Bodysurfing

[Joseph Tracy]

This is real interesting. I wish I understood more clearly the role of alchemy in exemplifying this Mother Son transformation. My natural association for this archetype is more Catholic( albeit that is certainly laden with an earthy peasant spirituality) than alchemy. But I feel my understanding of the purpose and historical practice of alchemy is vague at best. It seems to mean very different things to different people and that throws me off.

There is a  story of the Fishermans wife where a couple starts off living in a pisspot  by the ocean, He catches a magic fish who speaks and asks to be released. He does so. But the dissatisfied  wife sends him to ask the fish to grant wishes and moves with each wish toward greater comfort and power from cottage to castle, emperor to pope   as the sea gets more and more stormy and finally foul  dark and boiling. She goes too far, asking to be God and they are back in the pisspot.   I take it as both the course of ambition and as a dissident folk version of the history of Christianity.  The correspondence between the state of the ocean and the state of the soul has an intuitive and powerful psychological heft, a mythic cinematic grandness that is not the normal folk tale. 
On Dec 29, 2012, at 1:37 PM, Ian Livingston wrote:

> > The sea in Pynchon seems an aspect of the concept of underground. In ATD there is a cavern which holds  a >secret sea under a desert. In IV the sea holds the menace of inherent vice and the possibility of Lemurian >redemption.
> 
> This struck a chord, so I went grubbing and came up with pages 23-4 in Psychology and Alchemy:
> 
> "The point is that alchemy is rather like an undercurrent to the Christianity that ruled on the surface. It is to this surface as the dream is to the consciousness, and just as the dream compensates the conflicts of the conscious mind so alchemy endeavours to fill in the gaps left open by the Christian tension of opposites....The historical shift in the world's consciousness towards the masculine is compensated at first by the chthonic femininity of the unconscious. In certain pre-Christian religions the differentiation of the masculine principle had taken the form of the father-son specification, a change which was to be of the utmost importance for Chritianity. Were the unconscious merely complementary, this shift of consciousness would have been accompanied by the production of a mother and daughter, for which the necessary material lay ready to hand in the myth of Demeter and Persephone. But, as alchemy shows, the unconscious chose rather the Cybele-Attis type in the form of the prima materia and the filius macrocosmi, thus proving that it is not complementary but compensatory.This goes to show that the unconscious does simply act contrary to the conscious mind but modifies it more in the manner of an opponent or partner. The son type does not call up a daughter as a complementary image from the depths of the 'chthonic' unconscious--it calls up another son. This remarkable fact would seem to be connected with the incarnation in our earthly nature of a purely spiritual God, brought about by the Holy Ghost impregnating the womb of the Blessed Virgin. Thus the higher, the spiritual, the masculine inclines to the lower, the earthly, the feminine; and accordingly, the mother, who was anterior to the world of the father, accommodates herself to the masculine principle and, with the aid of the human spirit..., produces a son--not the antithesis of Christ but rather his chthonic counterpart, not a divine man but a fabulous being conforming to the nature of primordial mother. And just as the redemption of man the microcosm is the task of the 'upper' son, so the 'lower' son has the function of a salvator macrocosmi.
>     "This, in brief, is the drama that played out in the obscurities of alchemy."
> 
> 
> On Sat, Dec 29, 2012 at 2:25 AM, Mark Kohut <markekohut at yahoo.com> wrote:
> nice..very.
> 
> From: Joseph Tracy <brook7 at sover.net>
> To: P-list List <pynchon-l at waste.org> 
> Sent: Friday, December 28, 2012 8:49 PM
> Subject: Re: Bodysurfing
> 
> My sense of the Biblical meaning is  that the sea functions as a metaphor for the whole of humanity and also for death and transience( as in Jonah or the parting of the red sea, Moses out of waters).  There is a psalm that says the voice of the Lord is upon the waters.  Jesus uses the surface of Gallilee to amplify his voice. Also I think in Rev. his voice is as the voice of many waters. In Jung the waters are the subconscious.  In IV there is that scene in the seafood restaurant where we are asked to consider what we are dumping into one of the world's primary food sources and how long we can poison the waters we swim in). And Jesus was a sailor when... ............ 
> 
> Okay so  this is a pretty big metaphor-  transformation, language, flow of life, death and resurrection, primordial soup, beginning and end of all flow( all the rivers run into the sea , but the sea is not full .Eccl.) arena of naval power and colonialism,  3/4ths of the body of living things,  subconscious/ sleep/dream  . This is such a big metaphor it is more like the reason that all language is metaphoric, slivers of fast fish (As Alice would say) in a big blue dream, not so much a symbol as a source of the symbolic.
> 
> The sea in Pynchon seems an aspect of the concept of underground. In ATD there is a cavern which holds  a secret sea under a desert. In IV the sea holds the menace of inherent vice and the possibility of Lemurian redemption.  
> 
> I like the comparison to time. In that sense we all walk on the sea for a moment and carry all time with us. Everything we know is as eternal and ephemeral , as solid and un-supporting as the waters we walk on.  No miracle in board or body though; just harmonious physics, skill, saltwater and waves.  
> 
> 
> On Dec 28, 2012, at 11:40 AM, Ian Livingston wrote:
> 
> > Hm. Odd I never made that association before. My Pa was a minister and I, in my anti-faith, researched the literature well and I don't recollect coming across the sea as the body of the church. I was taught that Christ was the body of the Church and that he was a fisher of men, i.e., one who pulled men out of the sea and to himself.
> One must never be so inconsiderate at that point to ask if Jesus then proceeds to sell the fish in the market, grill and eat them, smoke them or hang them up to dry. A fisherman , after all, is not the fishes best friend or savior.  It could be better argued that the fish saves the fisherman than that the fisherman saves the fish.
> 
> > Jung, of course, a theologically literate type, associates water in general with the chthonic, pre-conscious darkness. From that perspective, walking, gliding, or sailing over it, while a dicey bit of work, is precisely the business of the conscious (awakened, enlightened) people of the world.
> > 
> > Surf's up!
> > 
> > On Fri, Dec 28, 2012 at 4:46 AM, <bandwraith at aol.com> wrote:
> > Yea! Well, there are many different priesthoods in our complex modern society, whose collective motto might be: "Obfuscating you is just the nature of our game."
> > Science and literature as much as religion, in that regard. But the sea is still the sea, and we shall see whose left standing, or swimming as the case may be, come Lemuria- a garden for octupi.  Occupying octupi, one would hope...
> > 
> > Happy New Year!
> > 
> > 
> > 
> > -----Original Message-----
> > From: lee momonin <momonin at gmail.com>
> > To: bandwraith <bandwraith at aol.com>
> > Cc: pynchon-l <pynchon-l at waste.org>
> > Sent: Fri, Dec 28, 2012 7:07 am
> > Subject: Re: Bodysurfing
> > 
> > 
> > therefore happy new year!
> > 
> > Following the mood of bodysurfing
> > http://www.zuguide.com/#Being-There
> > the garden will make you happy too
> > 
> > 
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