(Fwd) Re: Trust-Love, Paranoia-Chaos, Leni

[David Casseres]

Byrnes Weir sez
>         An unusual paranoid: Salvador Dali.
>         He either stole or said: Paranoids? They are always right.

The first time I read Gravity's Rainbow, I was hanging out with a buddy 
who was a doctor, working in emergency rooms.  We talked about paranoia 
and he told me that on the one hand there's a popular notion of paranoia, 
which gets picked up and amplified in literature, and then there's 
clinical paranoia that you see in the emergency room, in the 
psychiatrist's office, and in the mental hospitals.

He said the two are completely different things; that the essential thing 
in clinical paranoia isn't the delusions of persecution or the perception 
of conspiracies, but a particular sort of solipsism -- the perception of 
the entire universe as revolving about the paranoid, motivated solely in 
terms of the paranoid.  Who therefore needs to control the entire thing; 
this is what leads to delusions of persecution, of course, when he's 
unable to feel in control, which is often.  The need for control fits in 
with paranoids' being well in control of all the quotidian details, the 
credit cards, the memorized numbers, usw., while being in agony because 
nothing else is under control.  My friend emphasized that this is a 
horrible condition, a life of pain and terror.

But it fits with being "always right," and I think there is a connection 
between this paranoia-as-an-illness and the "paranoid personality" that 
we often see in Pynchon.  I think it's interesting that Slothrop, who has 
perhaps the best reasons for feeling conspired against -- like, he *is* 
-- isn't particularly "paranoid"; he's more innocent than that.

But Slothrop's story is a "paranoid story," if you will; and many a 
reader goes through most of the book feeling that everything is a 
conspiracy of some sort, centered on Slothrop, and Pynchon constantly 
plays with things like the "Proverbs for Paranoids."  But look what 
happens: Slothrop actually fades out of sight as if to prove to us that 
everything *isn't* all about him, which by that time we already realize 
pretty clearly.  We've been shown that the actual conspiracy of Them is 
so vast and so universal that it hardly makes sense to think of it as 
conspiracy -- it's just the way things are, the way They work.  And who 
is it that has the big flashy almost-funny paranoid break?  It's poor 
Roger Mexico, so injured in love that yes, maybe everything *is* about 
him in his own universe, but who hasn't really been *personally* 
conspired against in any big way.

Pynchon offers a very direct explanation of what he means by and about 
paranoia when he tells us that it's just the onset, the leading edge, of 
the perception that Everything is Connected.  In other words, it's not 
the whole story at all, and a paranoid is someone who is stuck there at 
the leading edge, unable to explore the connections any further and find 
out, perhaps, that somewhere there's a Soul in Ev'ry Stone.


Cheers,
David