AtDtDA(28): A Figure Walking through the Aftermath

Sun Mar 16 15:44:16 CDT 2008

   "And from everywhere in the taiga, all up and down the basins of
the Yenisei, came reports of a figure walking through the aftermath,
not exactly an angel but moving like one, deliberately, unhurried, a
consoler. Accounts differed as to whether the outsize figure was a man
or woman, but all reported having to look steeply upward when trying
to make out its face, and a deep feeling of fearless calm once it had
passed." (AtD, Pt. IV, p. 785)

"the basins of the Yenisei"

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

"a figure walking throught the aftermath"

Cf. Mad Max/The Road Warrior, The Postman, The Road, et al. ...

A serious investigation of the Tunguska incident did not take place
for another thirteen years, when a Soviet mineralologist named Leonid
Kulik led an expedition to the site of the explosion. But within those
thirteen years, strange whispers and rumors spread across Siberia.
There were tales of a strange being wandering the remote forests of
Tunguska near the scenes of devastation. The nomadic reindeer herdsmen
of Siberia sighted the gigantic grey humanoid figure some 50 miles
north of the Chunya river. They saw the man, who seemed to be over 8
feet in height, picking berries and drinking water from a stream. The
superstitious Mongol herdsmen regarded the freakish-looking stranger
as one of the fabled chuchunaa - a race of hairy giants similar to the
abominable snowman which were said to inhabit the region. The nomads
crept through the forest to get a better look at the figure, and they
saw that the grey color of the man was not hair, but tattered overalls
of some sort. The herdsmen sensed that there was something unearthly
about the being, and they retreated back into the forest and moved
away from the area. There were several more sightings of the grey
goliath over the years, and each report indicated that the entity from
the cold heart of Siberia was moving westwards. Alas, all of the
accounts of the strange giant were interpreted as mere folklore tales
of the Russian peasants....

http://www.qsl.net/w5www/tunguska.html

Chuchunaa

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tjutjuna
http://www.occultopedia.com/c/chuchunaa.htm
http://www.unknownexplorers.com/chuchunaa.php
http://www.americanmonsters.com/monsters/hairy/index.php?detail=article&idarticle=248

"not exactly an angel"

Cf., e.g., ...

Angels

10; "helpless angel," 27; 42; "Archangels of municipal vengence," 150;
"God's wing" (?), 211; "agencies of the angelic," 221; "Avenging
Angels" 271; creatures, 277; H. Vanderjuice, 322; 332; birds, 336;
379; 389; Angel Street, 446; 531; in Venice, 575; "too bright to look
at directly" 616; of deep shit, 619; 632; 642; Gentleman Bomber, as
"messenger" 692; wings, 699; 725; 740; of death, 752; Tunguska blast
radius, 780; in Tunguska, 785; A.O.D., 894; 993; 1030

http://against-the-day.pynchonwiki.com/wiki/index.php?title=A

"graceful as a wing" 39; angel's-eye view, 54; snow angels, 57;
"Destroying Angel" 93; Katje's "questing shoulders like wings" 97;
"windmill known as 'The Angel'" 106, 536; starlings on radar, 112;
"the Angels sing new songs" 134; "mock-angel singing" 135; "days of
angelic visit" 145; Basher St. Blaise's angel, 146, 151-52 (aka Lübeck
angel, 214, 217); "sudden angel, thermodynamic surprise" 143; "Your
wings...oh, Leni, your wings..." 162; "as the Angel swooped in" 164;
"hark the herald angels" 177; "Jeremy will take her like the Angel
itself" 177; "She has swept with her wings another life" 218; "Richard
Halliburton...a failed angel" 266; "the Angel who tried to destroy us
in Südwest" 328; "star-blotting Moslem angels" 341; "Tenth-Elegy
angel" 341; "Angels and sanctions" 355; "to bring down steel angels of
exaltation" 437; "like the Archangels" 464; Bianca's "shoulderblades
rising like wings" 470; "the windmill called 'The Angel'" 536; "the
angel [the Erdschweinhöhlers] have hoped for" 672; "Angel Thanatz"
673; "functions of Moslem angels" 705; "Angels Melchidael, Yahoel,
Anatiel, and the great Metatron" 734; "some angel...watching us at our
many perversities" 746; "under a sentence of death whose deep beauty
the angel has never been close to" 746; "angels at the doorways" 750;
"a bright angel of death" 760; See also Metatron

http://www.hyperarts.com/pynchon/gravity/alpha/a.html

McLaughlin, Robert L. "Pynchon's Angels and Supernatural Systems
   in Gravity's Rainbow." Pynchon Notes 22–23 (1988): 25–33.

http://www.ham.muohio.edu/~krafftjm/pn/pn022.pdf

"the shaman Magyakan"

143; "a shaman of great regional fame ... who has been active on
behalf of the Ilimpiya" 775; disappears after Tunguska, 785;

http://against-the-day.pynchonwiki.com/wiki/index.php?title=M

Magankan, the Tunguska shaman, had already demonstrated his powers by
catching a bullet shot at him and by stabbing his own chest without
leaving a scratch. But his greatest feat was summoning a huge flock of
agdi, the birds that produce the thunder, for the explosion over the
land of a rival Evenki clan. It flattened nearly a thousand square
miles of forest and started a fire that burned for weeks, sending ash
so high that it circled the Northern Hemisphere, making sunsets
bright. Needless to say, it scared away his rivals for good.

