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

[Joseph Tracy]

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?