Archons? (was Re: Prosthetics Fetish...)

jporter jp4321 at idt.net
Thu Dec 9 06:29:51 CST 1999


>>On Mon, 6 Dec 1999, Joseph Porter wrote:
>> (stuff about the Archons)
>
>*Joseph*? aw shucks, i had thought jody was a girl...
>ce la vie...

Joseph is the given name of my meat doll. jody is my family nickname- I am
the youngest, which is a type of "girlhood". My older sister is a woman.

>anyhow, could someone please briefly explain what *Archons* are
>(sounds vaguely reich-ish or l-ron-hubbard-ian to these ears)?

See Kai's post. He is much more informed and probably objective than I am
regarding Gnosticism, with which I am as uncomfortable as I am with
straight Christianity. Both, to be very general, turn on the paradox of
evil- as either a passive or active agency- in a monotheistic universe. It
is the constraints of monotheism that causes all the consternation.
Gnosticism accepts evil as an active agency and hence the need for Archons.
But in a monotheistic universe that acknowledgement of evil as an active
agency forces "the self"- the hallmark of any species of the western canon-
to forsake all material forms as evil. Aquinas treats things differently,
but still insists on the self and monotheism. And, while gnosticism may
have provided an anecdote to the material world created by the "evil
demiurge," the gnostics, to my eye, were (are?) still a branch of the
scurvhamites: incapable of appreciating the perfection of existence,
without being mesmerized by it. They are fixated on the need to transcend
it. That should be one clue that they are incapable of doing just that.
It's the duality of the gnostics which must be transcended, not the
material world, but maybe that's part of their secret message too subtle
for me to pick out.

These speculations have a certain symmetry, for me, with the Oedipa Maas
dilemma. But , while I tend, after Weiner, to resist the urge to become
paranoid and incarnate with agency the universal tendency toward disorder-
no trystero here- I am agnostic about the existence of a possible new
particle, of unknown mass. It would be neither a fermion or boson, but
something entirely new- more weird than the putative tachyon or graviton.
If it does exist, it would be truly evanescent, a particle carrying not
only the force responsible for disorder, in general, but its own
dissolution, as well. It would come into existence only in the presence of
a consciousness, small or Large, as the result of said agency perceiving
order, and detectable only by a complicated process of reverse occultation.
While I am agnostic with respect to its existence, I already have the
perfect name picked out. Joining the ranks of the protons, electrons,
photons, mesons, etc., would be the shyest of particles- the pynchon.


>--rwilson
>
>"-You know, I've always liked the back of your neck." -- gaddis
>
>ps nice post on black holes a short while ago.

Thanks.

jody





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