V2nd, C3: pov in sec. viii

[John Bailey]

"To compare Sphere's gig with the wind..."

As is appropriate.

'Animate' stems from the Latin 'anima' - wind, air, breath, soul - and
led to Jung's anima, the feminine unconscious present in the male. The
dreaded 'inanimate', in V., is feminised, demonised, and rendered as
breathless. A woman whose lungs are balloons.

Some of the finest 17th/18th century automata were endowed with the
illusion of breath. Along with his Duck, Vaucanson's most famous
automaton was his fluteplayer, whose mechanics were so lifelike that
the work he produced to create the flautist became standard reading
for human players; a mechanical anatomy that told the human player how
better to be a human player.

Just down the track, Jaquet-Droz's three automata were equally
breathy. A boy writer that blows on his paper to scatter pencil
shreds, and a pianist with lungs that serve no purpose but to appear
more living, since to be animate is to breathe. Robots don't breathe.
There's been speculation that Mary W. Shelley checked out the J-D
automata just before Frankenstein came into being (but despite their
geographical proximity to that work's creation I don't buy it).

Goethe, Rilke, Dickens, Poe, Freud, Hoffmann, Hawthorne, Byron,
Melville and Kleist all witnessed and wrote on automata, and the more
humanist or romantic of the bunch ended up with binary oppositions
between breath and the inanimate. But after the confusion of V.,
Pynchon seems to develop an interest in the soul in every stone, the
tree and rock and rainbow, and I have to wonder where the poor
mechanical orphan of the automaton fits into this.

On Sun, Jul 25, 2010 at 9:23 PM, alice wellintown
<alicewellintown at gmail.com> wrote:
> Thw Wall Street Journal is a changes newspaper; you can read some very
> fine little essays on art, music, literature in it from time to time.
>
> The Smiling Genius reminds us that we have a bias against comedy; as
> we age, perhaps this bias wanes?
>
> "What Maisie Knew" (1897) stands at the threshold of James's late
> style. Although the novel has a clearly discernible plot and an "air
> of reality," it also shows James's growing fascination with an
> individual's subjective perception of the world.
>
> ...
>
> Unlike his brother, the philosopher William James, Henry was never
> interested in just the facts. Rather, it was the slowly acquired
> reality of an individual perception that held the novelist's interest.
> No "subject" is as affecting as little Maisie. Left to the devices of
> her own brave imagination, she is James's real masterpiece.
>
> —Ms. Sethi is a Robert L. Bartley Fellow at the Journal.
>
> The Smiling Genius Emmanuel Chabrier, music's master of good cheer
>
>
> On Sat, Jul 24, 2010 at 9:05 PM, alice wellintown
> <alicewellintown at gmail.com> wrote:
>> As far the sources of a gnostic reading, I'm sure I have a long list
>> someplace, but Bloom, Eddins--Voegelin, and look into Thomas Pynchon's
>> Gravity's rainbow : a study of its conceptual structure and of Rilke's
>> influence / Charles Hohmann, Sorry, best I can do at the moment.
>>
>> Did read a couple few interesting articles in the WSJ today; the one
>> one on Henry James is nice.
>>
>