The Lake, the arch, the Deep Arch, Her, the digital cave, the underworld, the womb

[Joseph Tracy]

I was thinking about the  horrible and sickening intrusion into Tolkien's Hobbit which takes place in the new movies. Orcs on assignment from Sauron are introduced to the storyline and cripple the meaning and inherent richness of the unfolding events in Tolkien's story. They also destroy those lovely spaces of rest, humor and high spirits that are part of the Hobbit. Grendel-like orcs appears everywhere.

 So thoughts led to Beowulf which Tolkien taught and wrote about and which is  a story deep in the psyche of anglo culture.  As in this case, it is also a story that seems to want to take over most big budget action movies, but that is not where I'm going. Beowulf led me to Grendel and the nameless Grendel's mother. Her role in the Beowulf epic seems to contain a universal archetype and even a cosmogenic mythos. She is the dark fear-bent embodiment of  the waters of transformation. She is the liquid shapeshifting birthplace of the monster within. Yet in so many myths  it is from her that light comes, the waters of life. When Beowulf comes to find the monster's mother she is in a dark lake boiling with blood, probably Grendel's. Beowulf, who slew Grendel bare-handed goes into the lake with a sword and in imagery as intense and fraught as any ever devised(sexually, psychologically, sociologically), kills her with the sword.

I will tell you I do not care at all for the Beowulf story. I've heard a million versions and they all sound like a tale of racial superiority, of colonialism, ethic cleansing and theft disguised as heroism, of destruction of the feminine disguised as freedom from nature and everlasting glory.  Grendel is a part of us, nature is part of us, birth and death, feminine and masculine. Love and the intelligent pursuit of understanding is what frees us from monsters.  

What is this lake in the human psyche, this womb-like feminine place of watery shapeshifting, fear, separation, violence and desire? One place Pynchon readers find multiple variations on this image is the novels of Thomas Pynchon.  Ever fascinated with underground worlds,  the mysteries of the feminine and sometimes both, he takes us down into this terrain again and again. The feminine becomes the bionic succubus of death, the rain of hope hidden in secret caves, , a lake fucked foul from the four directions, the mother who clings, the mother who abandons, the mother of resistance to fascism and patriarchy, the mother of nuclear annihilation, the mother of the sanctified rats.  

      And the world was without form and void, darkness on the face of the deep. Breath moved on the waters.   Science says about the same thing.

It is here again in Bleeding Edge. On the edge of deep waters where the towers fell. Down into the grave, down into the dark with the Mother , into the basement where the drones patrol,  down the money trails, into the hells we thought were a joke, down to the subway station, preparing for departure. The waters boil with blood. Dark toxic clouds roil through the streets.  Deep Archer? Should we take a sword, a bow, a software language, a pistol or the time machine of our bodies; should we take naked dreams, seed packets, intuition, a key to the cavern where the pure waters rain? Is this a tomb or a womb? Going down.



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Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l