ATD interpretation & over-interpretation WAS Re: AtD seal translated

[pynchonoid]

Another way to get at that may be via post-Freudian &
-Jungian James Hillman - another author blurbed by
Pynchon - who in a book called Animal Dreams talks
about how we fail to take animals for the complex,
mysterious presences they are, awake or dreaming, and
instead put anthropomorphized fantasy critters in
their place, and enlarges on that a bit:

"That's why our inside animals are not like those on
TV, where they are put into human stories. You don't
see a leopard just as leopard. It is put into a story
of predators, of extinction, or 'the wonders of
mating.'Or you are taught a lesson about motherhood,
about how risky animal life is and how everything has
to hide in camouflage; or it's about big bucks
competing for females.  All *human* stories. .... It's
very hard to hold back the desire to interpret, to
capture the animal into a meaning. .... We have to
*imagine* them. Get into them as imaginal beings, into
them as images. That's what Adam did:  he looked at
these images parading by and read their names out of
their natures. He was inside the animal. He knew the
animals of his imagination. He and they were all in
the same dream." [Animal Dreams by James Hillman,
paintings by Margot McLean, 1997; pp. 6-9]

Pynchon lathers on the layers of meaning, in ATD as in
his other books, so I guess the task is, or one of the
tasks at least, to find the cigar.


> "Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar,"
 

...sorry if this is seen as a digression, I happened
to be looking at Hillman this morning for another
purpose and thought it might be interesting here....




 
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