GRGR(24) Father Rapier's ABSOULUTE

[Terrance]

Paul Mackin wrote:

> One can't help reading these passages against the backdrop of Washington
> DC on this bleak overcast Sunday morning--a new generation of young
> Believers in the Possiblity of Return once more making the scene and
> Devil's Advocate Father Rapier once again giving his now famous "Critical
> Mass" sermon.
> 
>                         P.

How depressing is the spectacle of the scattered human mass!
A turbulent ant-hill of separate elements whose most evident
characteristic, excepting certain limited cases of deep
affinity (married couples, families, the team, the mother
country) seems seems to be one of mutual repulsion, whether
between individuals or groups. Yet we nurse in the depths of
our hearts the conviction that it could be otherwise, that
the chaos and disorder are 'against nature' inasmuch as they
prevent the realization, or delay the coming, of a state of
affairs which would multiply as though to infinity our human
powers of thought, feeling and action. Is the situation
really desperate, or are there reasons for believing,
despite appearances to the contrary, that Mankind as a whole
is not only capable of unanimity but is actually in process
of becoming unanimised? Do there exist, in other words,
certain planetary energies which, overcoming the forces of
repulsion that seem to be incurably opposes to human
harmony,are tending inexorably to bring together and
organize upon
itself (unbelievable though this may seem) the terrifying
multitude of milliards of thinking consciousness which forms
the 'reflective layer' of the earth? My object here is to
show that such energies exist. They are of two kinds: forces
of compression, which by external and internal determinisms
bring about a first stage of enforced unification; and
subsequently forces of attraction, which through the action
of internal affinity effect a genuine unanimasation by free
consent. 

				--De Chardin

"The town is saved for another year." GR.663 Bantam

"Within minutes, the area was sealed off by officers of the
Emergency Response Team."
			NY Times, Sunday, April 16, 2000

"Materializing from their own weird silence, the coppers
show up now...go at busting these proceedings the way they
must've handled anti-Nazi street actions before the War,
moving in, mmm ja, with these flexible clubs...jumping
little kids three-on-one, shaking down girls, old
people...Beneath the efficiency and glee is nostalgia for
the old days...But now, with the White Market to be
protected, here again are the whole streets full of bodies
eager for that erste Abreibung, and you can bet the heat are
happy with it."  GR.664 Bantam

"Has the morning been only a dress rehearsal? Is Slothrop
expected to repel REAL foreign invaders now?"   GR.665
Bantam

Such innocence cannot be preserved, cannot prevail, though
it is rewarded, applauded, by Pynchon, it is a "mindless
pleasure" and thus infected with the sickness of paranoid
self-transcendence, eternal youth, rebellion, so just as
Isle as she grows from small child to youth creates
escapists fantasies about a paradise on the Moon of all
places (oh, the bitter irony) or the children in the Hansel
and Gretel play sing of the polytheme home again on the
Moon, in the grown-up world, the Moon is where  Rockets are
sent. "We choose to go to the Moon" said JFK, the cold war,
WWIII, Major Weissmann's kingdom of death, where the quest
for childhood and freedom is a quest for the oven. But the
old aqyn's advise to learn the world as children do offers a
little solace, a little respite from the War, a little hope
against hope, a little grace, and a little Return to the
mystery that is mother earth. 

And the seasons they go round and round
And the painted ponies go up and down
We're captive on the carousel of time
We can't return, we can only look behind
>From where we came
And go round and round and round
In the circle game
And go round and round and round
In the circle game....