3rd post p. 836 (after break on page)..Paint It Black

[kelber at mindspring.com]

Yikes!!  I take off a week or two to wallow in depression and self-loathing (a full-time preoccupation where I come from) only to discover that everyone's become incredibly prolific in their postings.  So, putting aside the razor blades, sleeping pills, etc., I'll jump in with my own non sequiturs:

1. "Black Mountainside" equals Anarchy.

Black is the official color of anarchism (if anarchism can be said to have anything official associated with it).

Mountains in ATD are hotbeds of anarchy.  When Reef leaves the Sangre de Cristo range, he ends up in the Alps where his predilection for dynamite-blasting can be indulged.  In addition to providing dynamiting opportunities, mountains are, by their nature, anarchistic.  No straight, rigid borderlines here.  When Cyprian and Danilo finally make their way out of the mountains, "they got back again to steel and parallel tracks," (p. 840), i.e. order, civilization.

Obviously, in the mountains of the Balkans on the cusp of WWI (as in mountainous Afghanistan today)borders are ill-defined and anarchy is the name of the game.

2.  The real beginning of Cyprian's mountain adventure is the paragraph on p. 821 (one of my favorites in the whole book):

"If there is an inevitability to arrival by water, he reflected, as we watch the possibilities on shore 
being progressively narrowed at last to the destined quay or slip, there is no doubt a mirror-symmetry about
 departure, a denial of inevitability, an opening out from the point of embarkation, beginning the moment
all lines are singled up, an unloosening of fate as the unknown and the perhaps uncreated begins to make its 
appearance ..."

The fact that this paragraph references the opening line of the book and one of the book's major themes (mirror-symmetry) suggests that this is some sort of capsule summary of where we (and Cyprian) have been and where we're going.  Cyprian and Danilo are fleeing through the mountains, departing more than arriving, embracing the anarchistic.  Compare this, say, with Kit's journey towards Shambhala, a relatively harmonious voyage.

3.  Question:  does anyone have any thoughts on whether C and D's trip through the the Balkans (and Cyprian's, Yashmeen's and Reef's later trip) has mathematical overtones?  Is it a representation of some sort of equation or description of non-Euclidian space (pardon my innumeracy)?

4.  Another question:  does the Cyprian and Danilo flight through the mountains remind anyone of Kinbote's flight through the mountains of Zembla in Nabokov's Pale Fire?

Laura



-----Original Message-----
>From: Mark Kohut <markekohut at yahoo.com>

>836, (after break on page..) "nameless black mountainside'.....unlike most earthly mountains....blackness is being accented by OBA in this section....'blackness at the heart of all color" a few pages back....(what can that mean?, since the color black is not at the heart of ANY color ).....'all converged to black, black unmitigated by candleflame or woodsmoke)......
>  
>Notice that 'black mountainside is also nameless", as was the sea earlier.....
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>  Speculations: black is death herein, a common trope, natural death, reinforced by that figure watching Danilo and Cyprian...(like Bergman's Death or who else might the figure be?)
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>  'black mountainside' is as nameless, as tacit as all being, like the sea? Black at the heart of all color may be P's metaphor of the notion that Life, all its 'color', only has that color because of our mortality...???  'Nother oft-expressed notion by some thinkers.......
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>  in this primal basic world,---back in the last century (as is said in the text--- which would mean early 18th, largely before the industrial revolution, before electic lights, trains, etc.)---death (black) was what life converged to, despite community (candleflame and woodsmoke)...?
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>  It all reminds me of that line about the pampas and basic existence, including basic fear, dread and death [from GR, I think and I paraphrase, I hope closely enough]  that Monte, I believe, posted to show OBAs unsentimentality/ non-reductiveness about 'natural' life......
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>  I might argue, full of that pretension Dave has informed us is so pervasive, that this section is a major part of TRps vision of "deliverance"......deliverance from the modern age to a more primal time........(not that he wants us to go back there, but that that is where we were and ocasionally can esperience again.)...?
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