AtdTDA: Your Answers Questioned 410/411, 830

[robinlandseadel at comcast.net]

I know I've said it before, but with your indulgence I'll repeat it again: 
The man is a satirist and Against the Day lives in its many moments of 
high paradox and low humor.

I've got a lovely little old fashioned flamenco guitar with a Dean 
Markley electronic tuner attached via some modern plastic marvel of 
an adhesive, there's acrylic fingernails glued via cyanoacrylic to 
my fingers that allow me get some tone out of the lovely little girl. All 
this modern technology to evoke muses long out of date—I'm typing 
on a state-of-the-art personal computer with a buncha like-mined 
hooligans out there in the ayther—the entire notion of techno-pagan 
is just too. . . .I know a paradox when I trip, stumble and fall over it,
and paradox is my business [organ stab] ! ! !

There was the era of the expansion of corporations like Pynchon & 
Company, working towards modernization and in the process 
creating wage slavery. Then, the chasm of WWI, the first mechanized, 
automated war, "Death From Above." And then, there's our era, the 
era of the trespassers:

          A young person of neglected aspect, holding a bottle of 
          some reddish liquid, accosted the boys.. "You're the 
          ones lookin fer Alonzo Meatman, I'll bet."

          "Maybe," replied Darby, reaching for and grasping his 
          regulation issue "preserver." "Who wants to know?"

          Their interlocutor began to shiver, to look around the 
          room with increasingly violent jerks of the head.

          "They . . . they . . ."

          "Come, man, get a grip on yourself," admonished Lindsay. 
          "Who are this 'they' to whom you refer?"

          But the youngster was shaking violently now, his eyeballs, 
          jittering in their orbits, gone wild with fright. Around the 
          edges of his form, a strange magenta-and-green aura 
          had begun to flicker, as if from a source somewhere behind 
          him, growing more intense as he himself faded from view, 
          until second later nothing was left but a kind of stain in the 
          air where he had been, a warping of the light as through 
          ancient window-glass. The bottle he had been holding, 
          having remained behind, fell to the floor with a crash that 
          seemed curiously prolonged.

          "Rats," muttered Darby, watching its contents soak into the 
          sawdust. "and here I was hankering after a 'slug' of that stuff."
          AtD pages 410/411

I personally fear the day that PSP's get so souped-up that eleven-year 
olds, enabled by hot-rod time machine technology [them computers 
are gettin' scary fast—what if they catch up with themselves?] start 
playing with the past and Loki-like [hey, were talkin' eleven-year olds 
here] wreak havok.

Tom LeClair in his Bookforum review of AtD "Lead Zeppelin" plucked 
out this passage as representing the author's thoughts on the nature 
and meaning of Against the Day:

          The Book of the Masked . . . [was] filled with encrypted 
          field-notes and occult scientific passages of a 
          dangerousness one could at least appreciate, though 
          more perhaps for what it promised than for what it 
          presented in such impenetrable code, its sketch of a 
          mindscape whose layers emerged one on another as 
          from a mist, a distant country of painful complexity, an 
          all but unmappable flow of letters and numbers that 
          passed into and out of the guise of the other, not to 
          mention images, from faint and spidery sketches to a 
          full spectrum of inks and pastels . . . visions of the 
          unsuspected, breaches in the Creation where something 
          else had had a chance to be luminously glimpsed. Ways 
          in which God chose to hide within the light of day, not a 
          full list, for the list was probably endless, but chance 
          encounters with details of God's unseen world.
          AtD page 853

http://www.bookforum.com/archive/dec_06/leclair.html

For whatever reason, OBA spends a lot of words and energy pointing to Hermetics 
in AtD.

http://www.hermetics.com/
 -------------- Original message ----------------------
From: "Monte Davis" <monte.davis at verizon.net>
> Robin quotes Evola:
> 
> >      For 
> >      there are two worlds, one of which has separated 
> >      itself by cutting off nearly every contact with the past. 
> >      For the great majority of moderns, that means any 
> >      possibility of understanding the traditional world has 
> >      been completely lost.
> 
> Yes, yes... And yet... this is another instance of one of the master tropes
> of *modernity*, that we're adrift after NNN years or centuries of restful
> anchor. And it always feels so right. And yet i8t may be useful to raise two
> partial challenges:
> 
> 1) Among the spinoffs of modernity are history and the historical sciences
> (archaeology, paleontogy, paleo-this and that, all the way to Big Bang
> cosmology). With their aid, we in fact *know* much more about the past than
> pre-moderns did. I love Morte d'Arthur and The Once and Future King, but
> neither has much to do with what actually happened in the British isles
> 500-1400 AD (and White knew that much better than Malory had). Wren
> Provenance's Anasazi rock drawings tell an important story, but I don't
> trust its "truth" much past a couple generations -- the historical sciences
> at least hold promise that you, feckless untethered Robin, could have a
> clearer picture of what proto-Anasazi were doing in 500 AD than the Anasazi
> of 1000 AD did. 
> 
> 2) Could psychological projection of the family constellation be at work
> here? When I was a child, I was encountering weird new "I don't know what to
> do here" situations all the time - but there were the grownups, who had it
> all sussed out (and, even though they *claimed* to have been kids once
> themselves, had obviously been grownups forever). 
> 
> For what it's worth, my own suspicion is that the sensation of "all is
> off-kilter in a world changing Too Damn Fast" got going about the time we
> started making fire and knapping flint, if not before. Not that there hasn't
> been acceleration, but with Einstein I have doubts that there ever was
> anything corresponding to this reified, hypostasized notion of "at rest"...