TRP and enemies as mirrors / one more edit

[J Tracy]

Thanks for the clarification on your earlier comments , Michael. I was probably being over sensitive, written words can seem more loaded than what is intended. I have not read Lacan, but have heard the basic idea of human development.. My dad liked mystical poetry and he had 1 or  2 volumes of Tagore poems which I quite liked and still like when I come across them. 
 As to ATD, the whole doubling of Iceland spar, bilocation,  magicians’s mirrors, light spectrum with rays, time travel photography,  energy competition seem to compose a larger and multivalent background of  of dividing possibilities  about which the Renfrew Werfner riff seem to me to express rather emphatically a  particular political social  aspect of mirroring that speaks to some basics of the human condition. 

Thanks for filling in some of the RW references. I probably should he done more of that. It helps to think accurately about what P is up to.

> On Aug 12, 2025, at 7:31 AM, Michael Lee Bailey via Pynchon-l <pynchon-l at waste.org> wrote:
> 
>>> Congratulations on an admirable personal life!
>> 
>> My overview of my last 3 weeks was a response to the implication that my views of the world situation and US imperialism is a result of some kind of personal depression or bitterness requiring human solace.
> 
> Still, I was impressed - thought you were bummed about world events - who isn’t? - I don’t know you well enough to impute depression to you nor to think that a hug from me would cure that -
> Sorry if I sounded sarcastic
> 
>>> Lacan had a lot to say about the mirror stage;
>>> beyond noting that it’s rather primitive, his argument gets cloudy for me.
> 
> But I do like the idea that young people - and maybe, people in early stages of relationship or realization, or whole societies in forming nascent relations with a larger world - go through a mirroring phase. That seems reasonable…then they learn something and move on to more sophisticated action
Yes the US as breakaway republic had long  fascination with Imperialist Anglo culture reinforced by literary and political commonalities. 
> 
> Lew Basnight rides the R/W idea off into the sunset:
> 
> “And in that luminous and tarnished instant, he also understood, far too late in the
> ball game, that Renfrew and Werfner were one and the same person, had been all along”
> 
> - so he spends time in the T.W.I.T. library reading about bilocation, misses dinner -
> 
> The Cohen comes in with a tray for him, & they light the “Plafond Lumineux, a modern mixed arrangement of gas-mantles and electric incandescent bulbs arching
> across the entire library ceiling and covered by a pale translucent canopy of some
> proprietary celluloid which smoothed these sources, when at last they had all been lit”
> 
> Perhaps prompted by all that light, the Cohen segues into a lecture about how we’re all devolved from light and need to get back to it - a commonality that supersedes both individual and dual identities…
> - not neglecting to mention Iceland Spar (but with Iceland Spar, the 2 images are different, aren’t they? At least with that gold-refining technique back in Colorado?)
> 
> (Cohen) The first step in
> our Discipline here is learning how to re-acquire that rarefaction, that condition
> of light, to become once more able to pass where we will, through lantern-horn, through
> window-glass, eventually, though we risk being divided in two, through Iceland spar,
> which is an expression in crystal form of Earth’s velocity as it rushes through the Æther, altering dimensions, and creating double refraction.
> 
> Auditing a class about Rabindranath Tagore recently, the Cohen’s reference to
> “There’s to be a poetry reading in here tonight, Indian bloke, mystical stuff, quite a smash with the sisters”
> 
> seemed like it might be a reference to the “Tagore Evening” where in 1912 he met Pound and Eliot & many others at the London home of artist William Rothenstein. They talked him up quite vigorously; he won a Nobel Prize (only India person so far) for a book of poetry “Gitanjali” which struck me as sort of Omar Khayyam meets Whitman…
> --
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