BEg2 chapter 10 a reconvergence of what the day scattered

[Mark Kohut]

Thank you Michael for this. All of it.

 "what the day scattered" has "against the day" overtones too, of course...

On Wed, Dec 22, 2021 at 2:19 AM Michael Bailey <michael.lee.bailey at gmail.com>
wrote:

> Somebody on a blog has cherished this Sappho fragment 104 with a bunch of
> different translations and intertextual references from Byron to Eliot.
>
>
> http://reverberatehills.blogspot.com/2014/03/poem-of-week-201413-part-1.html?m=1
>
>
> http://reverberatehills.blogspot.com/2014/03/poem-of-week-201413-part-2.html?m=1
>
>
> http://reverberatehills.blogspot.com/2014/03/poem-of-week-201413-part-3.html?m=1
>
>
> None of them used “reconvergence” - I think it’s really apropos - Maxine
> has a flair for poetry if and when she ever moves on from fraud-busting.
>
> The fragment adresses Hesperus, Venus, in its capacity as evening star.
>
> Repurposing it to describe the effects of rain is kosher, imho, because
> it’s the affectionate/relationship aspect of rain she’s creatively quoting
> about that relates to the traditional Venusian cluster of associations.
>
> ——-No, wait, she’s using it as intended but moving on from it -
>
> “What might only be a simple point on the workday cycle, a reconvergence of
> what the day scattered as Sappho said someplace back in some college
> course, Maxine forgets,
>
> “becomes
>
> “a million pedestrian dramas, each one charged with mystery, more intense
> than high-barometer daylight can ever allow. Everything changes.”
>
> Something about lower barometric pressure changing everyone’s mood and
> appearance?
>
>
> “There’s that clean, rained-on smell.”
>
> Everybody’s probably tired of the word, but I just learned it a few years
> ago: petrichor! Is there anything more delicious?
>
>
> “The traffic noise gets liquefied.”
>
> Oh gosh, the sound of tires on a wet road! Sluices away anxiety.
>
>
> “Reflections from the street into the windows of city buses fill the bus
> interiors with unreadable 3-D images, as surface unaccountably transforms
> to volume.”
>
> This is lyrical enough that I’ve got to ask some more urbanite person to
> explain, or go stand at a bus stop in the rain till I get it. Or both.
> --
> Pynchon-L: https://waste.org/mailman/listinfo/pynchon-l
>