Hi Evrybahdy!

[Monte Davis]

The Lovecraft echoes are IMO stronger in the Vormance expedition and Wren's
Mexican archaeology of AtD. His alien-ness is that of the unthinkably
large, unthinkably old cosmos revealed from Copernicus through Hubble by
way of Lyell's geological "deep time." It's never quite clear whether the
traces of the Old Ones are in Antarctica, the Tibetan plateau, and remote
Pacific islets because the earth has changed so much since their heyday or
because they found/find such places more homelike :-).

The framing of Vheissu reminds me more of the ambivalent European response
to tropical landscapes. Some explorers were entranced by the jungles'
vine-draped vitality and the greater floral & faunal variety -- new orchids
for Kew! -- while others found it too intensely moist, fecund,
creepy-crawly for comfort. To me, the other-worldliness in Godolphin's
description can also be read as what *this* world truly looks like when you
take off your late-Victorian, north-temperate-zone spectacles. Yesyes,
we've planted the flag and sent dispatches to the Royal Society and claimed
it for the Queen-Empress, but must it be... so very... vivid?
'

On Thu, Jun 8, 2017 at 9:45 AM, rich <richard.romeo at gmail.com> wrote:

> and Lovecraft, e.g. 'The Colour Out of Space'. Vheissu is very much a
> Lovecraftian landscape which I'm sure has been pointed out in various
> critiques over the years
>
> rich
>
> On Thu, Jun 8, 2017 at 8:59 AM, Thomas Eckhardt <
> thomas.eckhardt at uni-bonn.de> wrote:
>
>> A tattooed savage...
>>
>> I detect "Arthur Gordon Pym" here, and, of course, "Moby-Dick".
>>
>> Compare and contrast:
>>
>> "And when we consider that other theory
>> of the natural philosophers, that all other earthly hues --every
>> stately or lovely emblazoning --the sweet tinges of sunset skies and
>> woods; yea, and the gilded velvets of butterflies, and the butterfly
>> cheeks of young girls; all these are but subtile deceits, not actually
>> inherent in substances, but only laid on from without; so that all
>> deified Nature absolutely paints like the harlot, whose allurements
>> cover nothing but the charnel-house within; and when we proceed
>> further, and consider that the mystical cosmetic which produces every
>> one of her hues, the great principle of light, for ever remains white
>> or colorless in itself, and if operating without medium upon matter,
>> would touch all objects, even tulips and roses, with its own blank
>> tinge --pondering all this, the palsied universe lies before us a
>> leper; and like wilful travellers in Lapland, who refuse to wear
>> colored and coloring glasses upon their eyes, so the wretched infidel
>> gazes himself blind at the monumental white shroud that wraps all the
>> prospect around him.  And of all these things the Albino whale was the
>> symbol. Wonder ye then at the fiery hunt?"
>>
>>
>> On Thu, 8 Jun 2017 08:30:46 -0400
>>  Monte Davis <montedavis49 at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>>> Godolphin to Victoria Wren:
>>>
>>> "“The colors. So many colors.” His eyes were tightly closed, his
>>> forehead resting on the bowed edge of one hand. “The trees outside the head
>>> shaman’s house have spider monkeys which are iridescent. They change color
>>> in the sunlight. Everything changes. The
>>> mountains, the lowlands are never the same color from one hour to the
>>> next. No sequence of colors is the same from day to day. As if you lived
>>> inside a madman’s kaleidoscope. Even your dreams become flooded with
>>> colors, with shapes no Occidental ever saw. Not real shapes, not meaningful
>>> ones. Simply random, the way clouds change over a Yorkshire landscape.”
>>> ​...​
>>> “They stay with you,” he went on, “they aren’t fleecy
>>> lambs or jagged profiles. They are, they are Vheissu, its raiment,
>>> perhaps its skin.”
>>> “And beneath?”
>>> “You mean soul don’t you. Of course you do. I wondered about the soul of
>>> that place. If it had a soul. Because their music, poetry, laws and
>>> ceremonies come no closer. They are skin too. Like the skin of a tattooed
>>> savage.”​"​
>>>
>> -
>> Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l
>>
>
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://waste.org/pipermail/pynchon-l/attachments/20170608/f4d15010/attachment.html>