M & D Group Read. Cont.

[Joseph Tracy]

I find that my actual dream experience seems to contradict the premise of the quote from Abel. While most of my dreams are vague as to negation I have a certain kind of recurring dream in which I fall into darker and darker spaces, often in a series of layers and am then confronted with what seems to me a very malign presence which in my mind wants to eat or kill me. In earlier versions of this dream I would call for divine help and wake up. I was definitely saying no to this presence/dream being and it took an effort to do so. . These dreams are increasingly rare, but when I have them more recently I negate the presence by talking about love as the most powerful force and the dream either shifts to a positive experience like a song or I wake up. It seems to me that in these dreams I feel threatened and must summon all my will power to negate this threat. Force is never an option in these dreams, I must summon positive energy/love/beauty/hope.  Maybe some deeper recociliation with my own shadow is needed, but that is not clear to me. I don’t know if that addresses Abel’s ideas or what but this topic and the topic of oppositions sent me into some lengthy rumination.

The Daoist tradition, which blends into Zen( In Chinese Chan) Buddhism is that oppositions arise because they are the only way to describe or conceive of many important categories of experience. Very hard to think of down without up, and so on with light/dark, large/small, heavy/weightless, male/female, east west, organic living/inorganic nonliving etc. Polar oppositions are intrinsic not only to language, but to science, math and any framework for perceiving and understanding lived in reality. Animals and plants too negotiate as a matter of survival  oppositions of heat/cold, heliotropic/geotropic, day/night, salty/fresh and many others. Is  consciouness by necessity a singularity of opposites, is language,  is this the essential reality of the universe? 

Plants are interesting in that they so clearly grow in opposite directions simultaneously. Leaves also gather sunlight on one side  while providing shade and preserving water in the opposite direction, light and water come together in the photosythetic generation of food becoming fiber to allow growth and flowers and seeds to pass on life. But  plants rely on and thrive in interaction with bacteria and fungi , A forest is  both a single thing and a community of living and nonliving forms . In a world that can be thought of as the unfolding chemical possibilities of  the base elements, plants are the world’s original and most complex self generated interactive chemistry lab. administering life, death, healing, oxygen, fuel and food and generating a vast array of unique chemicals. Do plants dream? Perhaps we in our hunger for immortality have presumed too much and are actually little more than the dream-life of plants. Are plants the dream-life of a planet? Are the very categories of being - plant, animal, fungi, protists, light, water, insects, mineral - the gods who dream the universe? Is being always only a seeming, a yin-yang dream?
 

Dreams: weightless, deathless, visual but often fuzzy, experiential but not truly sensory, emotional more than logical. Forms and places morph frequently, internal patterns repeat themselves, roles reverse, bodies lift off the ground or struggle with demons, sunlit waters flow, songs come unbidden and unsung.  Most dreams are almost impossible to honestly or thoroughly translate into language where constant linguistic  choices and consistency of narrative are formal requirements. In that sense negation is somewhat iffy because dreaming is almost always elusive, allusive, or simply vague and repetetive nonsense.  But there are also those rarer lucid dreams that stick in the memory. 

In a way Pynchon brings the reader into moments of history that occupy with particular strangeness, dreamlike spaces of indecision, the impossible becomes real.  Odd things really do happen in these historic moments, and it seems that because of that, the tendency and direction of a character’s dreamlife becomes important to how such moments will be negotiated. Slothrop goes through just about everything before making his timely and happy disappearance. His dreams  are often paranoid but they also accurately reflect the  actual dangers at work around him. The harmonica he chased and lost pursuing it into the dreamed chthonic sewers of American history, reappears, washed clean in a mountain stream  in the green hills of Germany as though dream and reality have merged in a musical sendoff. 

Interestingly at least to me in its similarity to the dreams I described above is Mason’s dream of a malign presence with a krees blade. He goes to an asian pygmy expert in these things who tells hm to fight and demand something , so next dream he demands the krees and wakes to find it next to him. The locals and asians of the cape regard dreams to be as real as waking life. M&D begin to exchange dreams. pgs 70-72 M&D

So I have put forth little that is conclusive, but this is where the questions took me. Friday I hung the show. Last night it was 10 below. The rest of the house is chilly and so I am close to the wood stove. 






On Jan 6, 2018, at 5:43 AM, Jochen Stremmel <jstremmel at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> 
> The Interpretation of Dreams, VI: 
> 
> The attitude of the dream towards the category of antithesis and contradiction is most striking. This category is unceremoniously neglected; the word “No” does not seem to exist for the dream. Antitheses are with peculiar preference reduced to unity or represented as one. The dream also takes the liberty of representing any element whatever by its desired opposite, so that it is at first impossible to tell about any element capable of having an opposite, whether it is to be taken negatively or positively, in the dream thoughts. 13
> 
> Note 13. From a work of K. Abel, Der Gegensinn der Urworte, 1884 (see my review of it in the Bleuler-Freud Jahrbuch, II., 1910), I learned with surprise a fact which is confirmed by other philologists, that the oldest languages behaved in this regard quite like the dream. They originally had only one word for both extremes in a series of qualities or activities (strong—weak, old—young, far—near, to tie—to separate), and formed separate designations for the two extremes only secondarily through slight modifications of the common primitive word. Abel demonstrated these relationships with rare exceptions in the old Egyptian, and he was able to show distinct remnants of the same development in the Semitic and Indo-Germanic languages. [back]
> 
> 2018-01-05 23:28 GMT+01:00 David Morris <fqmorris at gmail.com>:
> I like the "cleaver" example.  Multiple, and even sometimes seemingly opposite, word meanings are Pynchon's playground.  His play with words become multifaceted plays of questions.  I love that playground.
> 
> David Morris
> 
> On Fri, Jan 5, 2018 at 3:54 PM Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com> wrote:
> Take a word like 'cleave'. it has two almost opposite meanings. 
> 
> This duality of meaning is akin to the ironic ambiguity, I'll now call it, of meaning so evident throughout so much of M & D,
> with the difference that BOTH meanings at once are usually intended. 
> 
> And it is not over individual words but over allusive phrases--the words alluding to Matthew say: set piece scenes especially, one overt level going on and another counter-force layer counterpointing, so to cutely metaphorize. 
> 
> He did it most overtly with V herself by the end of V; he did it so overtly with Blicero and the Rocket---
> and not only there in each of these novels---and he showed us it as the ambiguous mystery that ends Lot 49..
> 
> But in Mason & Dixon TRP does it more throughout than in any other book, I suggest. 
> 
> 

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