ATDTDA (5.3) - Word Power

[Carvill John]

There's a lot in these sections to remind us of the power of words, names, 
repetition, and meaning. Some of this is in the little details, eg. the 
repeated use of a word such as ice, ice, ice on page 126, or green, green, 
green on p127. Or the fact that only one vast glacier has yet to be named, 
and we no doubt recall the passage about the Chums and the islands which 
once were named but now are fading back into obscurity.

There are also a few dualities scattered about - "a sea-smell of deep decay 
and reproduction" contrasting life and death, for one. Another being the 
Ginnungagap, its 'seeming emptiness' also having been the "ice chaos from 
which arose, through the giant Ymir, the Earth and everything in it".

And about that gap, the meaning of which can be "not just this particular 
chasm.. but also a wide-open human mouth, mortal, crying, screaming..."  We 
hear of how Harold Hardrade pulled back form the brink at the last minute, 
"the end of the world now at his back". Is there some metaphor there about 
the world being on the brink of war? This would of course fit with the 
classic Pynchon theme of pivotal moments in history, forks in the road, etc. 
And this fits in with the already-discussed question of inevitability.

These passages are uniquely Pynchon in tone and language too, those little 
twists like "suicidally cheerful".  Then there's the 'C' word - "some 
suggestion of a conspiracy of ancestors, against the future,..." and that 
could well be another angle on Against the Day, against the future....

I think the Ginnungagap is interesting enough to warrant a dip into some 
wikipedia snippets:

"In Norse mythology, Ginnungagap ("seeming emptiness" or "gaping gap") was a 
vast windy emptiness that existed before the ordering of the world. To the 
north of Ginnungagap lay the intense cold of Niflheim, to the south the 
insufferable heat of Muspelheim. At the beginning of time, the two met in 
the Ginnungagap; and where the heat met the frost, the frost drops melted 
and formed the substance eitr, which quickened into life in the form of the 
giant Ymir, the father of all Frost giants.

See also Chaos..."


wikipedia on chaos:

"In Greek mythology, Chaos or Khaos is the primeval state of existence from 
which the first gods appeared. In other words, the dark void of space.....  
it means "gaping void", from the verb  "gape, be wide open", 
Proto-Indo-European *"ghen-", *"ghn-"; compare English "chasm" and "yawn", 
Old English geanian = "to gape"

Chaos features three main characteristics:

it is a bottomless gulf where anything falls endlessly. This radically 
contrasts with the Earth that emerges from it to offer a stable ground;

it is a place without any possible orientation, where anything falls in 
every direction;

it is a space that separates, that divides: after the Earth and the Sky 
parted, Chaos remains between both of them.


Primal Chaos:

...For Orphics, it was called the 'Womb of Darkness' from which the Cosmic 
Egg that contained the Universe emerged. It is sometimes conflated with 
'Black Winged Night'....

Primal Chaos was sometimes said to be the true foundation of reality, 
particularly by philosophers such as Heraclitus and those trained in Orphic 
schools. It was the opposite of Platonism. "


Apt, no?

Also some good stuff on Adam of Bremen:

"ADAM OF BREMEN, historian and geographer, was probably born in Upper Saxony 
(at Meissen, according to one tradition) before 1045. ........the Historia 
Hammaburgensis Ecclesiae, which he finished about 1075.  ...Here occurs the 
earliest mention of Vinland, ... and to Finland, Thule or Iceland, Greenland 
and the Polar seas which Harald Hardrada and the nobles of Frisia had 
attempted to explore in Adam's own day (before 1066). "

Notice that Vin[e]land?


We note in passing the way Pynchon, as he often does, deftly conjures up a 
compelling emotional relationship between two characters - Constance and her 
grandson Hunter - and their story modulates in and out of the narrative 
throughout this section, eventually ending in another of the wrenching tales 
of departure, separation and goodbye that the book is studded with, wrapped 
up in beautiful poetic prose.

I haven't had time to look into Payne's gray or Naples yellow but we can all 
enjoy that great paragraph about droplets of salt fog mixing with the paint 
to affect Hunter's pictures, how they "introduced modellings, shadows, 
redefinitions of scale..." Maybe a metaphor for re-reading Pynchon's books 
and seeing new angles, new meanings?

