BtZ: Some more banana molecule stuff

[Smoke Teff]

Here is the spirit of Herr Rathenau on p. 169 on steel, coal,
transformation, the interface between death and...life? Maybe this supports
Laura's reading of the source of the bananas a bit.

"We thought of this as an industrial process. It was more. We passed over
the coal-tars. A thousand different molecules waited in the preterite dung.
This is the sign of revealing. Of unfolding. This is one meaning of mauve,
the first new color on Earth, leaping to Earth's light from its grave miles
and aeons below. There is the other meaning... the succession... I can't
see that far yet...

"But this is all the impersonation of life. The real movement is not from
death to any rebirth. It is from death to death-transfigured. The best you
can do is to polymerize a few dead molecules. But polymerizing is not
resurrection. I mean your IG, Generaldirektor."

This last section, behind enemy territory, seems to yinning the yang of a
bunch of stuff from the novel's opening chapters. Sort of obvious dark
matter--though of course that's the limited, first-order response. These
things are obviously inextricable.

So I'm inclined to believe the distance between how Rathenau might describe
the bananas and how I might be more comfortable thinking about them is
maybe not as vast or distinguishable as I want to think. This seems to be a
fundamental question. And to have always been. Is it death v life or is
that an illusion--is it death v (really death w/) death-transfigured?
[Optimistic spin: can we make the same lateral move in our understanding,
to see the binary as life v life-transfigured? Or to see beyond the binary
entirely?]

Imagine you live in that maisonette. How do you know if it's good to eat
the banana. What factors do you consider. All causes have, in turn, their
own causes. Eventually the question gets hopelessly entangled, and far from
you. It is probably wrongthinking to imagine we should be able to really
get to the bottom of it. On some level, our decision-making, our
categorization, has to rely on some sort of instinct. Instinct, at least,
leads me, for now, to do my best to choose to understand life as beyond a
real thing, whose value is self-evident. And if the bananas make me want to
share their scent with the whole desperate city, for free, I'm gonna call
that the good thing, even if it's not a stainless lineage. Steel, on the
other hand, is stainless, and rarely moves its handlers to share it for
free out of good feeling. I'll call that a different thing, a bad thing.
Maybe the distinction between the two is not rational, but I'm mortal, and
the categorization helps me.
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