BTZ42Reed: Von B's epigraph

[ish mailian]

I dig that pony, Ian.


Good stuff.

Thank you.
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
> loákol 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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Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l