Lost in the Cosmos

Theater.
    (h) A radio repairman from Santa Fe, looking for the priest in the crowd. He has fixed the radio. The pueblo, the Corn Dance, the spectacle are old stories to him. All he wants is to find the priest, deliver the Philco, get paid, and get home in time for a cold beer or two before supper.
    (i) A technician from the metallurgy lab at Los Alamos, a pale, plump, mustachioed, youngish man, native of Camden, New Jersey, employed by the Manhattan Project but also by an attaché in the Soviet Embassy in Washington. Only son of not impoverished but nonetheless dreary middle-class parents living in the dreariest double-house on the dreariest street in Camden. For him, revelation broke like sunlight through the Jersey winter when he discovered Marx and read him sitting there in a public library like Marx himself, constipated and alone and exhilarated among strangers as the light broke around him. All at once, he saw how it all worked, saw the very mechanism of his sadness and therefore the means of rising above it. Above it he was and above all this, the people whom now he understood, the Indians, the tourists, even the scientist whom he knew by reputation. They, not he, were puppets worked by strings they could not see. But he knew, could see the strings and, best of all, work them himself—for the good of the Soviet Union and therefore for world peace.
    (j) A tourist from Moline, Illinois, who is too busy taking pictures with his excellent Leica even to take a look for himself, whose concern is only with lighting, focus, composition; who is already casting ahead in his mind to the slide show he’ll give at Rotary, and then perhaps he’ll take time to take a look at what he recorded—or will he watch the faces of the viewers to gauge his worth from their approval, the way a joke-teller watches the face of the joke-hearer? Yet by no means is he a discontented or unworthy man, being a good husband and father, operating, as he does, a successful chain of dry cleaners in northwest Illinois and even in Davenport, enjoying not only his family but his bowling team and his Masonic lodge. He is an American Legionnaire, a decorated veteran of World War I, holder of the Distinguished Service Cross, an authentic hero who risked his life to save a comrade and who has thought not much about it since.
    ( CHECK ONE )

    Thought Experiment: Draw up an existential-semiotic self-profile or diagram indicating the self’s relation to its world (transcending? immanent? intact self among other selves?), identity of self (success or failure of self to perceive itself as a self), self’s relation to other selves (world community? elite community? loss of community?), movement of self vis-à-vis world (types of orbit, difficulties of reentry), placement of self in world as evidenced by mood and utterance.
    Thus, each character can be plotted, so to speak, on a system of self-coordinates and a rough-and-ready profile of the self arrived at. Such a profile might be called an “existential semiotic graph” of the self. By means of such graphs, selves can be readily compared and contrasted in their salient features—and one’s own self more easily identified.
    For example, four characters from the Taos Ten:
(1) The nuclear physicist
Self’s Relation to World: Transcending.
Self’s Relation to Other Selves: A restricted community of a transcending elite (scientific, political, philosophical, musical); also a modified transcendent-immanent sexual Jove-Europa community such as his relationship with blond grad student. E.g., she may not be quite fit to discuss the Bhagavad-Gita with or Planck’s equations with, but eminently fit to sleep with.
Identity of Self: A high degree of correspondence between self’s habitual mode of existence as transcending self and actual here-and-now life, e.g., scientific project at secret mountain installation, small elite community set down in an immanent world—pueblo, Indians, Corn Dance, tourists, priests—of which he is the onlooker.
Motion of Self vis-à-vis World: Traveling, orbiting, wandering; for a transcending self, one place is as good as any other place to the degree that it provides the immanent raw materials (climate, plutonium, Indians, girls, indigenous culture—Pueblo or Roman Catholic) by means of which the self can both arrive at scientific principles and satisfy its own immanent needs.
Placement (Mood) of Self :Overtly apocalyptic, covertly exultant. Covert exultation accruing from