AtDtDA(28): Cities, Unmapped, Sacramental Places

[Dave Monroe]

"'Do you remember once, years ago, we talked of cities, unmapped,
sacramental places ...'" (AtD, Pt. IV, p. 790)


"cities, unmapped"

Italo Calvino, Le città invisibili (1972)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invisible_Cities
http://www.harcourtbooks.com/bookcatalogs/bookpages/9780156453806.asp

Calvino was writing about Venice - all the Venice's collapsed, folded
or vanished behind the tourist façade. Anyone who loves Venice, knows
that its true life is half-glimpsed or dreamed, that the city
reconfigures itself, yielding suddenly as you turn into a deserted
square, snapping shut, as you walk past San Marco.

Venice has not disappeared under the pressure of mass tourism - it has
dissolved....

http://www.jeanettewinterson.com/pages/content/index.asp?PageID=196

In a classic work, The Image of the City, Kevin Lynch taught us that
the alienated city is above all a space in which people are unable to
map (in their minds) either their own positions or the urban totality
in which they find themselves: grids such as those of Jersey City, in
which none of the traditional markers (monuments, nodes, natural
boundaries, built perspectives) obtain, are the most obvious examples.
Disalienation in the traditional city, then, involves the practical
reconquest of a sense of place and the construction or reconstruction
of an articulated ensemble which can be retained in memory and which
the individual subject can map and remap along the moments of mobile,
alternative trajectories. Lynch's own work is limited by the
deliberate restriction of his topic to the problems of city form as
such; yet it becomes extraordinarily suggestive when projected outward
onto some of the larger national and global spaces we have touched on
here. Nor should it be too hastily assumed that his model – while it
clearly raises very central issues of representation as such – is in
any way easily vitiated by the conventional poststructural critiques
of the "ideology of representation" or mimesis. The cognitive map is
not exactly mimetic in that older sense; indeed, the theoretical
issues it poses allow us to renew the analysis of representation on a
higher and much more complex level.

There is, for one thing, a most interesting convergence between the
empirical problems studied by Lynch in terms of city space and the
great Althusserian (and Lacanian) redefinition of ideology as "the
representation of the subject's Imaginary relationship to his or her
Real conditions of existence." Surely this is exactly what the
cognitive map is called upon to do in the narrower framework of daily
life in the physical city: to enable a situational representation on
the part of the individual subject to that vaster and properly
unrepresentable totality which is the ensemble of society's structures
as a whole.

[...]

The political form of postmodernism, if there ever is any, will have
as its vocation the invention and projection of a global cognitive
mapping, on a social as well as a spatial scale.

http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/us/jameson.htm


"sacramental places"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sacrament
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sacramentals
http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/13295a.htm
http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/13292d.htm
http://tcrnews.blogspot.com/2007/09/on-catholic-sacramentals-and-spiritual.html


"I wish it could be Shambhala that I seek.  But I no longer have the right."

                If you would then ascend as high as these,
a soul more worthy than I am will guide you;
I'll leave you in her care when I depart,

	because that Emperor who reigns above,
since I have been rebellious to His law,
will not allow me entry to His city.

 	He governs everywhere, but rules from there;
there is His city, His high capital:
o happy those He chooses to be there!" (01.121-29)

http://dante.ilt.columbia.edu/new/comedy/index.html

Thanks again, Mark, Monte ...


"secular counterparts to the Buddhist hidden lands"

Lost City

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

Central Asia

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lost_city#Central_Asia


"only guessed at from indirect evidence"

Lost Cities of the Silk Road:
A Space-Age Search for Relics of Eurasia's Distant Past

In 1992 I joined a China Exploration and Research Society project to
use radar remote sensing to look for lost cities under the sands of
the Taklamakan Desert in northwest China. Key to the project is a
revolutionary remote sensing device called SIR-C. Carried by Space
Shuttle Endeavor in two 1994 flights, SIR-C has the potential to
reveal man-made artifacts hidden for two thousand years beneath desert
sands. Since 1994 I have spent many hours in the computer labs of
NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, processing and enhancing SIR-C radar
images of the Taklamakan, identifying unnatural-looking features that
hint at the presence of man.

http://alumnus.caltech.edu/~pamlogan/silkroad/index.html


"the wilderness Creature that feeds on all other creatures"

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/ru/thumb/c/c1/Simpsons_food_chain.jpg/200px-Simpsons_food_chain.jpg

Cf. ...

"'In part of Russia where I grew up,' Captain Padshnitoff was able to
say at last, 'all animals, no matter how large or dangerous, had
names--bears, wolves, Siberian tigers....  All except for one.  One
creature that other animals, including humans, were afraid of, because
if it found them it would eat them, without necessarily killing them
first.  It appreciated pain.  Pain was like ... salt.  Spices.  That
creature, we did not have a name for.  Ever.  Do you understand?'"
(AtD, Pt. II, p. 124)

Linguists cite Padzhitnoff's error as their favorite example of a
taboo. Some time in the remote past, the name of the bear—derived from
an Indo-European word like arktos or rktos—became unspeakable and was
replaced, in Russian, by the euphemism "honey-eater": medved'. It
happened so long ago that speakers of the language think this is the
native word. Same in English; ours comes from an old word for "brown."

http://against-the-day.pynchonwiki.com/wiki/index.php?title=ATD_119-148#Page_124


"their rail depot is Krasnoyarsk"

Krasnoyarsk lies on the Yenisei River and historically has been an
important junction on the Trans-Siberian Railway.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Krasnoyarsk#Railway
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Krasnoyarsk


the Okhrana

The Okhrannoye otdeleniye (Russian: Охранное отделение, literally
meaning Protection Section), usually called the Okhrana in Western
sources, or Okhranka by those dissatisfied with the czarist regime,
was a secret police force of the Russian Empire and part of the
Ministry of Internal Affairs (MVD) in the late 1800s, aided by the
Special Corps of Gendarmes.

As the name suggests, the primary purpose of the agency was the
security of the Tsar and imperial family, including, but not limited
to, fighting hostile organizations: terrorists ("bombists"),
socialists, and revolutionaries. The Okhrana operated offices
throughout the Russian Empire and in a number of foreign satellite
agencies  ...

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

And see as well, e.g., ...

http://www.mvdinform.ru/index.php?docid=364
http://www.mvdinform.ru/index.php?docid=365
http://www.mvdinform.ru/index.php?docid=366


"bruise-colored shadows"

Cf., e.g., ...

"light that's bleak and bruise-purple as Peenemünde sunsets" (GR, Pt.
III, p. 509)


"invisible functionaries"

angels

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

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

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

Among the novel's ambiguities are the mysterious, giant, supernatural
beings who appear from time to time to observe the action.  These
beings ... have usually been identified as Rilkean angels.  However, a
study of the way these beings function in the novel and of other uses
of "angel" imagery suggests instead that they are the ultimate
manifestation of Them, the novel's ubiquitous controllers.  This
interpretation implies that the supernatural Other side is not a
holistically unified realm free of the divisions and distinctions made
and enforced by earthly controllers ... but rather the originary
system of control that structures the entire life/death system. (p.
25)

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

I was surprised, by the way, as to how many non-Pynchonian Google hits
there were for that phrase. Is there an OG source?  Let me know ...


"'But now, given the Event, it may be possible to enter ... perhaps
somehow terms have been renegotiated'"

Why/how so?  Let me know ...