This is the story they told some twenty years later to the first
scientist to reach the remote, swampy, mosquito-ridden site. Since
then, the scientists have given other explanations. The forty-megaton
explosion, two thousand times as powerful as the bomb dropped on
Hiroshima, is now generally thought to have been caused by a meteorite
or comet that exploded in the Earth's dense atmosphere. But there are
still Evenki who think differently....

http://www.answers.com/topic/shaman

Suslov discovered that the Evenk (Tungus) attributed the blast to a
great shaman called Magankan. He would get people to fire a rifle at
him - he could catch the bullet when it came out of his body and show
it to everyone there. He would stab a knife into his chest and no
wound could be seen.

For a long time there had been war and feuds between the Tungus clans
living along the right tributaries of the Lower Tunguska. This led to
the rival shamans sending their evil spirits against each other
causing diseases and other troubles.

Then Magankan called on the Agdy. The Agdy is the God of Thunder (who
looks like an old man) but also the Agdy birds - the Thunderbirds -
big, black and made of iron, with fiery eyes. The beating of their
wings causes thunder and lightning flashes from their eyes. Ancestors
of the Agdy live in Khergu - the underworld as do the souls of
shamans, so many of them were friends with shamans and this
relationship had been passed on to their descendants - an evil shaman
can call on the Agdy to do harm to anyone he bears a grudge against.

This happened in the early morning of 30th June 1908. A flock of Agdy
were called by the shaman Magankan....

http://homepage.ntlworld.com/heather.hobden1/Tunguska.htm

"Already in the years 1912 to 1914 I had the opportunity to listen to
not a small number of stories, which I was told by the Tungus from the
Ilimpiya, about the «miracles» of [the shaman] Magankan. It seems that
there is not a single Tungus among the ten clans of Ilimpiya who has
not heard about how Magankan wanted to punish the spirits that
resisted submission to his Khargi and abided in his body: he got those
present to shoot directly with a rifle at him. He then caught the
bullet when it came out of his body and showed it to all people
present. Similarly, Magankan stabbed a knife to his chest with all his
force, but no wound and no blood could be found. The members of the
clan Shanyagir ascribe the impact of the famous Tunguska meteorite,
which at present is searched for by L. A. KULIK between the Stony
Tunguska and the Chunya, to Magankan, too."

http://abob.libs.uga.edu/bobk/evenkiv.html
http://waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l&month=0802&msg=124754

Thanks, Ya Sam, and see as well, e.g., ...

http://waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l&month=0703&msg=116854
http://waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l&month=0703&msg=116733
http://waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l&month=0704&msg=117036
http://waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l&month=0803&msg=125038
http://waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l&month=0803&msg=125073

izba

Russian: hut.

http://against-the-day.pynchonwiki.com/wiki/index.php?title=ATD_768-791#Page_785

"strange effects"

I propounded my theory of AtD to another Marcher today: embrace the
weird science and science fiction--the hollow-Earth, the Campanile,
the bilocated ships, Tunguska--because they are all means for
examining the effect of physical (and perhaps metaphysical) events on
human character and behavior.

So if you read the book as a character study, it's mediocre--poor
development plus all these irrelevant strangenesses scattered around.
But these extreme and unrealistic people do change over the course of
many pages. Pynchon uses the two ships on Kit the same way that, for
example, Brecht used the loss of a purse of money. The question is the
same in any novel: how does someone change when X happens to them?

Yes, there are still a lot of non sequiturs--Rudolph the reindeer, for
chrissakes! But as we travel geographically "against" the day, we are
connecting a chain of experiments and outcomes. We are saving up data
against the day when we shall understand humans better.

http://cecilvortex.com/swath/2007/05/17/the_against_the_day_deathmarch_week_16.html

And cf. as well, "strange effects," "a figure" ...

Arkady and Boris Strugatsky, Roadside Picnic (1969)

http://www.depauw.edu/sfs/abstracts/a31.htm#c31
http://www.shnaresys.com/roadside/picnic/parallel.htm
http://www.russiansifiction.com/translated/strugazckie/picnic/index.php

Stalker (1979)

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0079944/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stalker_(film)

Roadside Picnic (2009)

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0837157/
http://www.variety.com/article/VR1117947688.html?categoryid=1238&cs=1

S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl

http://www.stalker-game.com/
http://www.stalker-videogame.com/

"Soon the forest was back to normal ..."

Cf. ([albeit] in reverse?) ...

   "Other Units of the Chums of Chance meanwhile chose lateral
solutions, sidestepping the crisis by passing into metaphorical
identities, as law-enforcement squads, strolling theatrical companies,
governments-in-exile of imaginary countries they could nonetheless
describe in exhaustive, some would say obsessive, detail, including
entire languages with rules for syntax and usage--or, in the case of
the crew of the Inconvenience, immersed at Candlebrow in the mysteries
of Time, drift into the brief aberration in their history known as the
Marching Academy Harmonica Band." (AtD, Pt. II, p.418ff.)

http://waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l&month=0708&msg=120859

"As if in a dream, they would come to recall attending Candlebrow U.
not as visitors to a summer Conference but as full-time music students
..." (AtD, Pt. II, p. 418)

http://waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l&month=0708&msg=120860

"... with no idea what this emant for their mission out here"

So if anyone has any ideas ...