AtDtDA(34): Born of Light

[János Székely]

*A casemate is a fortified gun emplacement or armored structure from
which guns are fired....
*
Rather, "a tunnel cut into a rock face with
armoured<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armour>doors".

J


2008/6/21 Dave Monroe <against.the.dave at gmail.com>:

>   "'Born of light,' said Cyprian, as if about to understand
> something." (AtD, Pt. IV, p. 953)
>
>
> "a sort of enlarged casemate"
>
>
> 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<http://web.lemoyne.edu/%7Egiunta/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<http://www.innternet.de/%7Epeter.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/<http://www.u.arizona.edu/%7Elilley98/>
>
>
> "'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)
>
>
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