BTZ42Read

[Joseph Tracy]

I keep thinking about the half-formed, half-formless but clearly perceived sense of a vault being shattered and shards falling. Starting at Guernica, and now reaching the seeming safety of England a new phase of warfare from the air has shattered the vaulted myth of civilian security within national military boundaries. The anonymous industrial ghost trains of lost souls has begun to roll.The boundaries between life and death are falling down as we enter an outpost of hell. In the debris that remains the substrate of consciousness has become machine-like, urban, humans living and moving in skeletons of iron. 
  

> On Mar 14, 2016, at 2:40 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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Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l