on movement in M & D

[Mark Kohut]

Focusing on this concept--movement--picked up from an essay
in Ms Hinds' collection of essays on M & D--cannot even
remember which essay it was a part of.

 The novel is about movement in a major way. M & D
are in motion throughout. Global movement between a few countries and, of
course,
the full on-the-road but slow movement of running the line. Which ends
sorta finished, right?
a major visto scene looking West, right? That famous frontier thesis of
American History embodied
in that part of the story.

America, where immigrants are always arriving and moving on in.

Even the girls are vrooming, zooming around all the time. Restlessness.

The 'so un-American' waiting in line, remarks the narrator of The Nix.
America as a nation
of preferring speed, acting out speed; living and working faster and faster
comes to mind.
Not like much of settled Europe, self-stopped by rootedness.

Movement so fast in P's influential Henry Adams' time and telling that he
was always "unprepared' for the present.

America as a nation always changing, never fixed. America as the nation
where pragmatism
could emerge as the national philosophy. Pragmatism meaning open-ended,
tentative 'final' truths;
pragmatism meaning absolute fixed 'settled' truths have little foothold;
pragmatism meaning that the meaning
is in the fluid forms of the historically contingent, never like Plato's
Divine-like Forms. Pragmatism as
a philosophy of movement.

America always like the ending of The Crying of Lot 49. Unknown.
Within patterns and light along the ranges.



PS.  Easter egg on constant movement: in 1939 the American family could not
still still for television the NYT predicted:
The New York Times, in 1939, on why this "television" thing would never
catch on: "The average American family hasn't time for it.

PPS: D*anielle Sepulveres* <https://twitter.com/ellesep>
‏Verified account @ellesep <https://twitter.com/ellesep> 12m12 minutes ago
<https://twitter.com/ellesep/status/947536634635083776>
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New York is simultaneously the worst and best place for a breakup because
nothing stops moving even for a minute.


Of course, NYC was Philly then.
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