A Rat Became the Unit of Currency part 2 circling

     

A Rat Became the Unit of Currency part 1

He realized Elise was gone. He'd forgotten to ask where she was headed. (C 20)
Elise is an apparition, like Gradiva. Coupled with apparition is disappearance. She leaves silently when he isn't paying attention. She is hiding from him. In the early morning he looked in every room. He didn't see her. Was he searching for her?

Eric: There's a poem I read in which a rat becomes the unit of currency.

Chin: Yes. That would be interesting.

Eric: Yes. That would impact the world economy.

Chin: The name alone. Better than the dong or the kwacha.

Eric: The name says everything.

Chin: Yes. The rat.

Eric: Yes. The rat closed lower today against the euro.

Chin: Yes. There is growing concern that the Russian rat will be devalued.

Eric: White rats. Think about that.

Chin: Yes. Pregnant rats.

Eric:Yes. Major sell-off of pregnant Russian rats.

Chin: Britain converts to the rat.

Eric:Yes. Joins trend to universal currency.

Chin: Yes. U.S. establishes rat standard.

Eric: Yes. Every U.S. dollar redeemable for rat.

Chin: Dead rats.

Eric: Yes. Stockpiling of dead rats called global health menace. (C 23-24)

Gotham Book Mart In Memoriam - Eric Packer's Day in Cosmopolis

The Gotham Book Mart is the bookstore Eric goes into to look at poetry books and sees an apparition of a woman that he follows. He finally catches up with her and it is Elise sitting on the stairs reading a book of poetry. Just as Gradiva sits on the stairs in the antiquities shop that used to be the Pompeiian poet's residence. In both cases Gradiva/Elise are taken to lunch by Hansen and Packer -  rather lovely I think.

DeLillo has lovingly included the famous and excellent historical Gotham Book Mart in his story. It was forced to close in 2007. The real estate the store rented was obscenely expensive, and a bookstore that was cherished and obviously loved by DeLillo bit the dust to greed. It's huge inventory of priceless rare autographed books and photographs went up for auction and were donated to The University of Pennsylvania's Library. A happier ending than might have been.

NYTimes or paste in browser http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/01/02/gotham-book-mart-holdings-are-given-to-penn/ article

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/jacketcopy/2009/01/keeping-the-got.html lovely article reminiscing about GBM

The Gotham Book Mart was famous for its literary eminences. A December 1948 party for Osbert and Edith Sitwell (seated, center) drew a roomful of bright lights to the Gotham Book Mart: clockwise from W. H. Auden, on the ladder at top right, were Elizabeth Bishop, Marianne Moore, Delmore Schwartz, Randall Jarrell, Charles Henri Ford (cross-legged, on the floor), William Rose Benét, Stephen Spender, Marya Zaturenska, Horace Gregory, Tennessee Williams, Richard Eberhart, Gore Vidal and José Garcia Villa. (Photo: Gotham Book Mart)

Andreas Brown, the last owner of the Gotham Book Mart, readied vintage photos of Arthur Miller and James Joyce in 2004 in preparation for a move to a new location. (Photo: Frances Roberts for The New York Times)

Updated, 4:50 p.m. | About 200,000 items from the Gotham Book Mart, which closed in 2007 after 87 years as a New York literary haven of international stature, have been donated to the University of Pennsylvania.

January 2, 2009, 12:51 pm

Gotham Book Mart Holdings Are Given to Penn

By SEWELL CHAN

The Cut For the End of Representation and the Beginning of the Grid and Measurement

Foucault's analysis of Las Meninas (1656) spells the end of representation and the introduction of measurement and the grid. Don Quixote  (1605 vol 1 & 1615 vol 2)initiates the modern novel as language refering to itself, literature is the referent which tears language loose. The architecture of the city of Philadelphia assumes the grid in 1682 and New York, Barcelona, London and Buenos Aires fall in line. These dates are roughly the Foucauldian "cut" for the end of representation in language, art and architecture.

Dating from 1682, the City Plan of Philadelphia has provided a model which has helped mold the development of cities throughout the US. Key features, many of which were firsts in the US, include a gridiron street pattern and open public squares.  

Charles Darwin called Buenos Aires, “the most regular city in the world.” In the New World there was greater freedom to construct cities on regular plans. 4 grid cities

These grids are lovely I think, like Agnes Martin paintings.

Manhatten Grid Map of Packer's Journey to Samarkand

Cervantes Don Quixote 1605&1615 by Dore

Las Meninas 1656 Valezquez

 Las Meninas (Spanish for The Maids of Honour)^[1] is a 1656 painting by Diego Velázquez, the leading artist of the Spanish Golden Age, in the Museo del Prado in Madrid. The work's complex and enigmatic composition raises questions about reality and illusion, and creates an uncertain relationship between the viewer and the figures depicted. 

