MDMD(4): Equation, p. 134

[andrew at cee.hw.ac.uk]

Doug Millison quotes Keynes:

> "[Newton] looked on the whole universe and all that is in it...as [having]
> certain mystic clues which God had laid about the world to allow a sort of
> philosopher's treasure hunt to the esoteric brotherhood... these clues were
> to be found partly in the evidence of the heavens, [and] ... partly in
> certain papers and traditions handed down ... in an unbroken chain back to
> the original cryptic revelation in Babylonia. He regarded the universe as a
> cryptogram set by the Almighty.'

> . . . Maskelyne is called "insane" in Chapter 13, and by
> the end of the book, Mason is "insane" too. I suspect there's a lot I'm not
> seeing yet in these two characters and what Pynchon is doing with them.

Newton too was somewhat mad in his later years, thanks to liberal
doses of mercury taken as a cure against teh venereal disease he
imagined he had caught from consorting with prostitutes in his
youth. From the little I have read about his life this cosmological
obsession was at the core of his insanity.

But maybe in his time it was not regarded as such a bizarre thing to
believe in. And even if it was it is hardly surprising that where
rationalism has gained such ground and undermined the basis of many
people's certainties even the most accomplished of rationalists
(perhaps especially the most accomplished of them) would turn to
`pseudo-science' to restore the comforts of that lost certainty. Look
at the C19th response to `Darwinism', Blavatsky, Jung et al. Gravity's
Rainbow attempts to refine the grounds for and possible resolutions of
this all too human conflict from both the excessive claims of the
die-hard rationalists and the credulous superstitions of the lunatics.
And also attempts to relate this same conflict to its contemporary
setting i.e. this is an old and familiar theme for Pynchon.


Andrew Dinn
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We drank the blood of our enemies.
The blood of our friends, we cherished.