BTZ42Read

[Mark Kohut]

And/or, P's other trope " as so-and-so is always saying"....The screaming
is always present, always now, bombs screaming somewhere all the time.....

On Mon, Mar 14, 2016 at 10:40 AM, Steven Koteff <steviekoteff at gmail.com>
wrote:

> Some quick thoughts on the verb form in the opening line.
>
> I should expound on this in more detail, but there's something....temporal
> about the fact that it's a "screaming" and not a "scream." Or not that
> something "screams." Screaming, as gerund, is a noun formed from a verb. A
> verb is something that effects change. That initiates flux. That thus
> contains and causes the passage of time. A participant in the sort of
> eternal process of decay/death therefore. But then in normal grammatical
> space time a verb happens and then it's happening ends. The change is
> initiated. A coin is dropped into the fountain of space time; there are
> ripples. Time moves forward.
>
> But the gerund form, if you'll go with me, sort of preserves that
> flux/change in stasis. Kind of cryogenically preserves it. If something
> screams across the sky, the scream goes across the sky and then it is
> across the sky, and the scream is done. But if a screaming comes across the
> sky, where does that end? The flux of the scream is perpetuated within the
> virtual grammatical space of the gerund. It goes on forever inside there. A
> screaming. Inside the walls of the gerund form, the screaming is ongoing.
> So already there is a kind of temporal dialectic between the instant and
> eternity, between constancy and flux, and, we keep getting down to it, life
> and death, or whatever language you use for the fundamental dialectical
> binary, if you do.
>
>
> On Mar 14, 2016, at 1:40 AM, Ian Livingston <igrlivingston at gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
> “A screaming comes across the sky. It has happened before, but there is
> nothing to compare it to now…."
>
> Okay, this is pure and simple association, but I must say the whole of
> Jung's dream plays out quite well with the opening section of GR. Further
> parallels as we go.
>
>
>
> “The crucial dream anticipating my encounter with alchemy came around
> 1926: I was in the South Tyrol. It was wartime. I was on the Italian front
> and driving back from the front line with a little man, a peasant, in his
> horse-drawn wagon. All around us shells were exploding, and I knew we had
> to push on as quickly as possible, for it was very dangerous.
>
> “We had to cross a bridge and then go through a tunnel whose vaulting had
> been partially destroyed by the shells." C G Jung, MDR*,* 203.
>
>
> The Great Wars and the Depression between them left deep scars all across
> Europe. It wasn't just the soldiers who suffered nightmares in the
> aftermath. Jung's descent into the maelstrom led to his fascination with
> alchemy, which in turn influenced the work of Campbell, Eliade, and others.
> MDR was quite popular at about the time Pynchon was working on GR.
>
>
> Any other associations folks can relate to this opening? I think it
> deserves all the color it elicits.
>
>
>
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