The Devil & Tom Foley Walker

[alice wellintown]

"The Devil & Tom Walker" is a great tale by one America's most
important, now somewhat neglected, authors. I wish I could send some
paintings I have of the scenes with the Black Man. Several artists
have painted scenes from the tale. Cool. In any event, a cool book
that includes some Ryder paintings is Sarah Burns' _Painting the Dark
Side_, it’s now a Google book and can be located on the WWW.

All this Foley in the Park stuff reminds me of a cover on one of those
Vinelands, a black and white photograph of clear cut forest. And it
reminds me of that stinking Hell Frank ascends/descends, all stripped
of life (297). He meets his Beatrice/Dally and they ascend/descend
into a Miltonic Pandemonium Plus (Milton not Dante is credited with
the word, Pandemonium, PL Book I),  the Gallows Frame Saloon. Sailor's
Grave (V.) and inverted stars (M&D) and what knots …the Walker
connection is a Classic Tripartite again.

Remember the Zone  Herero regard the rocket as both their Destiny and
their Torah. (520) The Herero are Kabbalists. What are these magician
scholars trying to discover in the Torah or the Rocket? Like Slothrop
they are on a quest to find the Holy Center, Kansas, Home Dorothy and
ET, Woodstock for the Hippies, Self for Oedipus, Garden of America.

Ezian says (319) it’s a Center they need to get back to, the Garden, a
place without time, the journey without,  where every departure is a
return to the same place, the only place….Now these Kabbalists hope to
get to the bottom of the womb/cave/Mother/….Netherworld-Moon, Holy
Center, Holy Center with exhaustive explication of  the Text and
shooting a rocket. Where? At the moon? Well the moon is a tomb or a
womb or a Center lost, like Eden,  that the Zone Herero can only study
and get all mixed up in. The Herero conjunction of netherworld and
moon as Holy Center is parodied by the doctrines of other Rocket
cultists
in the novel.  Weisenburger says that TRP's accuracy on these
Kabbalistics "confirms that Scholem's Major Trends was his source in
these matters." On page 753 we have a count down.   There are ten
stages of the inner world through which God
descends-His revelation in the Shekinah. This ties back to Greta, but
here we get Fritz Lang's UFA film Die Frau im
Mond and the count down moves from film to Life As Film.  So Steve
Edelman, the Kabbalistic spokesman says, The Tree of Life itself was
brought into being, that is the Tree rooted at the Bodenplatte where
the dead abide, was brought into existence by "the Great Firing." The
Ten Sephiroth of the Tree (see Major Trends page 214 for a diagram)
are associated with the Rocket countdown;  you count down but the
Rocket goes up. The Rocket countdown "actually conceals the Tree of
Life." So once again,  the sacred guarantor of Return has been
co-opted by technological mysticism as part of a one-way process
designed to thwart the renewal of life. And, Captain Blicero, the guy
who wants to leave "this cycle of infection and death" imagines the
moon once reached by the Rocket will become "our new Deathkingdom", a
vacuous sphere inhabited by homosexual men. And what will Man be then?
He will be reduced to little more than "black and white film-images."
And what of Man’s dreams? They will be dreaming not of warmth and
communion but of perpetual separation from "loved ones."  How they
will cherish their "loneliness."  They Fly Toward a "sterile grace."
It is an Absolutely unnatural Ideal.  A Black and White Heart of
Darkness: a vacuous parody of Earth's vital core, a glass sphere.

THREE: NYC,  the Valley of Ashes, Long Island's rich great green
breast as seen through the Dutch Sailor's eyes, in The Great Gatsby.
Return or getting back to the Garden, to the Girl of his Dreams is a
quest that is destined to Fai, a Tragic quest. And why does he want a
Daisy when there is a Myrtle in the Valley of Ashes? The same reason
Myrtle is a consumer of prattle and Tom's violent wealth. Poor
Myrtle/Mary, flower of life; she is Henry Adams' Virgin Fecundity Run
Down by the Machine. In any event, The Romance is the obvious Pynchon
connection, but the Realism (Henry James) is also connected here.
Because Gatsby is a novel of machine manners, the constant flicker
(one of the best critical essays on Gatsby is Guy Reynold's, "The
Constant Flicker"), but also a Realistic novel about raw power. That
Power is Plutocracy. The novel is a battle of old and new money and
Myrtle (the Earth) gets run over. The Plutocracy, when challanged,
from below, by the Nego or the Jew or the soldier or the worker, forms
a United Front, it will  send Kit of Booker T or Invisible Man to
"school" with a Telluride scholarship, and, even good soldiers, who
are needed when the cartels have family feuds on a grand scale, and
who obtain some equality when all is general issue, and may even get
to fuck a Daisy, must be made tragic. But the Daisy Chain turns as the
billboard god's of commerce look on, and at least, for the preterite,
the Valley of Ashes will be a Park. A Moses project, it is where the
Worlds Fair was contructed and a beautiful Park now stands where the
ashes of industrialism once choked the life out of the Virgin.

http://www.nycgovparks.org/sub_your_park/vt_flushing_meadows/vt_flushing_meadows_park.html