COL49 - Chap 2: San Narciso as a circuit board

[Tore Rye Andersen]

Robin:
 
> I've often thought of OBA's outlook as Gaian, emerging from the same
> "Flash" shared by Mucho & Zoyd. Having one's doors of perception
> chemically blasted open often led to witnessing the essential
> aliveness of our planet and that attitude is frequently expressed in
> Pynchon's writings. Mother Earth—Gaia—is as much a character in
> Pynchon's writings as anybody else, seemingly more so in Against the
> Day.

Right you are - cf. Kit's vision in Inner Asia:
 
"Two small black birds who had not been there now emerged out of the light as it
faded to everyday green and blue again. Kit understood for a moment that forms
of life were a connected set - critters he was destined never to see existing so
that those he did see would be just where they were, when he saw them. Somewhere 
on the other side of the world, and exotoc beetle stood at a precise distance and
compass bearing from an unclassified shrub so that here, in this clearing, these
two black birds might appear to Kit, precisely as they were." (782)
 
- as Gaian as it gets. I do believe, though, that Pynchon's Gaian outlook reached
its fullest expression in GR, where Lyle Bland realized that "Earth is a living
critter" (590), and where we hear of "the World just before men. [...] an overpeaking
of life so clangorous and mad, such a green corona about Earth's body that some
spoiler *had* to be brought in before it blew the Creation apart" (720). And then
of course there is Kekulé's dream, a key passage which sadly seems more and more
prophetic:
 
"Kekulé dreams the Great Serpent holding its own tail in its mouth, the dreaming
Serpent which surrounds the World. But the meanness, the cynicism with which this
dream is to be used. The Serpent that announces, "The World is a closed thing,
cyclical, resonant, eternally-returning," is to be delivered into a system whose
only aim is to *violate* the Cycle. Taking and not giving back, demanding that
"productivity and "earnings" keep on increasing with time, the System removing
from the rest of the World these vast quantities of energy to keep its own tiny
desperate fraction showing a profit: and not only most of humanity - most of the
World, animal, vegetable and mineral, is laid waste in the process. The System
may or may not understand that it's only buying time. And that time is an artificial
resource to begin with, of no value to anyone or anything but the System, which
sooner or later must crash to its death, when its addiction to energy has become
more than the rest of the world can supply, dragging with it innocent souls all
along the chain of life. Living inside the System is like riding across the country
in a bus driven by a maniac bent on suicide..." (412)
 
If I was made Emperor of the World, I would declare this passage mandatory reading
for all my subjects. It says in half a page what this report by the UK Government's
Sustainable Development Commission says in 136 thought-provoking pages:
 
http://www.sd-commission.org.uk/publications/downloads/prosperity_without_growth_report.pdf
 
 
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