koans! koans! koans!

[Matt Treyvaud]

On Fri, 29 Jan 1999, Terrance F. Flaherty wrote:

>> this line of reasoning might also be applied to criticisms of gravity's
>> rainbow on the grounds that bits of it are contradictory and temporarily
>> impossible. if you find contradictions, then you're falling into the trap
>> of seeing GR as a description of reality, rather than a denial/subversion
>> of its validity.
> 
> If you want to follow this "line of reasoning" you can not. Haven't you fallen
> into the same trap?

I would say that I have fallen into a higher-level trap. While avoiding
the trap of using words to describe the wordless, I walk cheerfully into
the meta-trap of using words to describe the impossibility of using words
to describe the wordless. The hope is of course that everyone who falls
into the trap with me (and the other trap I'm in right now, describing
even more) won't stay there complacently but will contemplate their way
out of it. So to speak.

> Denial/Subversion of reality is language you will not find in a Buddhist text.

If you say so.. my admittedly minor reading on the topic has led me to
believe that the Buddhist take on reality is more complex than a pomo
slashword, and so in that sense I agree.  But that sentence was about GR's
relation to the idea of 'reality' being (to my mind) somewhat analogous 
to the koan's relation to the idea of 'logic', rather than identical.

> If Pynchon's method is as you say, in some way Buddhist in nature, by which I
> mean the absolute Bhudda-nature, paradoxical, negative in form, I'll agree.
> This, IMVHO, is one of the most beautiful aspects of Pynchon's "text." For
> example, critics might consider, if,  while lampooning "California Zen" in
> Vineland, Pynchon offers a Buddhist theory of salvation through a paradoxical
> discourse?

Salvation by absorption (= transcendence), is MVHO, but I can't justify it
as any more than a reaction to my reading style.

> Why does the Zen Master shout "HO" ?
 
To get to the other side. 

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 Matt Treyvaud, Abbr. Prim.                       (R.I.P. Kerry Thornley)
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