BTZ42Reed: Von B's epigraph

[Monte Davis]

I wouldn't even limit it to "spiritual existence." Within a few pages we'll
have the physical, consequential survival of bananaceous molecules in the
compost on Bloat's roof, warming us up for those strata of coal and oil and
iron (all made of or modulated by life) that may be calling the shots...
for seances and for instants stopped in Askania cameras, suspended
somewhere between 1944 and 1973. I once said of AtD that it made me think
Pynchon doesn't really believe in time, any more than Nabokov or Proust
does.

People quote Faulkner's "The past isn't dead. It isn't even past" as if it
were just a vivid, hyperbolic way of saying "we can't escape the effects of
history." It's a useful exercise, maybe a spiritual discipline, to take it
literally.

On Mon, Mar 14, 2016 at 2:23 AM, Ian Livingston <igrlivingston at gmail.com>
wrote:

>
> Regarding “…continued spiritual existence after death.”
>
>
> “The ghost or phantasm seen by the dreamer or the visionary is in
> unsubstantial form, like a shadow or reflection, and thus the familiar term
> of the shade comes in to express the soul. Thus the Tasmanian word for
> shadow is also that for the spirit, the Algonquins describe a man’s soul as
> otahchuk, ‘his shadow’; the Quiché language uses natub for ‘shadow, soul’;
> the Arawak *ueja* means ‘shadow, soul, image’; and Abipones made the one
> word *lo**ákol* serve for shadow, soul, echo, image. The Zulus not only
> use the word *tunzi* for “shadow, spirit, ghost,‘ but they consider that
> at death the shadow of a man will in some way depart from the corpse, to
> become an ancestral spirit. The Basutos not only call the spirit remaining
> after death the* seriti* or 'shadow', but they think that if a man walks
> on the river bank a crocodile may seize his shadow in the water and draw
> him in; while in Old Calabar there is found the same identification of
> spirit with the *ukpon* or 'shadow,' for a man to lose which is fatal.
> […] also what seems the fundamental thought of the stories of shadowless
> men still current in the folklore of Europe, and familiar to modern readers
> in Chamisso’s tale of Peter Schlemihl. Thus the dead in Purgatory knew that
> Dante was alive when they saw that, unlike theirs, his figure cast a shadow
> on the ground. Mircea Eliade, From Primitives to Zen: A Thematic Sourcebook
> of the History of Religions, 177 (1967).
>
> Pynchon uses light and shadow, light and dark, light and...well, other
> light to great effect throughout. Eliade was considered pretty hip in the
> day. Whether there is any intentional allusion is unimportant to me in this
> context, but the great rocketeer invites us to ask what he means when he
> says afterlife, and so, I think does Pynchon, especially considering this
> first section. Chimes?
>
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