Back to AtD....Tungaska Event, [in late 700s pages]

[Paul Mackin]

The passage suggests to me the oft expressed notion that modern reality 
has made the creation of fiction less feasible or at least more 
difficult. Though of course Pynchon does manage.

Modern reality here is the the cataclysmic turn taken in the early 20th 
Century--represented by the Tungasta Event.

What we have is a riff on the Real as against the imaginary. How the 
Real threatens the Imaginary. Erases the barriers.

When the physical laws of the actual world are suspended or altered, the 
fictitious space which the Chums occupy is made less separate from our 
own, and by a Pynchonean conceit it's the Chums who feel threatened 
rather than us.

It's kind of metaphysical.

P




On 4/1/2012 11:28 AM, Bekah wrote:
> Well that's a fine snip for a Sunday morning - (Palm Sunday fwiw).   Yup -  I love that passage  -  it's so Russian sounding and so visual and funny -  I laughed and laughed.
>
> And now I'm thinking of "Women Who Run With the Wolves: Myths and Stories of the Wild Woman Archetype"  by  Clarissa Pinkola Estés   (to go with Hillman studies and wolves and so on)  which is a very good book but I read it a long time ago -  it stuck though -
>
> Bekah
> " If you have never been called a defiant, incorrigible, impossible woman… have faith… there is yet time." -  from Women Who Run with the Wolves
>
>
> On Apr 1, 2012, at 5:11 AM, Mark Kohut wrote:
>
>> p. 784 "Siberian wolves walked into churches in the middle of services,
>> quoted passages from the Scriptures in fluent Old Slavonic, and walked peaceably
>> out again. They were reported to be especially fond of Matthew 7:15, "Beware of
>> false prophets, which come to you in sheep's clothing,but inwardly are ravening
>> wolves."
>>
>> Hilarious, I think and another take on a steady, deeppersistent theme of AtD---how righteous
>> self-justifying religious espousal masks much evil that goes down in the world....
>>
>> And wolves go way back as a trope: "Man is a wolf to man."
>>
>> From: Joseph Tracy<brook7 at sover.net>
>> To: P-list List<pynchon-l at waste.org>
>> Sent: Saturday, March 31, 2012 8:48 PM
>> Subject: Re: Back to AtD....Tungaska Event, [in late 700s pages]
>>
>> Wonderin' if you could elaborate on those wolves a bit.
>> On Mar 31, 2012, at 2:55 PM, bandwraith at aol.com wrote:
>>
>>> Partial to wolves speakin' The Gospel, myself.
>>>
>>>
>>> -----Original Message-----
>>> From: Joseph Tracy<brook7 at sover.net>
>>> To: P-list List<pynchon-l at waste.org>
>>> Sent: Sat, Mar 31, 2012 1:37 pm
>>> Subject: Re: Back to AtD....Tungaska Event, [in late 700s pages]
>>>
>>>
>>> Seems like the essence of the "word"  that explodes their world is something
>>> along the lines of' 'you are on a ball in space, vulnerable, open to the cosmos,
>>> wake up from the limits of your mammalian bodies, your territorial wars, your
>>> boys adventure stories." It happens at a time when  science is the new common
>>> global language, close on the heels of Einstein's publication of theories that
>>> made gravity vanish, based on thought experiments of the motion of particles of
>>> light through space, ideas that will bring new explosive dimensions to the word
>>> 'atomic' and 'enlightenment'. It happens at a time when the events can be
>>> understood in a non superstitious way.
>>>
>>> I feel in general Pynchon is pointing out that humans more easily achieve a
>>> change of information than a change of consciousness or  mammalian habit. That
>>> despite all the promise of cultural transformation burgeoning in western
>>> civilization at the turn of that century, the habit of war exercised enough
>>> gravitational pull to bind Europe in the bloody mud graves of WW1 and aerial
>>> flames of WW2.
>>>
>>> Hot year coming up.
>>>
>>>
>>> On Mar 31, 2012, at 7:36 AM, Mark Kohut wrote:
>>>
>>>> p. 793 The Tugaska Event reveals "the sacred City".....
>>>> the Chums "took longer to understand that the great burst of light
>>>> had also torn the veil separating their own space from that of the
>>>> everyday world"......they had met the same fate as Shambala,
>>>> their protection lost"...
>>>>
>>>> ..."gravity itself for a moment simply vanished"
>>>>
>>>> All textual clues to the immateriality of the Event...
>>>>
>>>> The Event = like a religious Visitation revealing the sacred?
>>>> Like the Pentecostal Word exploding above everyone's heads?
>>>>
>>>> Essay question: How is the Tungaska Event, therefore, similar
>>>> and dissimilar from the Rocket in GR?
>>>
>>
>>
>>
>
>