BTZ42+Reed

[Ian Livingston]

The Billy Cruddup / Malik Akerman scene on Mars in The Watchmen just
occurred to me as parallel illustration, from this perspective.

On Tue, Mar 15, 2016 at 3:56 AM, Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com> wrote:

> "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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