BtZ42: p. 27-30

Fri Apr 8 09:35:46 CDT 2016

Crumbling is not an instant's Act (1010)

By the same

Crumbling is not an instant's Act
A fundamental pause
Dilapidation's processes
Are organized Decays —

'Tis first a Cobweb on the Soul
A Cuticle of Dust
A Borer in the Axis
An Elemental Rust —

Ruin is formal — Devil's work
Consecutive and slow —
Fail in an instant, no man did
Slipping — is Crashe's law —


2016-04-08 16:10 GMT+02:00 David Morris <fqmorris at gmail.com>:

> 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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