The Burial of the Dead

[alice wellintown]

Bekah wrote,

> It seems like so much of Pynchon's work is about living on both sides of
> some kind of line.   In GR Slothrop crosses some border lines.  Also in AtD,
>  Kit and Lake live on both sides of their lines (Kit with Vibe and Lake with
> Deuce).    In Vineland  Frenesi lives on both sides of a kind of law and
> order line.   In IV Doc seems to live on both sides of that same kind of law
> and order line.   Pynchon's point?   "Single up all the lines!"

" — not a Chain of single Links, for one broken Link could lose us
All,—rather, a great disorderly Tangle of Lines, long and short, weak
and strong, vanishing into the Mnemonick Deep, with only their
Destination in common" (M&D.349).

The line that divides Life from Death, the Living from the Dead, those
Awake from those who Dream, the Dream of America from the American
Dream.

It's no wonder the characters in AtD can not sleep, the electric
current pulling at the fillings in their teeth, yanking their
exhausted souls against what is never "sufficient unto the day."

Speaking of Prophetic America and the Wasteland shored against its lee
shore ruins, today marks the day when William Blake, never one to keep
still, let alone to the living side of the boarder, died. His
influence on Romantics, even late Romantics like Pynchon lives on. In
some respects, as Blake Turned, so Eliot Turned again. Pynchon seems
to navigate some no man's land betwixt the two. Finding in the
Wasteland and in the Golden Bough and the notes and such, a Muse  that
William Carlos Williams, in poems, such as, Paterson gave voice to:



Paterson lies in the valley under the Passaic Falls
its spent waters forming the outline of his back. He
lies on his right side, head near the thunder
of the waters filling his dreams! Eternally asleep,
his dreams walk about the city where he persists
incognito. Butterflies settle on his stone ear.
Immortal he neither moves nor rouses and is seldom
seen, though he breathes and the subtleties of his machinations
drawing their substance from the noise of the pouring river
animate a thousand automations. Who because they
neither know their sources nor the sills of their
disappointments walk outside their bodies aimlessly
      for the most part,
locked and forgot in their desires-unroused.

  —Say it, no ideas but in things—
  nothing but the blank faces of the houses
  and cylindrical trees
  bent, forked by preconception and accident—
  split, furrowed, creased, mottled, stained—
  secret—into the body of the light!

>From above, higher than the spires, higher
even than the office towers, from oozy fields
abandoned to gray beds of dead grass,
black sumac, withered weed-stalks,
mud and thickets cluttered with dead leaves-
the river comes pouring in above the city
and crashes from the edge of the gorge
in a recoil of spray and rainbow mists-

  (What common language to unravel?
  . . .combed into straight lines
  from that rafter of a rock's
  lip.)

A man like a city and a woman like a flower
—who are in love. Two women. Three women.
Innumerable women, each like a flower.

                        But
only one man—like a city. (1)


http://oldpoetry.com/opoem/35372-William-Carlos-Williams-from-Book-I--Paterson
 (1)

"the city founded on the 16th anniversary of the Declaration of
Independence, July 4, 1792, not as a municipality but as a business:
the home of the country's first industrial corporation, the Society
for Useful Manufactures. The grand plans of the society and its
guiding light, Alexander Hamilton, ultimately failed, but Paterson
established itself as a cradle of American industry" --- (2)



"The Paterson silk strike of 1913 was a strike of the silk mill
workers in Paterson, New Jersey. Led by the Industrial Workers of the
World (IWW), the strike began on February 1, 1913." (3)



http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2000/03/job-line  (2)

http://www.mellenpress.com/mellenpress.cfm?bookid=5172&pc=9  (3)