Section the Third, pg.17-19: Watch the Skies!

[Smoke Teff]

I think Pynchon also often seems to be debasing the sacred, but deeper
thinking always shows that to be a limited view of things. (And actually it
seems like he is often challenging/provoking that initial reaction.) Some
of his Grotesque is not only meant to debase but to equalize, to unify. He
is not tearing down the sacred. More likely he is helping redirect our
attention toward it, albeit in some new way. Doing his part to keep the
fire going.

On Tue, Mar 29, 2016 at 12:09 PM, Smoke Teff <smoketeff at gmail.com> wrote:

> That reading makes sense to me. Pynchon uses the metaphors of strings,
> lines, geometry, entanglement, so forth, very frequently in his rendering
> of people attempting to make sense of the world around them. Constellations
> are more of that. They are our attempts to contain, narratize, make sense
> of the cosmos in a literal way. Are in most parallactic/subject senses
> mistaken, but in some sense not: we are trying to create an interface
> whereby we can relate to what (at time of constellations' manufacture)
> seemed to be infinite, beyond us. And those images exist, even if only in
> the mind of a few people from one part of the surface of one planet.
>
>
> On Tue, Mar 29, 2016 at 11:48 AM, Monte Davis <montedavis49 at gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
>> "The stars pasted up on Slothrop’s map... a constellation... a cluster...
>> a violet density... a nebular streaming... this glossy, multicolored,
>> here and there peeling firmament..."
>>
>>
>> Slothrop could have used colored pushpins or thumbtacks or dots of ink.
>> Colored gummed stars might be simply because many US (and other?) kids
>> encountered them in school, but were they routinely used in marking up maps
>> in WWII? Would either, or both, account entirely for this concentration of
>> insistently stellar, astronomical language? is it purely a poetic riff?
>>
>>
>> The *sky* is certainly with us from the first sentence of GR on, and
>> later there'll be rockets to a death kingdom on the moon, and Gottfried's
>> final wishing star... but by and large the stars and significances thereof
>> are, uhh, thin on the ground in GR -- certainly compared to M&D's
>> omnipresent "as above, so below."
>>
>>
>>  As noted before, I still find Duifhuyzen's 1981 "Starry-Eyed Semiotics"
>> (available in pn006.pdf
>> <http://www.ham.miamioh.edu/krafftjm/pn/pn006.pdf> at
>> http://www.ham.miamioh.edu/krafftjm/pn/ ) the best starting place for
>> what Slothrop's stars mean, don't mean, are mistakenly thought to mean,
>> etc. But it doesn't really engage with the  stars _qua_ stars.
>>
>>
>> Still, I'll lean on it, and on "constellations" and "firmament," to
>> advance the quarter-baked notion that Pynchon is pointing here to astrology
>> as much as (or more than) astronomy. Constellations are our 2-D
>> *projections*, not real spatial groupings of stars: of two stars very close
>> on the imagined shell of the ancient/ medieval firmament, one may be a
>> hundred times as far away as its apparent neighbor. The same goes in spades
>> for the zodiac, those "special" constellations that fall on the ecliptic.
>> So there's a prosaic, "realistic" map of London that corresponds in
>> conventional, reliable ways to the real London outside... overlaid with a
>> projected firmament.
>>
>>
>> So maybe, while the daytime narrative of Bloat's intra-Allied spying (and
>> hundreds of pages to follow) are telling us that Slothrop's stars are the
>> key to occult psychic powers, maybe the key to missile defense in the next
>> War... the stars are whispering that it's all pictures in our heads?
>> Patterns that aren't really "out there" at all?
>>
>
>
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