BtZ: Some more banana molecule stuff

[Smoke Teff]

Re Pointsman and Maud on p. 172 (note "sudden tropics"):

"But no one saw them, then or ever, and in the winter ahead, here and
there, her look will cross his and she'll begin to blush red as her knees,
she'll come to his room off the lab once or twice perhaps, but somehow
they're never to have this again, this sudden tropics in the held breath of
war and English December, this moment of perfect peace..."

Then, in Roger's head at the close of "Beyond the Zero," p. 179:

"It has begun to reveal itself: how easily she might go. For the first time
he understands why this is the same as mortality, and why he will cry when
she leaves. He is learning to recognize the times when nothing really holds
her but his skinny, 20-pushup arms.... If she leaves, then it ceases to
matter how the rockets fall. But the coincidence of maps, girls, and
rocketfallls has entered him silently, silent as ice, and Quisling
molecules have shifted in latticelike ways to freeze him. If he could be
with her more... if it happened when they were together--in another time
that might have sounded romantic, but in a culture of death, certain
situations are just more help to the jive than others--but they're apart so
much...."



On Tue, Mar 29, 2016 at 12:34 PM, Smoke Teff <smoketeff at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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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