pavement and beach(es)

[bandwraith at aol.com]

I would say, yea- how could it not be? running
along the swerve of, bend of... there is only one
beach, in English, a man can run along without
returning to "that" beach. But a dog? Dogs run
free, even Henry James reading dogs must feel
the pull to return to the wild undelineated beach
of pure being, unspoilt by man.


-----Original Message-----
From: Kai Frederik Lorentzen <lorentzen at hotmail.de>
To: pynchon -l <pynchon-l at waste.org>
Sent: Sun, Jan 23, 2011 7:02 am
Subject: pavement and beach(es)


Believe it or not, me got "The Moon" card two days after another as
daily instruction and that's exactly how I feel ... Anyway, just read a
sentence in Against the Day which seems to be connected to the
Situationist intro quote in Inherent Vice that found such brilliant
interpretation in Millard's article:

"He had found in Pugnax a sympathetic soul, for, owing to often weeks 
of
being cooped up in the gondola of the Inconvenience, Pugnax also 
dreamed
of release, running in the early morning, into a brisk wind, leaving
behind whatever humans had accompanied him, ALONG THE WILD BEACHES OF
FLORIDA HARD AS PAVEMENT [emphasis mine.kfl], or the frozen rivers of
Siberia where Samoyeds raced alongside in a spirit of friendly
competition." (p. 255)

So we have beach(es) & pavement another time, but this here is
different. The freedom desired is not imagined in figures of binary
distinction (soft vs. hard), yet in in the superimposition of both
terms, which
seems to indicate (cf. in the same sentence: "spirit of friendly
competition") a dialectical transcendence of thinking in opposites. But
maybe I'm exaggerating and it's just about that dogs can't run well on
soft sand ...

Kai