Agnes Martin 1960's 1970's

Foucault then proceeds to lay down the grid of power/knowledge. The two are not separate but fused. Each cannot exist without the other. Still today this is not understood as most people think power comes from above to repress and control them. Foucault locates power below, within the interstices of the grid, tightening, crushing and controlling the individual within the family, the educational system, the society in which s/he lives through the Inscription of the Body and with it the mind forcing the person to conform to what is perceived as normal behavior. The way you speak, walk, work, reproduce, everything in your life, must conform within the parameters of normality. Walk outside with green hair and you are going to be noticed, and not favorably, unless you move in slacker or punk sub-culture.

And this is where Eric Packer is this spring day in April 2000 at Eastertime, the same time of year Hansen is following his Gradiva in the simulacrum of Pompeii. The same time of year Jesus is following Isaiah. Packer is crushed within the grid, a hostage in his own limo, surrounded by bodyguards to protect him, make him secure, but who really cannot even as the pie thrower gets him with a whipped creme pie. He is as if in custody.

He is shorting the yen. The yen is going up and up and up above its resistance points and beyond. 

Yen plotted against the dollar

It charts, says Packer. But it only charts within a grid. It only charts within linear time. It only charts within the dialectic of opposites, up and down, true and false, etc. And Packer is not in the dialectic anymore, not in linear time anymore, but interfaced with the screen of globally orbiting numbers, currencies that move asymmetrically. That is they don't chart, not even according to Packer's meditative esoteric rhythms. Charting requires time:past present future and Packer is in real time, cutting it smaller and smaller into infinitesimal particles into zepto seconds, that accelerate asymmetrically with positive and negative charges that collide and go pouf. Packer is being crushed within the interstices of the grid, just as Nina was in Black Swan. 


But Elise-Gradiva is seductively luring him on. She is ahead of him all day and he is following her as she is hiding from him. He is not searching for her, but he keeps finding her. Inside the limo is the Order of Production and outside the limo is the Order of Seduction, and Elise Shifrin keeps shifting as Packer's mind shifts on this day. Death is ahead of him and hiding from him, but Packer unerringly moves towards Samarkand to meet his destiny with death.

Black Swan

 It is the terrorist model to bring about an excess of reality, and have the system collapse beneath that excess. - Baudrillard


And the imploder, the intellectual terrorist, will disappear as his world becomes a different world because of his actions. He will make the leap into death to offer the gift of his life. The world will die when Packer dies.


He's not a self-destructive loser, folks. He is an intellectual terrorist. 


And so was/is Jesus.

Reading Eric and Elise Through the Symbolic Order of Seduction/Challenge/Surprise and Destiny

Rob Pattinson as Eric Packer and  Sarah Gadon as Elise Shifrin in Cosmopolis

Destiny is stalking Eric and Elise. Destiny does not leave it to chance but repeats to make sure. Destiny is of the Symbolic Order of Seduction always paired with challenge, the duel and surprise. In each encounter with Destiny the self divides into a before and after. As time passes the two selves bifurcate and diverge away from each other, farther and farther away. They occupy parallel universes. As Eric and Elise meet and separate all day, each changes as a modified  and different self emerges from the previous encounter with each other. Elise is an apparition as she surprisingly appears and disappears. Apparition is always coupled with disappearance.

Following through (free download) Gradiva-Elise here and here. (earlier posts here)

Continuing through Baudrillard:

He took off his sunglasses , for effect. She gazed into his face. She looked steadily with fixed attention.
Your eyes are blue, she said.

Switching to Nietzsche On the Genealogy of Morals: He lifted her hand and held it to his face, smelling and licking. The Sikh at the wheel was missing a finger. Eric regarded the stub, impressive, a serious thing, a body ruin that carried history and pain.

Eat breakfast yet?

No, she said.

.... You never told me you were blue-eyed.

That face. Even in ten years time, I shall not know the colour of its eyes. But I see it in the street, in my dreams and just beneath the surface of a great number of other faces which suddenly start to resemble it. Baudrillard (Cool Memories, 1980-85b p. 54) :

Reading Elise Through Gradiva In Hades: Orpheus and Eurydice

Spencer Tunick Installation in Montreal (Montreal 1)

I have changed the photo into black and white as that is the way Eric Packer sees it in his mind when he closes his eyes.  Like an old timey noir film.

Reading through Gradiva and the last meeting between Zoe-Gradiva and Norbert Hanold which takes place at the Villa of Diomede:


A real Hades:
....a very extensive building and concealed within itself a part of the history of the destruction of Pompeii not invented by imagination. A confusion of extensive ruins formed the upper part; below lay an unusually large sunken garden surrounded by a well preserved portico of pillars with scanty remnants of a fountain and a small temple i the middle; and farther along two stairways led down to a circular cellar-vault, lighted only dimly by gloomy twilight. The ashes of Vesuvius had penetrated into this also and the skeletons of eighteen women and children had been found here;...and the deceptive refuge had become the tomb of all.


