Atdtda23: [46.1i] A passionate heart, 653

[Michael Bailey]

> On 12/13/07, Paul Nightingale <isread at btinternet.com> wrote:
> > [653.7-9] Old-timers on the crew ... when they first penetrated the
> > mountain, prepared to fight frozen rock, had found instead a passionate
> > heart, a teeming interiority...

In the passage on page 653, I think we'd all agree
that the narrow point being made is that
the crew more than once wound up drilling into
huge hot springs
(per Wikipedia on Gotthard (heh-heh) Tunnel,
water inrushes killed "about 200" workers, exact #
not known)

The first notion I got from Paul's pointer to this passage
and to similar tropes elsewhere in AtD
was a sense that here the text shows a touch of
what a skeptic-rationalist would call anthropomorphism
towards the geography, or what a more exuberant intellect
(with a possible trade-off in rigor? I'm not sure that's a linear
function, but it may be) might term
pantheism or Mystical Masonry.

Pynchon didn't invent that trope - stories about
people working on cars tend to anthropomorphize the cars,
eg - but it's always interesting to watch how he uses devices...

Since I've been poking around in Deleuzean philosophy,
I thought maybe these passages and similar ones in GR
might be bridges  - or possibly tunnels - leading to a
"we are made of stuff, we become conscious,
therefore, it is not inconceivable that the makings
of consciousness are inherent in stuff" line of reasoning

However, the passage also supports readings closer to
my more quotidian outlook:

the historical novelist "appreciating how something felt
or seemed to people that were there"

the student of human nature "ever notice how when you
actually turn to a task, it's much more exciting
(sometimes painfully so) than how you planned it"

and (growing out of that) the socially aware
"the capitalists who ordered the building of the tunnel
foresaw cold stone, (similar to their own hearts, one might add)
whereas the experience of the laborers who actually
did the work was much more vivacious**"

It doesn't require excessive torque on the terms of metaphor to
draw a parallel between the boiled-alive railroad workers' experience
and that of the victims of the Vormance Expedition

...although.... more (and, cynically, richer...) people were affected
by the disaster in the City, so therefore, the tunnel-diggers' disasters are
more easily downplayed  --- like real-world
mining disasters that seem to be happening more often in these
current dark days for unions...current attitudes toward the
unionized working class are for me aptly capsulized
in how the Chums experience their intra-earth denizens: as
dwarves throwing electric bolts...)

but I think the parallel is valid and not one I'd have noticed on my own

To generalize from that in an unexpected direction,
the "digging in and finding something you totally didn't count on"
also, I see parallels to the victims of the various culinary "Surprises"
in British cooking noted in GR...

** if Darby can work vivaciously, then so can the tunnel workers!


Michael Lee Bailey

"Taste the stainless blade of liberalism, Stalinist swine!" - Phineas Freak