BtZ42: p. 27-30

[kelber at mindspring.com]

Yes, to all of this, and Monte's point to. Again, what an evocative and emotional passage!

Laura

Sent from my Verizon Wireless 4G LTE DROID

Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com> wrote:

>p.27, that bright hand reaching out of the cloud has to remind of the most famous hand reaching out of a cloud in art, right? 
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>"The image of the near-touching hands of God and Adam has become iconic of humanity." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Creation_of_Adam
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>Once again, I will narrow the annotation to one of my hobbyhorses--the inversion of the Great Chain of Being here, as elsewhere.
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>The blasphemous and continued subverting of the Western Christian tradition in GR. The relentless naturalism, humanism, of the vision, (despite spiritual concerns up the kazoo (sic) all over the book) as one strain of interpretation has it. Weisenburger points out that there is heresy in Constant's epitaph since a Puritan knew that a death was owed to God, not nature, another in-our-face piece of vision.[ p 27 "Death is a debt to nature due, /Which I have paid, and so must you."]
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>I also love the edges of the tombstone eroded by "season's fire and ice chisels' associatively linking to me with 
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>'the impasto of the seasons' line and another compressedly-envisioned embrace of nature and all its life as our life. Dear Reader, just wait until I write Against the Day, you want fully-envisioned, Tom's thinking here. 
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>p. 28, Miller edition: "Mark Reader, my cry! Bend thy thoughts on the Sky,".....more and more allusions to what the rockets bring 
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>in GR....and not the music of the spheres from Shakespeare's (and earlier) time.
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>Doncha just love the joke---Morris you love the jokes!---of Constant, very wittily Puritanic even in heresy and of course, his son
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>Variable, another simple joke on heredity but also, maybe, a joke on the descent of Puritanism, on the entropic decline--'the money seeping its way out"--of the Slothrop family. 'Ruin is formal, devil's work,/Consecutive and slow---[notice the em dash, reader and remember the book's end]/ Fail in an instant no man did,/Slipping is crash's law, 
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>Such compression of prose, another of my current hobbyhorses during this reading. Why it is a 700 page poem. The compressed history of the Slothrop line is a kind of New England set Hawthorne- like story, The Decline and Fall of the House of the Seven Gables, so to joke. A shortcut US version of Buddenbrooks, so to so loosely speak. And I now see a kinship to
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>the Traverse family, sea-changed (as well as land-and-meaning changed) from AtD. But I would and
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>you all can reel me in. 
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>On Thu, Apr 7, 2016 at 2:43 PM, <kelber at mindspring.com> wrote:
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>Just pausing to savor this sequence (one of my many favorites):
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>Starting from: "On the old schist of a tombstone …" to the end of the section (italicized in the book): this is how it does happen - yes the great bright hand reaching out of the cloud …
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>There are so many Pynchon passages that send us scurrying to Google (or whatever the hell we used to do) an obscure reference. This one, though, sends the brain a-sparkling with associations - death from the sky - hand of God - V-2 rocket - differences, similarities - religion - terror - inevitability - resignation - quaint acceptance - death from the sky has always been with us, does it really matter what form it takes - take comfort from treating it as old family history … etc. etc. No Googling required!
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>Laura
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>Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?listpynchon-l
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