.....the place of refuge best suited to his newest mental needs. These longed most insistently for gravelike loneliness, breathless silence, .....so he had been wandering around through the portico since his entrance; 

Still feeling mad and disoriented concerning Zoe-Gradiva he notices it is growing darker and darker around him. And sees high up on a stone ruin, Gradiva. About to run...he involuntarily gave up the attempt to get away, stood there, helpless, and looked at the two feet, which now, as if somewhat impatient, were swinging back and forth; 


Zoe-Gradiva then tells him it is she, his neighbor and former childhood playmate. she tells him she found him intolerable when he developed his passion for archeology and his indifference to her.

"...But that your head harbored an imagination so magnificent as here in Pompeii to consider me something excavated and restored to life__I had not surmised that of you...and, in spite of its madness, it was not entirely displeasing to me. For, as I said, I had not expected it of you."


He then goes into a long description of what she is wearing, the folds, the material, the cashmere scarf, her extraordinary appearance. And then says,

"Yes, now I recognize_no, you have not changed at all_it is you, Zoe_my good, happy, clever comrade_it is most strange_" 


"That a person must die to become alive again; but for archeologists that is of course necessary."


Then he discusses the etymology of her name which has the same meaning as Gradiva signifying the one splendid in walking.


And then she tells him how they are going to convince her father of their betrothal. so all ends in marriage, family and a normal life.
________________________________________________________________________
The last scene with Eric Packer and Elise begins in the dark among naked bodies piled up for a film shoot.

He felt the presence of the bodies, all of them, the body breath, the heat and running blood, people unlike each other who were now alike, amassed, heaped in a way, alive and dead together. .....but the experience was a strong one, so total and open he could barely think outside it...


"Hello," someone said.


It was the person nearest him, a woman lying facedown, an arm extended, palm turned up.


"Are we supposed to be dead?"

"I don't know," he said.


Nobody told us. I'm frustrated by that."


"Be dead then.".....


"I assumed an awkward pose intentionally. Whatever has happened to us, I thought, probably happened without warning and I wanted to reflect that by individualizing my character. One entire arm is twisted painfully. But I wouldn't feel right if I changed position. Someone said that the financing had collapsed. Happened in seconds apparently. Money all gone.  This is the last scene they're shootig before they suspend indefinitely. So there's no excuse for self-indulgence, is there?"

Didn't Elise have sorrel hair?.....If this was Elise, wouldn't she react to the sound of her husband's voice? But then why would she? It was not an interesting thing to do.


"But I suspect we're not actually dead. Unless we're a cult," she said, "involved in a mass suicide, which I truly hope is not the case."


They call for stillness and silence ......he saw the clustered bodies as the camera did, coldly. Were they pretending to be naked or were they naked? It was no longer clear to him. They were many shades of skin color but he saw them in black-and-white and he didn't know why. Maybe a scene such as this needed somber monochrome.

It tore his mind apart trying to see them here and real, independent of the image on a screen in Oslo or Caracas. ...But why ask these questions? Why see these things?  They isolated him. They set him apart and this is not what he wanted. He wanted to be here among them, all-body, the tattoed, the hairy-assed, those who stank. ...He wanted to look around but did not open his eyes until a long moment passed and a man's soft voice called, "Cut."


He took one step and extended an arm behind him. He felt her hand in his. She followed him into the boarded off section of sidewalk, where he turned in the dark and kissed her, saying her name. She climbed his body and wrapped her legs around him and they made love there...

And here we have the resonance with Orpheus and with Eurydice being led out from Hades. And like Orpheus, Eric Packer turns to her in the dark kissing her.


....The instant he knew he loved her, she slipped down his body and out of his arms. ....She was the lone stroke of motion.....and she was cool and silvery slim and walking head high with technical precision...she would find her clothes, dress quickly and disappear. Into the dark, like Eurydice. (C 178)

John and Yoko

Disappearing all Elise's money into the void: Let it all come down. Let them see each other pure and lorn....Let them see each other clean, in killing light.(C 124)




If the film and the daydream are in more direct competition than the film and the dream, if they ceaselessly encroach upon each other, it is because they occur at a point of adaptation to reality – or at a point of regression, to look at it from the other direction – which is nearly the same; it is because they occur at the same moment: the dream belongs to childhood and the night; the film and the daydream are more adult and belong to the day, but not midday – to the evening, rather.[3]

Continuing a deeper discussion of cinema and dream go to: http://cengizerdem.wordpress.com/2011/05/05/cinematic-apparatus-brain-and-the-psyche-as-fantasy-machines/

Reading Elise Through "Gradiva"

Gradiva from Pompeii

Jensen's Gradiva 1903 Google Books PDF

The Grid of Eric Packer's Journey April 2000

Had not Freud interpreted Gradiva it probably would have sunk into oblivion. It is didactic in style and yet a lovely fantasy. The bas-relief comes from the ruins of Pompeii on that day in 79 AD when the volcano Vesuvius erupted and buried the city and all its people.

