Back to the past....riffing on THE PRESERVED

[alice wellintown]

In his treatise on "Queen-Gold," or Queen-pin-money, an old King's
Bench author, one William Prynne, thus discourseth: "Ye tail is ye
Queen's, that ye Queen's wardrobe may be supplied with ye whalebone."
Now this was written at a time when the black limber bone of the
Greenland or Right whale was largely used in ladies' bodices. But this
same bone is not in the tail; it is in the head, which is a sad
mistake for a sagacious lawyer like Prynne. But is the Queen a
mermaid, to be presented with a tail? An allegorical meaning may lurk
here.

There are two royal fish so styled by the English law writers- the
whale and the sturgeon; both royal property under certain limitations,
and nominally supplying the tenth branch of the crown's ordinary
revenue. I know not that any other author has hinted of the matter;
but by inference it seems to me that the sturgeon must be divided in
the same way as the whale, the King receiving the highly dense and
elastic head peculiar to that fish, which, symbolically regarded, may
possibly be humorously grounded upon some presumed congeniality. And
thus there seems a reason in all things, even in law.

Thomas Erastus (September 7, 1524 – December 31, 1583) was a Swiss
theologian best known for a posthumously published work in which he
argued that the sins of Christians should be punished by the state,
and not by the church withholding the sacraments. A generalization of
this idea, that the state is supreme in church matters, is known
somewhat misleadingly as Erastianism.

What has all this to do with Hester Prynne  and the book of Kings? I
have written a wicked book and dedicated to you, author of The House
of the Seven Gables and The Scarlet Letter and a bunch of twice and
thrice (so says Poe) told tales.

I. The Prison-Door
A throng of bearded men, in sad-colored garments and gray
steeple-crowned hats, intermixed with women, some wearing hoods, and
others bareheaded, was assembled in front of a wooden edifice, the
door of which was heavily timbered with oak, and studded with iron
spikes.
The founders of a new colony, whatever Utopia of human virtue and
happiness they might originally project, have invariably recognized it
among their earliest practical necessities to allot a portion of the
virgin soil as a cemetery, and another portion as the site of a
prison. In accordance with this rule it may safely be assumed that the
forefathers of Boston had built the first prison-house somewhere in
the vicinity of Cornhill, almost as seasonably as they marked out the
first burial-ground, on Isaac Johnson's lot, and round about his
grave, which subsequently became the nucleus of all the congregated
sepulchres in the old churchyard of King's Chapel. Certain it is that,
some fifteen or twenty years after the settlement of the town, the
wooden jail was already marked with weather-stains and other
indications of age, which gave a yet darker aspect to its
beetle-browed and gloomy front. The rust on the ponderous iron-work of
its oaken door looked more antique than anything else in the New
World. Like all that pertains to crime, it seemed never to have known
a youthful era. Before this ugly edifice, and between it and the
wheel-track of the street, was a grass-plot, much overgrown with
burdock, pig-weed, apple-peru, and such unsightly vegetation, which
evidently found something congenial in the soil that had so early
borne the black flower of civilized society, a prison. But on one side
of the portal, and rooted almost at the threshold, was a wild
rose-bush, covered, in this month of June, with its delicate gems,
which might be imagined to offer their fragrance and fragile beauty to
the prisoner as he went in, and to the condemned criminal as he came
forth to his doom, in token that the deep heart of Nature could pity
and be kind to him.

This rose-bush, by a strange chance, has been kept alive in history;
but whether it had merely survived out of the stern old wilderness, so
long after the fall of the gigantic pines and oaks that originally
overshadowed it,--or whether, as there is fair authority for
believing, it had sprung up under the footsteps of the sainted Ann
Hutchinson as she entered the prison-door, we shall not take upon us
to determine. Finding it so directly on the threshold of our
narrative, which is now about to issue from that inauspicious portal,
we could hardly do otherwise than pluck one of its flowers, and
present it to the reader. It may serve, let us hope, to symbolize some
sweet moral blossom that may be found along the track, or relieve the
darkening close of a tale of human frailty and sorrow.


