ATD stars above, abyssal plain below

[Hepzibah Pyncheon]

Howdy
For me, GR didn't so much organize and stiffen an
immature personal philosophy as go off like a
flashbulb and imprint itself on the inside of my
skull.  I was prepared for it by having skimmed the
many hundred pages of The Rise and Fall of the Third
Reich and closely read every one of those little
Time-Life paperbacks on WWII --- the ones that were
organised around weapons systems and individual
battles --- as a teenager yearning for clear
distinctions good and evil at the end of the Vietnam
War. (I was too young for the draft but felt exposed
to the Bomb, that one ICBM hanging up there in the sky
with my name on it... a perfect Platonic idea/form
hanging in the blackness of space, heavy at the head
and waiting permission to drop on its mark.) It was
easy to identify with Pirate of the Clenched Sphincter
and Slothrop the Paranoid Sleuth and Katje the
Helpless Tool and Geli the Magical Thinker, and fun to
surf the thermocline between history and fiction in
the text. I went in believing war was on the whole
honorable and thrilling and had been an engine of
civilization, an expression of a just Darwinian
struggle between striving peoples, and came out the
other end mysteriously convinced that war is instead
an efficient way of consuming excess inventory, and
that to those at the apex --- wherever that is,
wherever the Apical deity has withdrawn to --- human
casualties are but one of the less troublesome costs
of doing business. Not even a cost of business really,
more an example of a classical economic externality.
In GR the IG is become the model of nations; by now,
today in the actual world I'm sitting in, nations have
become the organizational matrices in which greater
Beings, great systemic enterprises, prosper or die.
And these enterprises are like life forms in the way
they unconsciously and without malice reorganize their
environments to futher their own inhuman prosperity;
to postpone systemic "death" by eating the weak and
avoiding their own excrement for as long as possible.
Nations are the living soil in which Corporations (and
their kissing cousins, the Churches) grow. Vital
jungle, healthy arable field or constricted clay pot,
each favors a different ecosystem of flora and fauna,
a different population of enterprises subject to
Natural Selection in various forms. It's Adam Smith,
nature red in tooth and claw. The truely formidable
enterprises have escaped their constraining niches and
thrive unencumbered on the broadcast manure of life
itself. The individual is independantly meaningful
only insofar as he or she moves counter to the general
flow towards planetary death. (The Counterforce?) The
rest of us, even the "desperate fraction" behind those
dark limousine windows speeding to safety in
undisclosed locations,  are fertile earth and food for
a higher order structure perpetuating itself in an
evolving usable universe of matter, energy, and
information. Walk up hill into the gale with your eyes
open, or duck and fucking cover baby. No one is ever
going to take the trouble to save *you*...

That, plus a marvelous lot of audible laughter, loopy
smiles and thumping good cheer, is what I took from
GR, which by gum had shape. In my dotage, though, M&D
has become my favorite. In GR everyone, even the good
guys, is damned. In M&D everyone, even the bad guys,
gets to go to heaven.

Thus spake Miss Hepzie


--- Monte Davis <monte.davis at verizon.net> wrote:

> > I'm pretty sure I'm not looking for what "really"
> > happens, ambiguity is absolutely fine with me.
> What I
> > seek is shape...
> 
> The quest-for-shape that GR satisfied for me (at 23,
> when it came out) had
> grown out of a Cold War childhood. 

Ever yours,
Hepzie

"It still lacked half-an-hour of sunrise when Miss Hepzibah ... arose from her solitary pillow and began what it would be mockery to term the adornment of her person."
Hawthorne


	
	
		
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