GRGR(24): Pudding's death

[Terrance]

Jeremy Osner wrote:
> 
> On  p. 533, Pudding's death is described as occuring "just before dawn,
> as he had wished". I've read this sentence enough times to have
> internalized the notion that P would have wished to die "just before
> dawn", but looking at it now, that wish doesn't seem very meaningful.
> Why just before dawn? Is that the most romantic time to die? Does
> someone in Ivanhoe die just before dawn? Did P perhaps express such a
> wish earlier in the book and I've forgotten? There is a heavy dose of
> irony here, assuming for the moment that he wanted to die just before
> dawn for the putative romantic/military connotations of the hour; his
> wish for a noble death presumably did not include the cause of death
> being an infection contracted from eating shit.
> 
> Jeremy

They say the darkest hour is right before the dawn
They say the darkest hour is right before the dawn
But you wouldn't know it by me
Every day's been darkness since you been gone.

Bob Dylan said that...

These episodes are so very difficult it's no wonder that
folks read them and come away with radically different
interpretations. Some say this is Pynchon's intention,
sheriffs, midgets, and plots, and so on, subverting this and
that, but I doubt it. These narrators here can try our
patients and it's hard not to fling the book across the room
or out the window, but that will only make it fatter and
tatter, and well, come to think of it, I was reading my old
Bantam, stapled, taped and tattered, typos and all,
thinking, what is this guy kidding us, he must be mad, he
seems to be mumbling jokes under his mustache, "had to be
there, you know these kute correspondences, you get it? ho
ho, he he, ha ha, there coming to take me away, ha ha..."

But then I think, what an imagination this Pynchon guy has
got, wow!, he really has quite an imagination. Yes, Old
Pudding, back on page 236 "can't see how he can hold out
much longer. But perhaps, in the hours just before dawn..."
and so, we are left to consider why he had wished to die
just before dawn. But with so many things to consider,
perhaps only Pudding knows and Pynchon knows, and so we
can't be sure. Or can we? Does his wish have something to do
with Merkabah Mysticism and Jewish Gnosticism? Gershom
Scholem doesn't tell us anything about the hours just before
dawn, neither does Hans Jonas. I don't think Grimm provides
an answer. So perhaps it the heavy dose of irony--he wanted
to die just before dawn for the putative romantic/military
connotations of the hour. Yes, and remember why old Pudding
went back into active duty, what he was doing in the hours
before dawn prior to becoming key man at the mad White
Visitation. Sad, so sad, so terribly sad. Pynchon's satire
of the voyage to god, the seven heavens, the body and blood
of christ, how black, how black his humor, how brilliantly
black. 




Aeneas and the Sibyl, begin their journey to the underworld
at the hours before dawn I think and just before the dawn
Lucifer is in the sky:

         Now the changing colour of the eastern ether warned
that Phoebus was imminent, and the light is white and not
yet red, and steals their flames from the nearer stars, and
now the
Pleiads grow dim, now revolving Bootes' wagon grows faint
and merges into clear heaven's face and the greater stars
disappear and Lucifer himself recoils from hot day.

And Phoebus/Apollo, and indeed all the SunKings and sons of
kings, all their purification rituals, underworld ventures
and victories are but perverted pagan prophecies of the
coming of the King of all Kings, the day star that sinks
into the western ocean and rises to the glory of the
everlasting Day. 



Acts 2:19,20:

  I will show wonders in the heaven above
  and signs on the earth beneath,
  blood, and fire, and vapor of smoke;
  the sun shall be turned into darkness
  and the moon into blood,
  before the day of the Lord comes,
  the great and manifest day.
 
I think Luke wrote this....