BtZ: Some more banana molecule stuff

[Monte Davis]

I've sought but not found coherence and consistency in how GR's symbolic
geology, biochemistry, etc.  link life, death, and various layers of the
earth. That scumbled bananery topsoil, the soil in which a Herero woman is
ritually embedded, the hot radioactive mud at Bad Karma, and the deep
strata of metals and hydrocarbons all have different symbolic freight, and
each bears a different relation to natural life and assorted unnatural
analogues of life. Likewise, flight gets a few good vibes, but its
extension intso pace travel is clearly nixed and __nicht_ed as a route to
Good Transcendence.

Sometimes I think Pynchon never got the memo about the fruitful,
nourishing, ever-rebirthing Earth Mother and the wise, justice-dispensing
Sky Father -- or even the one about the brawny dumb earth god and serene
Queen Selene. He's just a suspicious cuss all around.

On Tue, Mar 29, 2016 at 1:34 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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