AtDtDA(34): Born of Light

[Dave Monroe]

   "'Born of light,' said Cyprian, as if about to understand
something." (AtD, Pt. IV, p. 953)


"a sort of enlarged casemate"

A casemate is a fortified gun emplacement or armored structure from
which guns are fired....

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casemate


Phosgene

Phosgene is the chemical compound with the formula Cl2CO. This
colourless gas gained infamy as a chemical weapon during World War I,
but it is also a valued industrial reagent and building block in
organic synthesis....

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phosgene

Facts about Phosgene

http://www.bt.cdc.gov/agent/phosgene/basics/facts.asp

On a Gaseous Compound of Carbonic Oxide and Chlorine

http://web.lemoyne.edu/~giunta/jdavy.html


"'Born of light'"

Main Entry: phos·gene
Pronunciation: \ˈfäz-ˌjēn\
Function: noun
Etymology: Greek phōs light + -genēs born, produced — more at fancy,
-gen; from its originally having been obtained by the action of
sunlight
Date: 1812

: a colorless gas COCl2 of unpleasant odor that is a severe
respiratory irritant that has been used in chemical warfare

http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/phosgene


"as if about to understand something"

Cf., e.g., ...

"Oedipa settled back, to await the crying of lot 49."

http://www.innternet.de/~peter.patti/thomaspynchon-thecryingoflot49.htm


motoros

Cyclist, biker, referring here to Mihaly Vamos.

http://against-the-day.pynchonwiki.com/wiki/index.php?title=ATD_946-975#Page_953


"'We learned it is light here which is really the destructive agent'"

Hence "against the day"?  However ...

Thematic, of course, when non-natural light is created.... studies
back to 'city illumination'. Cf. Telluride chapter.

http://against-the-day.pynchonwiki.com/wiki/index.php?title=ATD_946-975#Page_953


"early studies of city illumination"

Schivelbusch, Wolfgang.  Disenchanted Night:
   The Industrialization of Light in the Nineteenth Century.
   Trans. Angela Davies.  Berkeley: U of California P, 1988.

http://www.ucpress.edu/books/pages/2328.php

It is a cardinal error to believe that, of "Surrealist experiences",
we know only the religious ecstasies or the ecstasies of drugs. The
opium of the people, Lenin called religion, and brought the two things
closer together than the Surrealists could have liked. I shall refer
later to the bitter, passionate revolt against Catholicism in which
Rimbaud, Lautreamont, and Apollinaire brought Surrealism into the
world. But the true creative overcoming of religious illumination
certainly does not lie in narcotics. It resides in a profane
illumination,  a materialistic, anthropological inspiration, to which
hashish, opium, or whatever else can give an introductory lesson. (But
a dangerous one; and the religious lesson is stricter.) ...

[...]

The collective is a body, too. And the physis that is being organized
for it in technology can, through all its political and factual
reality, only be produced in that image sphere to which profane
illumina­tion initiates us. Only when in technology body and image so
interpenetrate that all revolutionary tension becomes bodily
collective innervation, and all the bodily innervations of the
collective become revolutionary discharge, has reality transcended
itself to the extent demanded by the Communist Manifesto. For the
moment, only the Surrealists have understood its present commands.
They exchange, to a man, the play of human features for the face of an
alarm clock that in each minute rings for sixty seconds.

--Walter Benjamin, "The Last Snapshot of the European Intelligentsia" (1929)

http://www.generation-online.org/c/fcsurrealism.htm

Profane illumination

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Profane_illumination


"the Aether"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luminiferous_ether
http://www.mountainman.com.au/aetherqr.htm

Lord Rayleigh and Sir Oliver Lodge, "The Aether of Space" (1908)

http://www.keelynet.com/osborn/rey7.htm

The New Student's Reference Work (1914)

http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_New_Student%27s_Reference_Work/Ether


"light pressure"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiation_pressure
http://www.u.arizona.edu/~lilley98/


"'to project it as a stream of destructive energy'"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laser
http://www.howstuffworks.com/laser.htm


"'Fear in lethal form'"

This is strongly reminiscent of the "Panic fear" (p. 151) unleashed by
the Vormance Expedition's digging up of the buried alien - the
"incendiary Figure."

http://against-the-day.pynchonwiki.com/wiki/index.php?title=ATD_946-975#Page_953
http://against-the-day.pynchonwiki.com/wiki/index.php?title=ATD_149-170#Page_151


"'A great cascade of blindness and terror ripping straight across the
heart of the Balkan Peninsula'"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_I


"Like nothing that has ever happened"

Vs. ...

"It has happened before, but there is nothing to compare it to now."
(GR, Pt. I, p. 3)


"'More damned code'"

Talk about yr reader-response ...


Shipka

A very small village in Bulgaria's Central Balkan Mountains, near a
mountain pass of strategic importance, which connects northern
Bulgaria to Upper Thrace (East Rumelia). It was the site of a battle
between the Russian army and the Ottoman Turks in 1877.

Sok szerencsét

Hungarian: good luck.

.http://against-the-day.pynchonwiki.com/wiki/index.php?title=ATD_946-975#Page_953


"the 'straight dope'"

http://against-the-day.pynchonwiki.com/wiki/index.php?title=ATD_946-975#Page_953


"a vast roar of light"

Cf. ...

"A screaming comes across the sky." (GR, Pt. I, p. 3)

"MB DRO ROSHI" (GR, Pt.II, p. 693)