Thank you! A fascinating installment. I must read this book, assuming you have not dreamed it up entirely.
One part of your response — "A sender puts a message in a bottle that he does not believe to be true—or even possible—and it reaches someone who knows it to be both possible and real, which suddenly makes it real for the sender" — puts me in mind of Eco's "Foucault's Pendulum." I find that book a bit more difficult to enjoy now than I did when it came out, during my sophomore year in college, but I still love the conceit of cynical intellectuals who invent a playful conspiracy theory connecting every secret/occult society throughout history, only for real-life occultists to believe it's true. Daumal proleptically pushes that joke even further, it sounds like.
PS: YOUNG UBU is the best joke of the 21st century so far.
Foucault's Pendulum, as you recall it for both of us, reminds me of the Collège de ’Pataphysique, which is an absurdist society for which the French seem to have a natural knack. As pataphysics mocks science, the Collège mocks scientific societies. (I just learned, via Google, that there is an active chapter in NYC, to which I immediately cancelled my membership.) A Foucault's Pendulum set in the future would be like a Canticle of Leibowitz where only the minutes of the Collège de ’Pataphysique survive. Someone should write that, though--for myself--I prefer the Borgesian strategy of imagining it already exists.
This was a brilliant discussion of Daumal, an author I'd never heard of but whose death is truly the best for a writer (well, minus the tuberculosis and young age... Basically just the dying mid-sentence). Incredibly, I'm reading Kiran Desai's The Inheritance of Loss and just two days ago fell down a rabbit hole reading about Mount Kailash/Kailasi in Tibet, sacred to Hindus, Buddhists, Jains, and Bons, "the ultimate spiritual center of the universe" (Wikipedia, if you can believe it). No one is allowed to climb it, but many people do the Kora, perambulating the 54 km around it. Not that this is equivalent to Mount Analague (great name that has a whole other vinyl meaning to it today), but just an interesting parallel in the "truth is stranger than the most absurd paraphysique you can come up with" vein. Will get the books, thank you!
Thank you! A fascinating installment. I must read this book, assuming you have not dreamed it up entirely.
One part of your response — "A sender puts a message in a bottle that he does not believe to be true—or even possible—and it reaches someone who knows it to be both possible and real, which suddenly makes it real for the sender" — puts me in mind of Eco's "Foucault's Pendulum." I find that book a bit more difficult to enjoy now than I did when it came out, during my sophomore year in college, but I still love the conceit of cynical intellectuals who invent a playful conspiracy theory connecting every secret/occult society throughout history, only for real-life occultists to believe it's true. Daumal proleptically pushes that joke even further, it sounds like.
PS: YOUNG UBU is the best joke of the 21st century so far.
Josh. I must confess I kick myself daily for not going for "Ubu Boy."
Ignore that esprit d'escalier feeling -- your first impulse was the better one.
Foucault's Pendulum, as you recall it for both of us, reminds me of the Collège de ’Pataphysique, which is an absurdist society for which the French seem to have a natural knack. As pataphysics mocks science, the Collège mocks scientific societies. (I just learned, via Google, that there is an active chapter in NYC, to which I immediately cancelled my membership.) A Foucault's Pendulum set in the future would be like a Canticle of Leibowitz where only the minutes of the Collège de ’Pataphysique survive. Someone should write that, though--for myself--I prefer the Borgesian strategy of imagining it already exists.
This was a brilliant discussion of Daumal, an author I'd never heard of but whose death is truly the best for a writer (well, minus the tuberculosis and young age... Basically just the dying mid-sentence). Incredibly, I'm reading Kiran Desai's The Inheritance of Loss and just two days ago fell down a rabbit hole reading about Mount Kailash/Kailasi in Tibet, sacred to Hindus, Buddhists, Jains, and Bons, "the ultimate spiritual center of the universe" (Wikipedia, if you can believe it). No one is allowed to climb it, but many people do the Kora, perambulating the 54 km around it. Not that this is equivalent to Mount Analague (great name that has a whole other vinyl meaning to it today), but just an interesting parallel in the "truth is stranger than the most absurd paraphysique you can come up with" vein. Will get the books, thank you!
*pataphysique