The Burial of the Dead

[Bekah]

And also straddling that line between life and death are the  
Thanatoids of Vineland.

Bekah


On Aug 12, 2009, at 7:57 AM, alice wellintown wrote:

> 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)
>