Immortality, personally and otherwise

[Paul Mackin]

On Thu, 1 Feb 1996, Greg Montalbano wrote concerning the immortality
theme in GR:

> ....and a corollary from VL:
> 
> "...remember that windowpane, down in Laguna that time?  God, I knew then,
> I knew..."
>      They had a look.  "Uh-huh, me too.  That you were never going to die.
> Ha!  No wonder the State panicked.  How are they supposed to control a
> population that knows it'll never die?  When that was always their last
> big chip, when they had the power of life and death.  But acid gave us
> the x-ray vision to see through that one, so of course they had to take
> it away from us."

And from Andrew (echoing back to an hg post)

> Having just read Greg's quote about acid taking away the fear of death
> Geli Tripping *would* be the one who `gets things kinda right'. I'm
> also remembering that witch logo painted on one of the A4s where the
> witch rides her rocket broomstick past a crescent moon - Die Frau im
> Mond, indeed, more like over the moon. But she, like Slothrop, must be
> a candidate for the Titans. Isn't her screaming, no hands
> BrockenGespenst orgasm up in the mountains the equivalent of
> Slothrop's Rilkean assumption of immortality - or rather timelessness
> and placelessness - when he retrieves his harp and subsequently
> arrives at his Crossroads?

And from Peter:  (referring to Fr. Rapier's words from the Underworld)

> The passage brings to mind these lines from Ai's poem about Emilio Zapata:
> Take the land, boys, take it
> It's yours
> If you suffer in the grave, you can also kill from it.

IMO all nice corollaries to the fear of death theme.
 
It may turn out some of those "voices from beyond" were _physical_ after 
all--chemical to be precise.

Seems to me the _key_ may be that Superman x-ray vision. 
Pynchon _has_ to be familiar with the tradition, dating from antiquity,
of suppressing supermanship. Only in comicstrips do the cops
cooperate with supermen.

Puts in mind Second Century ecclesiastic Montanus, who expressed the
idea of the Christian "superman". There had been a lot of loose talk in
the Gospel of John and the like about such a possibility. "Beloved . . .
it does not yet appear what we shall be, but we know that when it appears
we shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is."

Naturally, Montanism was declared a heresy, but only very slowly faded away.
Along came the Reformation and the "They" types in control decided this
old crap had definitely to stop. No room in the plan for the "perfect man". 
The gift of immortality (drug induced or otherwise) (or at the least 
speaking in tongues) was a danger to public order.

But you can't stop History. Nineteenth Century ideas of evolution and
the expectation of the future perfection of man in the form of reaching 
ever higher levels of knowledge and power once again prompted, in Churchy
circles, the hope of the god-like- or super-man. "They" were again of 
course up in arms.

And there's a nice 20th Century tie-in with GR's Hades episode. (You knew
there would be.) The Jesuit Teilhard de Chardin makes a cameo appearance 
there. Teilhard expounded a paleoanthropological notion that Jesus Christ
is not only the figure in which the incarnation becomes historical but also
the final goal in the genesis of man. Oboboy, someday, we'll all be 
supermen. Obviously old Teilhard had to be quietly shushed up.

It's all of a piece, foax.

			P.