airships and mellow technologies and fictional ideas (silly ramblings, really)

[David Morris]

On Nov 8, 2007 11:43 AM, Monte Davis <monte.davis at verizon.net> wrote:
> David Morris sez:
>
> > As a part of his examinations of power structures he idealizes the untamed/unregulated "wilderness"...
>
> Note the ambivalence within the gaucho's speech itself: "We cannot abide the openness.  It is terror to us." Are ATD's polar waste and Central Asian desert really congenial places? Was Sudwest, even before the Herero war? Or the environs of the Kirghiz Light, or of Vheissu?
>
[snip]
>
> I'd say it's a very special, highly charged and double-edged kind of "idealization" going on, a lot more nuanced than any back-to-nature that Rousseau or Marie Antoinette would recognize. Pynchon's a writer; while he may not like what history has scribbled, the blank page is pretty damn scary, too.

I catch your drift, and I'd not really thought about that other edge,
more subtly presented in the descriptions of actual physical
environments.  In one sense the idealized version is GR's Zone, akin
to the Gaucho's blank pampas, where a man is free to go where he
wills, mostly an idealized political state akin to anarchism.   But
that blank slate is also a Nietzschean place in which power is for the
taking, if you are able, and where you might end up drinking bad water
and puke your guts out on an abandoned cold cellar, alone (Mommy!),
very possibly to die.

David Morris