Freud's Interpretation of Jensen's Gradiva-Summary of Gradiva at Wiki

Norbert Hanold is following Gradiva in Pompeii. He is convinced she is an apparition of his imagination  . She keeps disappearing before his eyes and he traces her to the House of Meleager, a Greek poet who lived 2000 years ago, where now antiquities are being sold. He keeps getting glimpses of her in the labyrinth of rooms and finds her sitting on the stairs with a papyrus in her lap. It is lunchtime. He is convinced she is a figment of his imagination, a hallucination. She "plays" with him telling him not to speak Latin that he must speak German. She promises to meet him the next day. He is obsessively consumed.

Eric follows Elise through the maze of rooms in The Gotham Book Mart where he goes to peruse poetry books. He catches glimpses of an unknown woman that he follows through the labyrinth of rooms. He finds Elise sitting on the stairs with a book in her lap. Eric talks to her and then takes her to lunch.

Eric Packer is paying attention to what Elise is wearing. Her shoes. A cashmere sweater. Gradiva wears a cashmere shawl. Gradiva - Zoe holds her head high and slightly forward on her slender neck. Elise is described in the same way. They both  walk lightly away, as they disappear.

Elise is Eric Packer's wife of 22 days. The moon is in the 22nd day of its cycle. Eric and Elise have had sex. Elise's seduction of Eric Packer begins after the consummation. Eric is seducing Elise with his constant talk of sex, with wanting her immediately, with suggesting they do it in the bathroom, in the alley indicating his lust for her, not a perfunctory conjugal embrace.

Gradiva (Zoe) is seducing Norbert with her elusiveness and he has been seducing her with his amazing fantasy that she is Gradiva, whom he has sought after a dream of her, when she is really the neighbor Zoe whom he never notices, but  has known since childhood when they were inseparable playmates. With the death of his parents the wealthy Norbert Hanold has been so completely consumed with his research (Eric with his nightly studies and fabulous financial empire) in classical archeology that Zoe stopped existing for him. He has displaced his affection for her with his obsession for Gradiva, which greatly intensified with his dream of her. They both have the same way of walking very lightly, the foot pointed toe down perpendicular to the ground.

Norbert Hanold and Eric Packer are shadowing Zoe and Elise. Norbert is convinced Gradiva-Zoe is not real and Eric is never sure that it is Elise until he catches up with her. They both have only glimpses to follow. And there are many similarities as DeLillo creates a dream scene in a dying metropolis doomed to ruin resonating with the excavated relic of the catastrophically destroyed Pompeii.

The resonances continue. To be continued.

Map of Eric's Route for the Day Starting at 1st Ave Going West on 47th St

 Eric Packer on his Appointment in Samarra.

Follow Eric on his route starting at 47th St. and 1st Ave. right by the Japan Society (yen you know). You will see the green park where he starts going West on 47th St. His residential tower is imaginary at 89 stories, (WTC had 107 stories) and is De Lillo's judgement on the Twin Towers which Eric does not pass that day in April 2000. De Lillo finished the manuscript before 9-11 and left it unchanged. The description of Eric's residential tower:

It was nine hundred feet high, the tallest residential tower in the world, a commonplace oblong whose only statement was its size. It had the kind of banality that reveals itself over time as being truly brutal. He liked it for this reason. This is a referent to Hannah Arendt's definition of EVIL: "Evil is banal."

Dag Hammarskjold Plaza at 47th between 1st and 2nd Ave

Michael Chin is in the car, sitting in the jump seat that faces backward and there is gridlock at 3rd Avenue.

Jane jumps into the limo at 47th and Madison. She has been running in the nearby Bryant Park when she gets the call.

Bryant Park

The violent demonstration occurs just before 7th Avenue and North  of where Broadway intersects at 7th, right before the triangle. Vija is in the limo now. The description in the book and the map are a little off I think, as the book puts it at the intersection a few blocks south and closer to Times Square.

Then follow Eric West across town into Hell's Kitchen just before the shipyard. I often like to follow characters on maps. Sometimes some insight appears that you hadn't thought of. In this case we see that Eric is following Elise all day, who is always ahead of his route when he sees her all day long. I knew this but didn't really know this until I saw the map. But it fits with the way I am reading Elise  - through Gradiva (Hansen and Freud) and hoping the film will make this clear.

Scene in Hell'a Kitchen from Past

Old Barbershop in Hell's Kitchen

Gradiva