The Naked and the Dead - Norman Mailer [268]
I was considering a little earlier a rather fascinating curve whose connotations are quite various. The asymmetrical parabola, the one which looks like this --
or this --
or this
or this
Re: Spengler's plant form for all cultures (youth, growth, maturity, old age, or bud, bloom, wilt, decay). But the above curve is the form line of all cultures. An epoch always seems to reach its zenith at a point past the middle of its orbit in time. The fall is always more rapid than the rise. And isn't that the curve of tragedy; I should think it a sound aesthetic principle that the growth of a character should take longer to accomplish than his disaster.
But from another approach that form is the flank curve of a man or woman's breast.
Cummings halted, feeling an unaccustomed nervous play of needles along his back. The comparison disturbed him, and the first few sentences he wrote after this had little meaning to him.
. . . of a man or woman's breast, the fundamental curve of love, I suppose. It is the curve of all human powers (disregarding the plateau of learning, the checks upon decline) and it seems to be the curve of sexual excitement and discharge, which is after all the physical core of life.
What is this curve? It is the fundamental path of any projectile, of a ball, a stone, an arrow (Nietzsche's arrow of longing) or of an artillery shell. It is the curve of the death missile as well as an abstraction of the life-love impulse; it demonstrates the form of existence, and life and death are merely different points of observation on the same trajectory. The life viewpoint is what we see and feel astride the shell; it is the present, seeing, feeling, sensing. The death viewpoint sees the shell as a whole, knows its inexorable end, the point toward which it has been destined by inevitable physical laws from the moment of its primary impulse when it was catapulted into the air.
To carry this a step further, there are two forces constraining the projectile to its path. If not for them, the missile would forever rise on the same straight line. These forces are gravity and wind resistance and their effect is proportional to the square of the time; they become greater and greater, feeding upon themselves in a sense. The projectile wants to go this way and gravity goes down and wind resistance goes . These parasite forces grow greater and greater as time elapses, hastening the decline, shortening the range. If only gravity were working, the path would be symmetrical
it is the wind resistance that produces the tragic curve
In the larger meanings of the curve, gravity would occupy the place of mortality (what goes up must come down) and wind resistance would be the resistance of the medium. . . the mass inertia or the inertia of the masses through which the vision, the upward leap of a culture is blunted, slowed, brought to its early doom.
The General halted, looked blankly at his journal. One of the last phrases kept repeating in his mind with a cloying regularity. "The mass inertia or the inertia of the masses, the mass inertia or the. . ." He was disgusted abruptly.
I'm playing with words. All that he had written seemed meaningless, a conceit. He was filled with a powerful spasm of distaste for what he had written, and slowly with a heavy pressure of his pencil he drew a line through each of his sentences. In the middle of the page his pencil broke, and he flung it down and strode outside the tent, breathing a little quickly.
It had all been too pat, too simple. There was order but he could not reduce it to the form of a single curve. Things eluded him.
He stared about the silent bivouac, looked up at the stars of the Pacific sky, heard the rustle of the coconut trees. Alone, he felt his senses expanding again, lost the intimate knowledge of the size of his body. A deep boundless ambition leaped in him again, and if his habits had not been so deep he might have lifted his arms to the sky. Not since he had been a young man had he hungered so for knowledge. It was all there if only he could grasp it. To mold. . . mold the curve.