25 April 2007


277
There is about to be executed, for Friedrich August Kekule von Stradonitz, his dream of 1865, the great Dream that revolutionized chemistry and made the IG possible. So that the right material may find its way to the right dreamer, everyone, everything involved must be exactly in place in the pattern. It was nice of Jung to give us the idea of an ancestral pool in which everybody shares the same dream material. But how is it we are each visited as individuals, each by exactly and only what he needs? Doesn't that imply a switching path of some kind? a bureaucracy? Why shouldn't the IG go to seances? They ought to be quite at home with the bureaucracies of the other side. Kekule's dream here's being routed now past points which may arc through the silence, in bright reluctance to live inside the moving moment, an imperfect, a human light, over here interfering with the solemn binary decisions of these agents, who are now allowing the cosmic Serpent, in the violet splendor of its scales, shining that is definitely not human, to pass--without feeling, without wonder...Here, here's the rundown on Kekule's problem. Started out to become an architect, turned out instead to be one of the Atlantes of chemistry, most of the organic wing of that useful edifice bearing down on his head forever--not just under the aspect of IG, but of World, assuming that's a distinction you observe, heh, heh.

Thomas Pynchon, Gravity's Rainbow