hello walls

[hankhank at ccwf.cc.utexas.edu]

On Fri, 13 Dec 1996, Diana York Blaine wrote:

> In all seriousness, Merry Christmas and farewell Steely baby.  

No, Diana; Messiah may have left us but He *will* come back. He, who is
Christmas Himself. Maybe He will not keep us waiting as long as He did the
last time, and there will be a Spring of Joy. Meanwhile, we still have
his Word to treasure in our hearts: let it nourish us spiritually, and our
winter nights can never be all lonely any more. Not even if we find
ourselves at the coldest corner of the Panhandle, way past Amarillo: those
killer bees are really swarms of the Holy Spirit, and Bee-thlehem to be
found everywhere in our ragged State.

Diana, you doubting Thomasa, you in the habit of erring like we all
wormlings of the earth are, you mistook St. Head for a mortal when you 
sighed: if He only were as right as He is adamant. But like  He can never
be wrong; His stern but reviving words only *sound* ambiguous to our
finiteness. Unlike foregone believers in Realsocialismus, He does
not have mundane measures: only His Emersonian Self-Reliance. 

And our Academy, it is the Limbo, where we cannot see Real People
burning in Hell, but nor the Way that leads to Heaven. Paul
E. Bove, this Pharisean Cultural Theorist writes in his essay on Henry
Adams in the latest "Critical" "Inquiry": "Like _The Education_,
_GR_ proliferates attempts to put lines of order through chaos: Roger
Mexico's statistics; Poinstman's Pavlovian certainties; Blicero's
Hansel and Gretel game; the Schwarzkommando and the myth of the rocket-
god, and so on. It is not important that Pynchon's proliferation appears
to some as relativism and to others as postmodernism, as historical
pastiche. _GR_ is the novel of America as a permanent state of interregnum
-- this is what deserves our attention. Endless stories can be told about
it, stories of religion, empire, race, poplular culture, music, movies,
and so on. Taken together America appears, as it does to Adams, as a name
of force or power that seems to demand the questions: Is it headed
somewhere? Does it have a purpose? Does it make any sense? It summons
the desperation to make sense; its opaqueness, its entropy, its
informational noise appear directly in the necessity for the endless
stories and explanations -- but without ever coming out into a new,
full-blown language, waiting a single new world. [...] It is the same
necessity Adams and Gramsci speak of: that demanded by the intolerability
of life in the Zone." ("Giving Thought to America", _CI_, Autumn 1996,
105-106)
 
But maybe the time is ripe soon for Him to return. To break the Walls
of Academy and show us the heading and purpose of _GR_, and America, and
the World. To stop this intolerable interregnum. 

But it will happen only when we are ripe.

Heikki