Wandering Oh Rocks ("tell us in American words")

[M Choakumchild]

In his Introduction to Tanner, Bell alludes to Emerson, Whitman,
Fenellosa, Pound, Jonathan Edwards, Ralph Ellison, Thoreau, John
Adams, Thomas Paine, Thomas Gustafson, Melville, DeLillo, Hawthorne's
famous Preface from HSG, Pynchon, Dixon and Mason, Clark and Lewis,
William and Henry James, Tocqueville, Proust, Cooper, Fitzgerald,
Benjamin Franklin...all before he gets into any of the essays by
Tanner. No mere name dropping, Bell's judicious selection of
allusions, centered on his thesis about American Language & Culture,
is an excellent source for anyone interested in the history of
American Language Tom Pynchon the younger is up to his ass in while
writing V.. One may be tempted to attribute the keen insights and
allusiveness to the reader (tanner or Bell or Hawthorne or Robin), but
when God gives a man bad ears or cripples him with blindness or drops
him in the shit stream flowing from up the way then cleanses him in
the scroatumtighteningsea, he often compensates him with genius.

from Emerson's Nature

Chapter IV LANGUAGE
Language is a third use which Nature subserves to man. Nature is the
vehble, and threefold degree.
1. Words are signs of natural facts.

2. Particular natural facts are symbols of particular spiritual facts.

3. Nature is the symbol of spirit.

1. Words are signs of natural facts. The use of natural history is to
give us aid in supernatural history: the use of the outer creation, to
give us language for the beings and changes of the inward creation.
Every word which is used to express a moral or intellectual fact, if
traced to its root, is found to be borrowed from some material
appearance. Right means straight; wrong means twisted. Spirit
primarily means wind; transgression, the crossing of a line;
supercilious, the raising of the eyebrow. We say the heart to express
emotion, the head to denote thought; and thought and emotion are words
borrowed from sensible things, and now appropriated to spiritual
nature. Most of the process by which this transformation is made, is
hidden from us in the remote time when language was framed; but the
same tendency may be daily observed in children. Children and savages
use only nouns or names of things, which they convert into verbs, and
apply to analogous mental acts.



On Sun, Sep 12, 2010 at 8:53 AM, M Choakumchild
<mrmchoakumchild at gmail.com> wrote:
> p74 or Chapter VI in Grant's Companion to V., "nothing but wrong
> words", Grant's cites Hawthorne:
>
> A "hermaphrodite sort of deity": sexuality, gender, and gender
> blending in Thomas Pynchon's 'V.'
> Studies in the Novel, Spring, 1997 by Mark D. Hawthorne
>
> online
>