sensitive moderation

[TERRY CAESAR]

     I had been thinking about Maxwell's Demon before Erik mentioned it, regard-
ing this matter of moderating the list. His mention made me return to the pass-
age. Recall that the Demon collects data in order to pass it on to a sensitive,
who must then receive all the energy, fee it back, and keep everything cycling.
A list moderator is asked in these terms to be both Demon & sensitive.

     Recall further that when Nefastis tells Oedipa to concentrate, he asks her
to be a sensitive, staring at a picture of Clark Maxwell. She tries. She fails.
She can't see or sense a thing--until Nefastis returns and sez, let's fuck. 
Whether or not we include this last possibility, the whole incident does not
bode well for the future of moderating the list.

     In fact, I think our reluctance to opt for moderation expressing something
of Pynchon's own deep antipathy to controlling information, managing disorder,
and interpreting chaos. Like lots of people, I'm appalled at what the list has
come to during the last few months. Some days I've deleted so much that I've
hardly read anything. And yet I don't think a moderator is a solution. "The
true sensitive," we read Oedipa thinking, "is the one that can share in the 
man's hallucinations, that's all." She's thinking of Nefastis. I'm thinking of
Pynchon. We have a hard enough time sharing our sense of Pynchon in terms of
each other. To share of sense of each other in terms of Pynchon would be futile
as well as impossible.

                        That's all,
                           Terry