on that great ever-expanding symbol Icelandic Spar, sorta, maybe?

Mark Kohut markekohut at yahoo.com
Wed Oct 24 13:00:15 CDT 2012


Walter Ong, S.J. was a literary/cultural critic back in the day who I
think I first learned of in a Saul Bellow essay.
 
in a review of McLuhan's "Mechanical Bride" in 1967---important enough to
be included in an anthology on McLuhan a year later, which is where I have
stumbled upon it........
 
he writes of the 'natural symbolic force' of sex in folklore and mythology...which
at present might be said to have a "mechanical' [as against 'materialistic'] orientation
 
......"since sex is necessarily materialistic in the sense that its bipolarity is a kind of 
refraction of the composite structure of material beings"...............
 
Whatever that means but one gloss follows in the spirit of Ong, I hope:
 
Icelandic Spar's resonances include refraction [of a composite structure] which
Ong might mean whatever is the Spiritual within the pure Material............
it is Light, after all, which refracts................
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://waste.org/pipermail/pynchon-l/attachments/20121024/2ea326f1/attachment.html>


More information about the Pynchon-l mailing list