BTZ42: "feeling metal nearer and farther rub and connect"

[Smoke Teff]

p. 3

p. 5: "[Pirate's] skull feels made of metal."

p. 8: "What if it should hit *exactly*--ahh, no--for a split second you'd
have to feel the very point, with the terrible mass above, strike the top
of the skull...."

Metal falling on metal. Like magnetism.

To entangle a few thoughts here:

Maybe we all know the Sagan thing, about humans being "the universe
becoming aware of itself."

We all know about symbiotic relationships in nature. Parasitic ones. We
know about bacteria that invade the brains of animals, insects, and
manipulate behavior to suit the insects' own ends.

Michael Pollan, sort of pop food writer, in his *The Botany of Desire*,
talks about how plants that offer something useful or desirable to humans
can ensure their own cultivation and survival (though also possibly their
own genetic manipulation, which takes us into that control vs. nature
thing).

Pynchon occasionally drives at the idea of there being broad and mysterious
forces of manipulation at work on a geological/planetary scale. Ley lines.
America as machine.

We think about some of the binaries Pynchon likes to explore (though he is
ultimately dialectical). Nature and artifice (humans as each). Light and
dark. Life and death.

Norman Brown, via Freud, identifies the human psyche as being driven by the
constant, dialectical struggle between the life instinct and the death
instinct.

Campbell talks about all religions as being different systems of
iconography for the same eternal struggle, the constantly churning cycle of
death and rebirth.

So we notice these dualisms in Pynchon's writing. The rocket is controlled
by humans on the way up and nature on the way down.

Nietzsche tells us that we must go beyond good and evil. God is dead. Our
morality is dead. We must live without guilt.

The difficulty with (and benefit of) dialectical thinking as Nietzsche
prescribes--I have found in trying to incorporate it into my own life--is
in its practice/implementation. It seems to lead to a disavowal of meaning.
It makes it hard to form judgments and decisions. What are your criteria?
What makes an action better or worse than any other?

Maybe we read Nietzsche again, after reading Brown and Campbell, and find a
bit more optimism in him. Okay. Maybe our received morality is totally
useless. Maybe human life in general has nothing to do with morality, but
maybe we should ultimately be deciding in favor of--absent all other
criteria--life. As opposed to death.

Another route: maybe we take a more macrocosmic view of the eternal
conflict and understand that, on Pynchon's level, it is not merely human
life that is engaged in battle with death. We might generously think of
humans as fulfilling Sagan's role, which is nice, but the species itself is
immaterial. Again, the one irreducible, bedrock criteria we can ultimately
rely on is we side with life, and not death.



To finally knot this up with the Pynchon line: what if there is a way to
understand the course of human affairs as being driven not merely by human
consciousness nor only by the biological side of human evolution, but by
the (dead?) lifeless environment itself? By the mountains, the ore.

Brown talks about how humans are able to construct civilizations and urban
life of astonishing complexity in the stone age. The transition into the
age of metals seems to have as much to do with the originally (and still
repressedly) sacred attachment humans place on metal as anything else. This
comes out of its--and its' qualities--rareness in the natural world, except
for that gleaming, that shocking metallic color, which elsewhere we find
basically just in the sun and moon.

We are that animal the universe uses to understand itself. We are that
animal the earth uses to change itself. Plants manipulate us so that we
might cultivate them. Metals manipulate us so that we might extract them.
This leads us to base our currency on metal. But the metal starts showing
up elsewhere. In weapons. Rockets. Rockets that we make, and that fall
right on top of our skulls that are infected--like insects whose brains get
infected with *Wolbachia, *leading the insects to destroy the brains
themselves--with metal. That feel, like Pirate's, made of metal.

We are one point in the history of a planet that is less defined by what we
do and much more defined by the earth, its stone and metal, near and far,
rubbing and connecting.
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