ATD the norse/nunatak/serpent/odialesque thing

[grladams at teleport.com]

I'm definitely not prissy and I like Dave Monroe's ways of connecting the
text with his own mind meld about TRP and what he gets out of the text and
how it makes him think about life. If that's not exactly what he said it's
what I got out of it. So I also don't post much but I will so that ATD
won't fizzle out. What I am most confused about is why they do pull it out,
and what is the City that gets destroyed? I guess it's some city in Canada?
I can't figure out what city it is even though I know it's a metaphor
anyway. Can someone say exactly what city it is please? My eyeballs are red
from paging around.

The Nunatuk Spirit presents a metaphor in ATD and I'm glad for all the
input regarding myth and prophecy that have been posted. I'll breathe some
more chaos into this thread.
 
Nunatuks themselves are thought to hold species of plants that will survive
and repopulate after ice age. That there were warnings about removing the
figure that existed there.. it makes it even seem as though it, reclining,
wasn't ready to be brought up. This represents another theme common to
Pynchon which is the haste in which man tends to use the resources we have
now, that took so long to become resources in the first place. I don't have
an exact example but I think in GR there's bits about refining and plastics
and whatnot.. and see what that gets us?!. And the recent excellent summary
Michael Silverblatt .. let it speak for itself.. So, the hell we're in, we
being the ones from the future, isn't this a wish for us to examine our
path? And that the spirit's Mongoloid, that can be good or bad. Maybe this
is a riff to examine Islam? The Mongols in the 1200s were tolerant of
Islam. Until this guy named Ibn Taymiyah came along who was a controversial
Islamic scholar who believed that since the Mongols didn't want Shariah
law, since they wanted Mongolian law, and wanted to keep civil code and
religious code separate, then the Mongols should be viewed as unbelievers
and eventually they were crushed. And that it's serpent like, well that's
the serpent in Adam and Eve but more exactly it's the serpent in the Norse
Mythology of the time when even the gods die, there's a part in their myth
of Ragnarok (the calamity at the end of the world prior to the regreening
of the earth) The ocean would surge up onto the lands because another of
Loki's sons, the serpent Jormungand, would rise up from its deep ocean bed
onto the land in a rage, bespattering the sky and sea with his poison. 

And for those of you who have to look things up, check with your local
librarian, a trip into Encyclopaedia Brittanica or OED online or other
fascinating proprietary databases might be a library card click away, and
even though google works well for a lot of stuff, online databases are
better sometimes. 

-Jill

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