ATDDTA (6) 163:16 - 165

[bekah]

Interesting pages.   A  "co-conscious," (?)  Kit hears  "ghostly?" 
unmusical "music" while experiencing "electric currents" and sees a 
"dark figure" moving into the "invisible"  -     Kit somehow meets 
Fleetwood and they look at NY City skyline in the sun-"light," 
visible, semi-visible,  "some portal to another world."    Fleetwood 
begins his tale of adventure in Africa home,  spiritual geography and 
homelessness.


163:16 - 26
piano music which sounded like someone was sitting on the keys - 
dimming amber light but no switches,  a dark figure receding into the 
invisible wearing a pith helmet -   "Kit realized it must be the 
widely discussed black sheep Fleetwood Vibe, in from one of his 
expeditions." 
(the ghostly  presence -  "receding into the invisible"?)

**********************************
163:28
R. Wilshire Vibe's new show is called "African Antics" with a catchy 
tune which the family,  except Fleetwood but they  don't know he's 
"there,"   enjoys singing around the apparently untuned piano. 

Lines 5 & 6 of song -
"Tell me, what-cha gonna do,
When they come screamin' after you?"

remind me of
"Bad boys, bad boys,  what-cha gonna do,
  what-cha gonna do when they come for you?"  (Bob Marley)

Except that in Vibe's show the screamers are cannibals and in 
Morely's song they're the police.  ??   

***********************
164:10 -
Fleetwood does not enjoy singing Wilshire's  catchy,  little, 
racist-cannibal ditty.  Fleetwood and Kit are in the back of the 
mansion.

Fleetwood:   "They don't actually know I'm  here.  If they do it's in 
some the way some can detect ghosts though you may have noticed 
already these are not the most spiritual of people.   I once had 
hopes that Dittany could escape the general corruption but ... sigh 
...  Not so much lately."     "You shouldn't trust anything I say 
about this family. "


Then they are rather suddenly (?) standing on a hill  behind the 
mansion and ** overlooking New York City. ***

***********************
164:23
"Through the miles of coal smoke and  salt haze,  Kit could make out 
the a few semi-visible towers  of the city of New York descended upon 
by a radial shaft of late sunlight from behind and among clouds that 
seemed almost their own heavenly prototypes, what photographers 
called a 'two-minute sky,' destined   destined rapidly to cloud over, 
and maybe even start dropping some rain."

Does that sound like a photo we've seen somewhere?

Fleetwood,   "When I came up here by myself it was too look at the 
city.  I thought there had to be some portal into another world.    I 
couldn't imagine any continuous landscape that would ever leave 
naturally from where I was to what I was seeing.   Of course,  it was 
Queens,  but by the time I had that sorted out it was too late. "


Was this Fleetwood's portal into another world?
***********************

164:33 ->   "I was possessed of the dream of a passage through an 
invisible gate.  It could have been a city but it didn't have to be a 
city.  It was more a matter of the invisible taking on substance." 


***********************


165.2    "There are stories,  like maps that agree ...  too 
consistent among too many languages to be only wishful thinking.  It 
is always a hidden place.  The geography is as much spiritual as it 
is physical.

an invisible spiritual geography,

***********************
165: 5
(Fleetwood) "If you should happen upon it, your strongest certainty 
is not that you have discovered it  but returned to it.  In a single 
great episode of light, you remember everything."

  (Kit)    "Home."

(Fleetwood)  "Oh...   There's home, and there's home, you know."

Is this Fleetwood describing his death experience?  or still desiring it?

Or  of course,  it may be:
Proust's   'A la recherche du temps perdu,'   (In Search of Lost Time 
- Remembrance of Things Past)  and the Madeleine business.  Home and 
sudden memory.  

***********************

165:9 -  "...toward the invisible 'big house,'..."

***********************

165: 11
"...all my colleagues care about is finding waterfalls.  The more 
spectacular the falls, the better the chance for an expensive hotel."

** waterfalls of Africa: 
<http://www.world-waterfalls.com/database.php?s=T&t=G&category=continent&search=Africa&orderby=name>
<http://www.victoriafallshotel.com/>

***********************
165:27
   "I'll tell you a story about the Heavenly City. About Zion."
and
Fleetwood tells Kit the story of Yitzhak Zilberfeld,  a Zionist agent 
he met in Africa.  Yitzhak was looking for a Jewish homeland 
explaining that because Jews are propertyless,  without a homeland, 
they are a threat to the suburban order and the state and hated. 
All un-propertied elements are targets of the hatred.

The African Hereros and Namas became homeless or were killed off as a 
result of the land wars between them and  land-grabbing Germany. 
This all took place in 1904 in Nambia just north of and in South 
Africa.   These events are included  In  "V."     In Gravity's 
Rainbow  some were taken to Germany and kept on to fight WWII .

***********************
165:39-40    "Everyone must live in a simply-connected space with an 
unbroken line around it."

A discussion of homelessness vs suburbia and the state.

"Orthodox Jewish communities often make a symbolic perimeter around 
their space so that they can, for example, carry a book as they walk 
to Sabbath worship; by convention they are still "home"-thus not 
enjoined against some kinds of work-as long as they stay inside this 
'eruv.' One such neighborhood in Atlanta uses a set of electrical 
power lines to bound its area.
<http://against-the-day.pynchonwiki.com/wiki/index.php?title=ATD_149-170#Page_165>


How does this homelessness relate to Fleetwood's mention of "home" 
earlier in the page?  What is homelessness in a spiritual geography?


Bekah