ATDTdA : 12 "My Native land is not a country" #1, 326
robinlandseadel at comcast.net
robinlandseadel at comcast.net
Wed Jun 27 09:29:09 CDT 2007
Tesla speaks:
"My native land is not a country but an artifact of
Habsburg foreign policy, known as 'the Military
Frontier,' and to us as Granitza. The town was
very small, above the Adriatic coast in the
Velebit range, where certain places were better
than others for . . . what would you call them?
Visual experiences that might prove useful."
The real impetus for this psudo-quote is in the start of this little episode:
They sat in a masonry transmitter "shack" designed
by McKim, Mead and White, gradually getting used
to being alive and on dry land again. A workman's
wife had brought them blankets and coffee. Dr Tesla
had imported from Trieste. The rainlight came in
through a series of high arched windows.
Lots of significant arrows pointing to that little anti-postal anti-empire
whose name shall not be spoken. That 'masonry transmitter "shack" '
---reminding us of Radio, the "Ray Rush" in progress---that team
name---like 'Warpe, Wistful, Kubitschek, and McMingus,' [here it's
'McKin, Mead and White'] and cofffee from Trieste, followed by a
most melancholy vision; 'rainlight came in through a series of high
arched windows'. These are all little pointers to and reminders of
The Crying of Lot 49 and also reminders of Rilke's relation to Trieste,
an element that ties into the prescence of Angels and other related
entities in all of Pynchon's books. Most importantly [and right on the
top layer of this reading] this episode serves to undermine the
general notion of the exact location of Scientific Knowledge, as
Tesla's great Vision of the transmitting tower is in fact a Vision:
". . . . As if time had been removed from all equations,
the Magnifying Transmitter already existed in that
moment, complete, perfected. . . .Everything since,
all you have seen in the press, has been theatrical
impersonation---the Inventor at Work. To the
newspapers I can never speak of that time of simply
waiting." 327
Somehow, this all strikes me as a parallel to Rilke and the Duino Elegies:
Existence in itself is of course valid because it's there.
And validity is enough maybe meaning is unnecessary.
How appropriate then to get a call, a revelation: a
pre-Christian, pre-Mosaic, pre-Everything angel to
dictate a few lines about this truly terrifying subject,
giving the lost poet both license and direction.
Such an event took place around the 20th or 21st of
January 1912, when Rilke visited the princess Marie von
Thurn und Taxis-Hohenlohe at the castle Duino just
outside Trieste. He was in a crisis and even considered
psychoanalytical treatment. However, during a walk
alongside the cliffs, sloping some 200 feet down to the
sea, words suddenly came to him: "Wer, wenn ich schriee,
höre mich denn aus der Engel Ordnungen?" Rilke was
actually contemplating his bookkeeping at the time, and
he knew immediately that this impulse was the beginning
of something remarkable. He took notes of the words,
and during the rest of his stay at Duino, Rilke wrote the
beginnings of most of his ten elegies.
http://art-bin.com/art/oduinocontents.html
Tesla's description of his vision of the transmitting tower has many parallels
with Rilke's experience of 'receiving' the Duino Elegies, and Pynchon is
deliberately undermining the sceintific method in the process, as he does
many times in AtD and all his other books.
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