BtZ42: p. 27-30

Fri Apr 8 09:10:36 CDT 2016

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/177119

Because I could not stop for Death – (479)
BY EMILY DICKINSON <http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/emily-dickinson>

Because I could not stop for Death –
He kindly stopped for me –
The Carriage held but just Ourselves –
And Immortality.

We slowly drove – He knew no haste
And I had put away
My labor and my leisure too,
For His Civility –

We passed the School, where Children strove
At Recess – in the Ring –
We passed the Fields of Gazing Grain –
We passed the Setting Sun –

Or rather – He passed Us –
The Dews drew quivering and Chill –
For only Gossamer, my Gown –
My Tippet – only Tulle –

We paused before a House that seemed
A Swelling of the Ground –
The Roof was scarcely visible –
The Cornice – in the Ground –

Since then – 'tis Centuries – and yet
Feels shorter than the Day
I first surmised the Horses' Heads
Were toward Eternity –

On Fri, Apr 8, 2016 at 8:37 AM, Monte Davis <montedavis49 at gmail.com> wrote:

> > The blasphemous and continued subverting of the Western Christian
> tradition in GR
>
> I don't disagree with that  -- certainly not with the linkage of "that
> stone hand pointing out of the secular clouds" (27 Viking/Penguin), "the
> great bright hand" (29) and Michelangelo's 'Creation of Adam". Pynchon will
> certainly be getting around to  (and more) on his way to "There is a Hand
> to turn the time" on p. 760.
>
> But single up the lines and heave again, draw them tighter. How does the
> book *get* from a GI out of the Berkshires to "the Western Christian
> tradition"? What's the technique of blasphemy and subversion, taking the
> first V-2 hammercrack as a starting point?
>
> Within three lines, "God... God... revealed in the sky... a *hardon*". Is
> Tyrone shocked? Is the narrator shocked? Are we shocked? Bananas, rockets,
> now penises...where's he going with this?
>
> The imagery Laura celebrates goes straight for the specifically American
> jugular, via the Pilgrim-Thanksgiving-"city on a hill" fetish. These
> pages hit every Calvinist -> Puritan -> Congregationalist ->
> transcendentalist mark all the way down the Slothrop slide:
>
> Nine or ten generations of ancestors "in a long gradient of rot," their
> molecules assimilated like Osbie Feel's alkaloids (wherever their souls
> might have flown)
>
> Gravestone poetry dwindling from "straight-on and foursquare" to "sarcasm
> and guile"
>
> "shit, money, and the Word" -- profane, secular and sacred in jolting
> juxtaposition. rather than decently segregated
>
> Instead of prosperity as proof of Protestant grace, the Slothrops'
> "flooded quarries and logged-off hillsides," the Harrimans' and Whitneys'
> country retreats abandoned
>
> And maybe a hint, in the pairing of the northern lights with the skyglow
> and sparks of the Aspinwall Hotel fire, that with WWII coming up, we
> wouldn't have to depend on God (or Nature) for our light shows much longer
>
> By Tyrone's time, there wasn't much more than soothing nostalgia.  "White
> steeples" on "autumn hillsides"... "rose windows taking in Sunday light,
> elevating and washing the [ministers']' faces above the pulpits defining
> grace"... aaaah yes, we are a Godly people in a Norman Rockwell devotional
> image....
>
> So why are those white steeples turning into blasphemous, subversive
> banana-penis-*rockets*?
>
> When Ted Cruz slides from "Let us revitalize our shared faith and values"
> to "Let us make the sand glow" in ISIS territory, I remember why GR is
> still so amazingly alive.
>
> On Fri, Apr 8, 2016 at 7:44 AM, 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?
>> "The image of the near-touching hands of God and Adam has become iconic
>> of humanity. <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human>"
>> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Creation_of_Adam
>> Once again, I will narrow the annotation to one of my hobbyhorses--the
>> inversion of the Great Chain of Being here, as elsewhere.
>> 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."]
>>
>> I also love the edges of the tombstone eroded by "season's fire and ice
>> chisels' associatively linking to me with
>> '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.
>>
>> p. 28, Miller edition: "Mark Reader, my cry! Bend thy thoughts on the
>> Sky,".....more and more allusions to what the rockets bring
>> in GR....and not the music of the spheres from Shakespeare's (and
>> earlier) time.
>>
>> Doncha just love the joke---Morris you love the jokes!---of Constant,
>> very wittily Puritanic even in heresy and of course, his son
>> 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,
>>
>> 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
>> the Traverse family, sea-changed (as well as land-and-meaning changed)
>> from AtD. But I would and
>>
>> you all can reel me in.
>>
>>
>>
>> On Thu, Apr 7, 2016 at 2:43 PM, <kelber at mindspring.com> wrote:
>>
>>> Just pausing to savor this sequence (one of my many favorites):
>>>
>>> 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 …
>>>
>>> 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!
>>>
>>> Laura
>>> -
>>> Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?listpynchon-l
>>>
>>
>>
>
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