North: The Other Side of A Scarlet Letter (A is for Art)

[alice wellintown]

Enzian is going North and Slothrop is North--with Geli, he
is "on top of the Brocken, the very plexus of German evil."
Signs, ancestors, doubles of Katje too. This the fun house
shooting gallery mirrored world of GR. Put on your white
stetson and fire away Marvy and you may shoot a rocket and
blow us all up;  liberated in the spirit from Dora, thanks
Yanks. You may shoot a witch in a white dress and how will
we all get Home to Mother & the Land of E Pluribus Unum?

Oh, don't be so quick to go S.O.S.  or go on some evil rampage from
the other side.

The Brocken is not so evil here, is it?

It's seems a Natural place, more like Home, more alive and Human than
a plexus of modern evil--the Raketen Stadt.

Yes, it's a pre-Christian place, but can we crucify jesus in the name
of judas, even if he is a Con man on an April Fools
trip through the Western soul?

christ!

evil disguises, voyeuristic tourism , and genocide!

Ontop Brocken, Pagan instincts and Titans, where the light magnifies
the Human and Slothrop and
Geli become  "God_Shadows."

What is the evil here?

A natural rivaling of the Christian god and those ice saints in the North?

The evil here is surely not the mechanical and gigantic evil of the
Mittlework, no. To worship the old gods
is not a technological act--Nazi idolatry.

What's up there?
"The relics of the latest Black Sabbath." Hmm, "Kriegsbier empties,
spent rifle cartridges, Swastika-banners ripped red
satin, tattooing-needles and splashes of blue ink."
Detritius, yes, but after the war, go out buy a Harley and have a
pagan holiday, nothing evil here, right?

Slothrop, poor Harvard boy, he doesn't get it, he can not fathom these
reflections of witchcraft--don't they hang witches? And oh
the irony again, this witch is an ancestor--Amy Spruce. And like Amy
Spruce, Geli's witchcraft is free and open, an
openness that the Law, like that Argentine and American's, can not
abide, for it refuses to sequester the spirit.

Witchcraft here is Antinomianism--the persistent tendency of the
spirit away from codification and order, the perennial
suspicion that the Word is not the Letter.

How do you know she's a witch? She turned me into a newt, but I got better.

To be a witch, like Geli and Amy, is to suppose that one has immediate
relation to Nature--the godhead and so who needs
the interposition of authority, doctrine and law, Control?

Burn her, burn her, hang her like christ from a tree.

If there are no zones, is this a second coming ? Or is it pie in the sky?

But, in that early severity of the Puritan
character, an inference of this kind could not so indu-
bitably be drawn. It might be that a sluggish bond-
servant, or an undutiful child, whom his parents had
given over to the civil authority, was to be corrected at
the whipping-post. It might be, that an Antinomian,
a Quaker, or other heterodox religionist, was to be
scourged out of the town, or an idle and vagrant Indian,
whom the white man's fire-water had made riotous about
the streets, was to be driven with stripes into the shadow
of the forest. It might be, too, that a witch, like old
Mistress Hibbins, the bitter-tempered widow of the
magistrate, was to die upon the gallows. In either
case, there was very much the same solemnity of de-
meanour on the part of the spectators; as befitted a
people amongst whom religion and law were almost
identical, and in whose character both were so thor-
oughly interfused, that the mildest and the severest acts
of public discipline were alike made venerable and
awful. Meagre, indeed, and cold, was the sympathy
that a transgressor might look for, from such by-
standers at the scaffold. On the other hand, a penalty
which, in our days, would infer a degree of mocking
infamy and ridicule, might then be invested with al-
most as stern a dignity as the punishment of death
itself.

Released from jail and sentenced to wear a scarlet letter A upon her
bosom so that all will know of her sin, Hester discovers that she must
also fight to keep custody of her daughter. Mother and daughter live a
simple life in a secluded cottage on the edge of town. This isolation
allows Hester time for introspection, during which she engages in
independent thinking, allowing herself to consider ideas that the
Puritans would label antinomian, as she places faith and love above
obedience to moral law and social custom. Hawthorne underscores this
aspect of Hester’s nature by linking her to the seventeenth-century
Puritan Ann Hutchinson, whose trial for heresy was at the center of
the Antinomian Controversy.