science-fiction-economic-collapse
Joseph Tracy
brook7 at sover.net
Sat Dec 3 21:18:00 CST 2011
Another aspect of the chums and other characters in ATD that bears relevance to the final scene and Pynchon's probing relationship to the concept of grace is the field of alternative technology. I wonder if fiction isn't itself acknowledged throughout P as an alternative technology and a generator of same. There is plenty of Jules Verne in ATD. The airships, like Popular Science do-it-yourself gadgetry taken to the next level, function with increasing autonomy on technologies that represent roads not taken in mainstream physics. They are also outside the rush of high speed propulsive fossil fuel tech. The chums themselves are aging far more slowly than the rest of the planet's inhabitants. This all could be looked at as silliness and a spoof of this genre's boys adventure obsession with gadgets and science and the dreams of escape from the the gravitational pull of death. But let me turn to today's inconvenient truth and the grim lines of geo political power in a hothouse planet.
Here is where certain kinds of technologies could make a huge difference in how physical power is available and therefor in how other kinds of power is distributed.. The struggle between Tesla and JP Morgan is still alive.The truth is that a change in how physical power is negotiated has to happen or we will boil or nuke ourselves, competing over ways to fill the sky and waters with shit. I think there is a constant toying in P's fiction with the interaction between technologies and the consciousness they engender. The paramorphoscope, one of the wittiest words ever invented embodies this fusing of the spiritual/philosophical/karmic/duality/love aspect of consciousness with the the scientific tools to evaluate the data map as it extends into the subatomic, the geophysical and the mysteries of light, matter, space, time, energy. MInd is the paramorphoscope and because it is a balance of female/male east/west water/air/fire energies it is dangerous when it is only the plaything of the boys and their competitive - mine is bigger than yours and I've got the oil rigs and corporate jet to prove it and more nukes than you, too -mentality. This state of consciousness locks up the waters of biospheric transmutation in underground caverns like tears unshed and rivers that never see light . Because oil has induced the worship of fire we live in a world where cities are visible from the moon, but where deserts (and desserts) grow and gardens (and healthy food ) shrink.
If Rossi's cold fusion energy catalyzer is real, or as similar breakthroughs in safe sustainable non polluting energy makes power inexpensive, local or even personal in scale and universal in availability, and the freshly locally empowered peoples of the planet tell the war-mongers to shove it - well some new doors of consciousness may also open, new winds blow, cleansing rains fall. Just sayin.
On Dec 2, 2011, at 11:03 PM, Joseph Tracy wrote:
( in response to the following M Bailey response to M Kohuts initial questions and thoughts
>> but just on the flying toward grace passage in general, it's I suppose
>> natural that he ended the book with the Chums, since he began with
>> them as well.
>> So basically the Chums is the frame tale, sort of? and their
>> progression by a commodious vicus of recirculation is from a voyage to
>> a specific destination (viz the Columbian exposition) to a generalized
>> movement toward grace. What has changed in them? Rather than
>> exhausting the genres, cutting and drying them, could the tale be
>> revivifying them? and if so, how? If a Chums-like stance is
>> suggested as a reader of the genre fictions, above them and but
>> partially involved in the emotions of those tales, the rest of one's
>> consciousness involved in aerial maneuvers and missions, how does one
>> read the Chums?
>
> As some may recall, I think P projects his vision in 3 dimensions, separate but interactive:
Hey, it's right there on the cover, 3 layers, with the light coming from the reader.
> 1) complete fiction/myth/imagination existing outside laws of physics and plausibility but true to their own mythos. ie the chums, the thanatoids, benny, Vaukanson's Duck, the rats in V, vieshu 2) the plausible fictive and 3)the actual historic :Tunguska, Nixon...
>
> The chums are the mythos of the boys adventure fiction from late 1800s to current times. One could trace their origins back to medieval knights and beyond, but there is a distinctively western and Christian quality to this corpus. What changes in them is their relation to their author. First they are on missions for which they don't question the purpose or morality. They have rivals and enemies but don't ask why this is the relationship. They are like their readers. They accept the authority and meanings assigned by the author. Male authority figures with religion and science, age and money. The dominant mythos of the readers is Christian, western, and because sex is not safe for young boys they fly through the hollow earth and burrow through desert sands. Such innocence is fun but sinfully dangerous. This is, however the world of a great many people; tell us who the bad guys are and we will fight them. By the end the Chums are their own authors, have come into equal relationships with women and are independent contractors . In other words, after a lot of arguing and exploring and questions and the dark lessons of war a new mythos has been negotiated and grace, that beautiful, terrifying, loaded word, has become something otherworldly in its humane chance of being normal.
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