A Soul In Ev'ry Stone

[Mike Weaver]

Paul Mackin  wrote
>I take Mike's meaning and respect it for its unselfishness and altruism.
History is full of people who see >self-sacrifice for the good cause, even
the hopeless cause, as the right and often the only choice. There is no
>other way.  We do love each other, strange as it seems, and as a result
brave people must die.

Um - altruism - don't believe in it myself and definitely wasn't talking
about it.  I'd suggest that the reason that many people put themselves into
the line of fire is to preserve their sense of self not altruism or
unselfishness.   I reckon what is often defined  as unselfishness is a
broader sense of self than an individual one.  Love is an expansion of self
to take in other individuals.   
 What I spoke of was an unbearable pain,  the inability of people in certain
situations to envisage being able to live with themselves if they do not
risk that personal extinction.  

> However, existentially speaking, this definitely sucks. The fact that
collectively the human race somehow >carries on just doesn't quite cut it.
While individual immortality is impossible, even absurd,  we still long for it.

Speak for yourself Paul.  There are a lot of us out here who don't long for
personal immortality, and understand our lives value in its finiteness:
growth, maturity, decay and dissolution as a normal process from which we
are not exempt.

The following is a pertinent quote from 'We've Had a Hundred Years of
Psychotherapy (and the World 's Getting Worse) a book TP recommended and
maybe here is a reason why. James Hillman the author of this bit has been
talking about recovery groups...
" We huddle because we still believe we die alone and ask for protection
from the group to keep this basic belief of our culture from coming too
close.  Our imagination of death is Jesus alone in the garden denied, on the
cross forsaken.  Fundamental to the doctrine of individualism is tha tyou
die alone.  We believe that each of us makes his or her own death.  Even if
comfortable,  clutching at the coverlet,  loved ones present to ease the
parting and to remember the last words,  we still believe we meet death alone.
        Ours is a religion of individual death.  Maybe individualism begins
in our idea of death,  an ego's idea of death,  which is also to say that
the separated ego and the idea of an individual self are representatives of
death and therefore destructive.  Perhaps for this reason people in recovery
so often attest to the group having saved their lives from death.  They have
been saved by communal feeling freom individuality.
        Death has become a substitute word in our philosophy
(existentialists, Heidegger, Unamuno, Spinoza, Socrates) for aloneness.  Yet
as I move more and more toward communal feeling,  death occupies me less and
less,  and the meditation on self calls with an ever-weakening voice.  For
the meditation of self on self is but another name for the meditation on
death.  I guess that's why I once rudely called meditation "obscene"."


> and for me the knowledge throughout life that it's but an idle dream is
the ultimate source of the paranoia felt >throughout the book.

I know I differ from a lot of people on the list in my view of the place of
paranoia in the Pynchonian scheme of things.  IMO TP is at the least viewing
paranoia from two distinct angles,  one as a reasonable response to the
connections which exist as a matter of course on Their level of operation,
the inadequacy of our strengths in the flows of power which for Them are the
stuff of business- as- usual, and two, as a neurotic response to the world
in general - *seeking to perfect methods of immobility*,  an inability to
'go with the flow',  the process which includes development and death. 
 Immortality = changelessness = non-existence. I don't htink TP is
advocating the second listed form of paranoia as a healthy response. 

Rave on 

Mike

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"...if you do not love words,  how will you love the communication?
  How will you, forgive me my tropes, communicate the love?" 
R. A. Lafferty
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