On Sat, Jan 30, 2010 at 7:34 AM, alice wellintown
<alicewellintown at gmail.com> wrote:
> But if the doctrine of Fast-Fish be pretty generally applicable, the
> kindred doctrine of Loose-Fish is still more widely so. That is
> internationally and universally applicable.
>
> What was America in 1492 but a Loose-Fish, in which Columbus struck
> the Spanish standard by way of wailing it for his royal master and
> mistress? What was Poland to the Czar? What Greece to the Turk? What
> India to England? What at last will Mexico be to the United States?
> All Loose-Fish.
>
> What are the Rights of Man and the Liberties of the World but
> Loose-Fish? What all men's minds and opinions but Loose-Fish? What is
> the principle of religious belief in them but a Loose-Fish? What to
> the ostentatious smuggling verbalists are the thoughts of thinkers but
> Loose-Fish? What is the great globe itself but a Loose-Fish? And what
> are you, reader, but a Loose-Fish and a Fast-Fish, too?
>
>
> On Tue, Jan 26, 2010 at 1:08 AM, Joseph Tracy <brook7 at sover.net> wrote:
>> Probing thoughts. Yes, I think this stuff, right here is where the central
>> political metaphor meets the human soul. Whether moving beyond our reach in
>> the waves of the future or anchored in poetic condensation. Preservation is
>> about the the deep values, the treasures. All that is freely given to us in
>> life.The Golden Fang is about the acquisition of wealth and power. The
>> vessels that  carry these things are both local and interdimensional. I
>> agree with Mike and the wooden Nickel that this is what is talking to
>> Pynchon in an argument about the precariousness of Liberty, about who owns
>> this particular  ship, and a question about whether "ownership"  is the
>> pornographic desolation of the thing owned, the thing desired.  Is liberty
>> something we own or something we ride like a wave.   Are our treasures
>> stashes of dope, boxes of paper with pictures of  dead presidents, something
>> we hide from the state , something the state hides from us? Charley Manson?
>> Real estate? Sex with Marilyn Monroe?  Something you extract with torture,
>> protect with drones, vote for, pay taxes for, kill the wicked witch of the
>> west for, pimp for, suck cock for, lick pussy for, kill the owner of the
>> restaurant for?  Is it something that can be stolen?   Does the state keep
>> us free? Did the state steal its freedom from  the people who used to live
>> here, or do Americans have so much that they  just hand it out like
>> chocolate bars and smallpox blankets and condoms?
>> If not for the captain and his fearless crew the Minnow would be lost. Sorry
>> Charlie we don't want Tunas with good taste;  we want tunas that taste good.
>>
>> Wave your mini-flag. It's a post 9-11, post modern, post poster, post toasty
>> world.
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> On Jan 23, 2010, at 6:33 PM, Ian Livingston wrote:
>>
>>> The sea, as image, symbol, refers to the unconscious, yes? It is the
>>> Mother (Mare, La Mer) of everything, of life, yes? of thought,
>>> consciousness. It is chaos, from whence all things issue into the
>>> realm where reasoned order can be imposed, and it reclaims all things
>>> in the end. One of the first and most deeply rooted of all our
>>> archetypal symbols, it resonates deeply with the N. European psyche,
>>> if not among all cultures.
>>>
>>> Is what is Preserved also that which can be said to have an Inherent Vice?
>>>
>>>
>>> On Sat, Jan 23, 2010 at 4:42 PM, Mark Kohut <markekohut at yahoo.com> wrote:
>>>>
>>>> Specultions on the concept, The Preserved within TRP's fiction
>>>>
>>>> 1) goes back deep in maritime law.
>>>>     1A) back before and, mostly, outside the legal rise aand creations of
>>>> nation states.
>>>> fromBritannica Concise Encyclopediaalso called admiralty law, or
>>>> admiralty,
>>>> One early compilation of maritime regulations is the 6th-century Digest
>>>> of Justinian. Roman maritime law and the 13th-century Consolat de Mar
>>>> (“Consulate of the Sea”) both brought temporary uniformity of maritime law
>>>> to the Mediterranean, but nationalism led many countries to develop their
>>>> own maritime codes. Maritime law deals mainly with the eventualities of loss
>>>> of a ship (e.g., through collision) or cargo, with insurance and liability
>>>> relating to those eventualities, and with collision compensation and salvage
>>>> rights. There has been an increasing tendency ... (100 of 6271 words)
>>>>
>>>> A ship named THE PRESERVED might be thought to have a cargo of what,
>>>> human values?,---cargo that had soul since that was what, twice, p. 90, it
>>>> was said to have lost--- preserved from the past? From before nation-states
>>>> and modern wars between them? Fighting over the territory of each nation,
>>>> whereas the sea was........open to all?
>>>>
>>>> .....we come from the sea.....Pynchon loves the water.....and some values
>>>> associated with it, yes?
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>       1A) Sauncho had a piece of a class action suit against its cargo,
>>>> we learned in this chapter
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> --
>>> "liber enim librum aperit."
>>
>>
>