ATD Vortical Romance

[Joseph T]

This never came back to my mailbox after posting, though I did find  
it in p-list archives so assume others got it?  But just in case it  
did not not I thought I'd post again with a number of changes. I have  
marked my less literary ranting in green, more a reflection of   
personal response than attempt to understand.


> I find this Vormance expedition section deliberately more elusive,  
> allusive, fictionalized/mythologized, and non historical than any  
> other section with the exception of the central asian sub-sands   
> with which P  feeds us in a later chapter, or the time travel U. As  
> I was thinking about  the Vormance expedition a word lodged in my  
> mind to connect several parts of ATD in particular and make more  
> sense of Pynchon in general: that word is unearth.
> unearth
> verb [ trans. ]
> find (something) in the ground by digging.
> • discover (something hidden, lost, or kept secret) by  
> investigation or searching : they have done all they can to unearth  
> the truth.
>
> The miners are unearthing  silver and zinc and gold  using dynamite  
> which  becomes a kind of religion both for the anarchists and the  
> mine-owners in its explosive power.Both groups are vying for  
> ownership of their lives and labors. The scientist Tesla is  
> unearthing electromagnetic forces. The Traverses are unearthing the  
> ghost of their father. The Vormance expedition are variously  
> looking for the perfect iceland spar, a more perfect control of  
> global energies, transportation routes, and are drawn magnetically  
> to the  resting place of an unearthly  being hidden beneath the  
> ice. Converging on the scene from beneath the surface of the  
> planet  (where they have witnessed war among the tommyknockers)  
> come the chums of chance. The chums (who seem to me to be updated  
> knights of the roundtable, both secular and religious, but  serving  
> "higher" powers and ideals) have learned nothing from the book of  
> Genesis but serve as both God and serpent in this story.
>
> The serpent faced creature is both unearthed and unfrozen  and  
> awakened. One thought about this nameless being was  of Superman 
> (both Nietzchean and comic book), so much more likely in our actual  
> history to be malign than benign, with his unearthly defiance of  
> limits, his icy fortress of solitude and power crystals. I also  
> thought of Oppenheimer's thoughts from the Baghavad Gita when  
> viewing the first atomic explosion," now am I become death  
> destroyer of worlds". This nuclear technology and physics is  
> suggested by the hilarious and strangely dark "ray rush" to  
> colonize and exploit the undiscovered parts of the electro-magnetic  
> spectrum.  Equally suggestive of the future both of science and  
> metaphysical origins of the mass killings of the 20th century is  
> the discussion among the Scientists in this austere northern  
> landscape who start out talking about colonizing  space and time  
> and descend in their discussion through a comic  shtick toward  
> sentient rocks and magic crystals which soon become less than  
> laughable .The final remarks of the Librarian on 133-134 seem  
> particularly worthy of group consideration.
> We now live with the consequences of these scientific pursuits. We   
> have unearthed from atomic bonds the "radiance of a thousand  
> suns" (Baghavad Gita) , and now seem on the verge of unearthing the  
> earth.
>
> One also thinks of King Kong( a Pynchon fave)  who was found in  a  
> region the Chums have just come from, and the Karmic payback  
> represented in Kong's attack on New York, the revenge of the god of  
> the colonized  native peoples.  But it is northerners who are  
> historically the most violent natives and this unearthing of their  
> Fear/god is a storybook foreshadowing, set in a frozen white world  
> of green ice and  ribbons of colored light.
>
> I also find throughout ATD, particularly in the minds of the  
> powerful, a psycho-mythological unearthing of the ancient and  
> seemingly hardwired story of a final battle between light and  
> darkness , ( or good and evil, or just  survival of the fittest) .  
> A vision which seems to change little from Zoroaster to John's  
> apocalypse, to the wars to end wars, to the evil empire, to the  
> religion of Jihad to the war on terror) So often the modern  
> justification for war revolves around the need to defend oneself  
> from a clearly oppressive and aggressive state (the military  
> industrial complex must thank God for the Nazis on a regular  
> basis), but it is impossible to find this moral clarity with WW1,  
> or today's 1984 style war on terror). The Karl Roves and Rush  
> Limbaughs  of the world  treat people  like moral children who  
> cannot realize that the demonic other we fear is a part of  
> ourselves, a potential we all share, the predatory monster we dug  
> up and fed with our "needs" and carried home with us for the  
> obvious rewards.
>
> The entire story of the Etienne-Louis Malus  is  fictionalized and  
> distanced from the more historical world of  the Traverses  and the  
> non chums parts of ATD. I think it is important to follow the  
> bridges between the chums world and everywhere it connects to other  
> more"real" worlds.
> One route is the connection from the turn of the last century (and  
> the ideas and myths at play then) with the turn of this century  
> (and the result of choices made). Right now this makes the most  
> sense for me  of the unavoidable comparison between the northern   
> creature's attack and the attacks of 9-11. It also is a bridge to  
> the preeminance of aerial warfare, and the fetishizing  of  
> clandestine boy heroes with hight tech toys saving the world from  
> the evil nasty bad guys who want to steal our sandboxes and play  
> with our toys.
>
>  Anyway, maybe we should stop the endless unearthing and take up a  
> little more earthing.
>
>
>
>
> On Mar 21, 2007, at 11:32 AM, robinlandseadel at comcast.net wrote:
>
>> I was thinking, just the other day, about Love's Body:
>>
>>                    "Norman O. Brown is variously considered the  
>> architect
>>                   of a new view of man, a modern-day shaman, and a
>>                   Pied Piper leading the youth of America astray. His
>>                   more ardent admirers, of whom I am one, judge him
>>                   one of the seminal thinkers who profoundly  
>> challenge
>>                   the dominant assumptions of the age. Although he is
>>                   a classicist by training who came late to the  
>> study of
>>                   Freud and later to mysticism, he has already  
>> created
>>                   a revolution in psychological theory."
>>
>>                   --Sam Keen, Psychology Today
>>
>> http://www.ucpress.edu/books/pages/2502.html
>>
>>
>> I read the thing many years ago, and remember little in terms of  
>> content
>> (other than recalling it was pretty freeeeky stuff, man) but  
>> absorbing
>> instantly the notion of sculpting literary structure out of other  
>> peoples words.
>> Of course, other writers use this mode, like Studs Terkel, but  
>> when I read
>> "Love's Body" the quarter dropped and the jukebox started to play.
>>
>>                   Mark Kohut:
>>                   Does anyone think it is Pynchon's way of  
>> indicating the
>>                   darkness in us, in human nature when it is  
>> mangled by
>>                   'the day's" narrownesses.....not allowed to be  
>> natural?
>>
>>                   A kind of Return of the Repressed?.....We sorta  
>> know that
>>                   Brown's Life Against Death was important to TRP...
>>                   (see stuff on GR)......so, here the Death Wish  
>> shows itself,
>>                   buried in a remote location, in ATD?
>>
>>                   David Casseres:
>>                   I can't help thinking of those many different  
>> versions
>>                   of "The Mummy's Curse," in which a group of  
>> scientists,
>>                   against the earnest advice of their guides, take an
>>                   artifact out of its concealment and ship it home  
>> for
>>                   their museum. And as soon as they get to New York,
>>                   it breaks out of its confinement and causes havoc.
>>
>>                   David Morris
>>                   I agree with your take here. One gets the sense  
>> that the
>>                   object was buried in a remote location for a  
>> reason. The
>>                   ultimate "Mummy's Curse" cautionary-ignored tale  
>> would
>>                   have to be that of Pandora's Box.
>

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