BTZ42+Reed

[Mark Kohut]

"When they severed myth from sky."---line I read recently and saved for
this read

Later in the novel we will get Pynchon writing about "The Heavenly City"
(in the sky) an allusion
to the Heavenly City of the Eighteenth Century Philosophers almost surely,
when there was
unity of cosmos and man.

On Tue, Mar 15, 2016 at 4:24 AM, Ian Livingston <igrlivingston at gmail.com>
wrote:

> GR seems to me above all else mythic. Following Campbell's cycle, we are
> here called to the journey, and the descent toward zero is under weigh (pun
> intended, of course.)
>
>
> “It is too late. The Evacuation still proceeds, but it’s all theatre.
> There are no lights inside the cars. No light anywhere."
>
>
> “The development of the mythical feeling of space always starts from the
> opposition of *day* and *night*, *light* and *darkness*." Ernst Cassirer,
> The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, Volume 2: Mythical Thought, 98 (1955).
>
> "Above him lift girders old as an iron queen, and glass somewhere far
> above that would let the light of day through. But it’s night. He’s afraid
> of the way the glass will fall—soon—it will be a spectacle: the fall of a
> crystal palace" GR, 3.
>
>
> In On Symbols and Society (1989), Kenneth Burke differentiates action and
> motion inasmuch as action refers to a sequence attributable to symbol-using
> animals, whereas motion refers to the movement of things in the world
> [trees swaying in wind, waves rolling in to shore], 53.
>
> However, falling glass can be tremendously symbolic, such as when men
> raise the glass as testimony to their great ability and permanence, then
> cast it down in a suicidal tantrum of rage.
>
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