AtDtDA(28): A Figure Walking through the Aftermath

[kelber at mindspring.com]

See also the Konchalovsky film, Siberiade (1980) which had a mystical character, the Eternal Grandfather, who seemed to be some sort of embodiment of Siberian nature.

Laura

-----Original Message-----
>From: Dave Monroe <against.the.dave at gmail.com>

>
>   "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)
>
>
>
>"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 ...
>