We don't know exactly who's conversing about the Meat Olaf, but that sauce 
bottle gave me a good laugh when I looked up the translation - I think the 
Pynchon wiki has it as 'Watch out, fucker'.  And Urban Dictionary has a lot 
of good stuff, including this:

"A good definition that would apply in almost all Spanish speaking countries 
would be asshole-fucker-bitch. .... ..It can really mean anything, you can 
get a smile or a stab."

http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=cabron


The ¡Cuidado Cabrón! section has some great little stabs of Pynchon humour, 
punctuating the gloom and foreboding nicely - people overdoing the sauce and 
"the evening that resulted was notable for hysteria and recrimination", 
which of course could just possibly be another 9/11 reference?

There's also another riff on meaning and the power of words, with the 
assertion that you can pass between worlds by invocation and chanting: "The 
luxuriant world of the parrot on the label... in fact was separated from it 
by only the thinnest of membranes." And here agian I was reminded of the GR 
line, "words are only an eye-twitch away from the things they stand for."  
And the repetition of "¡Cuidado Cabrón!"  reminds me of the repetitions on 
page 126 - ice, ice, ice - and 127 -  green, green, green. There's even the 
repetition of 'one' in the description of how to chant your way into the 
luxuriant parrot world: "to get from one to the other one only had to fill 
one's attention unremittingly with the bird's image."  This matches nicely 
with the claim that it's possible to pass from Iceland to Venice on nights 
when the land and ice shift themselves into such a pattern that they become 
a double for Venice.

Another word that caught my eye was 'toroid', as in "toroidal dispensation". 
  Rather than make a clumsy attempt at my own definition here's wikipedia 
again:

"A toroid is a doughnut-shaped object whose surface is a torus. Its annular 
shape is generated by revolving a circle around an axis external to the 
circle.

[See also Tesla Coil]

A Tesla coil is a category of disruptive discharge transformer coils, named 
after their inventor, Nikola Tesla. Nikola Tesla actually experimented with 
a large variety of coils and configurations, so it is difficult to describe 
a specific mode of construction that will meet the wants of those who ask 
about "Tesla" coils....

Although modern Tesla Coils are designed to generate long sparks, Tesla's 
original systems were designed for wireless communication, so he used large 
radii of curvature to prevent corona and streamer losses. Tesla coils' outer 
conducting surfaces, which are charged to a high potential, have large radii 
of curvature to minimise leakage of the oscillating charges through corona 
discharges or sparks. The intensity of the voltage gain of the circuit with 
a free, or elevated, toroid is proportional to the quantity of charge 
displaced, which is determined by the product of the capacitance of the 
circuit, the voltage (which Tesla called "pressure"), and the frequency of 
the currents employed. Tesla also used various versions of his coil in 
experiments with fluorescence, x-rays, wireless power for electric power 
transmission, electrotherapy, and telluric currents in conjunction with 
atmospheric electricity....

Someone who builds Tesla coils as a hobby is called a "Tesla coiler", or 
simply a "coiler". There are even "coiling" conventions where people attend 
with their home made Tesla coils and other electrical devices of interest. 
It should be noted that there are rather significant safety issues [6] 
regarding coil assembly and operation by hobbyists (including professional 
engineers), which may be discovered by study of the literature far more 
reliably than by only attempting one's own analysis."

A-and, a toroid - or torus - can also be used as an architectural term, and 
maybe this is a connection too many (?) but at any rate that reminded me of 
the architectural details we keep reading about, especially columns and 
roofs, gables, spires and finials, which crop up again in the Hotel 
Borealis. And a toroid is somewhat like a snake, the 'Figure' is described 
at one stage as having some serpent-like characteristics. What does that all 
add up to? Well, two little details I picked up on the Pynchon wikie came 
together in my mind when I was thinking about this stuff. One: Malus (as in 
Etienne-Louis) is also the genus of the apple. Two: walled gardens, as 
described in the Constance Penhallow portrait paragraph, are often taken to 
represent the garden of eden, so - not to get all religiously symbolic on 
your ass - but how about the Malus/apple coming into the garden/iceland and 
bringing disaster, plunging the world into a new 'toroidal dispensation'?

Cheers
JC

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