Gottfried & Blicero

[Dave Monroe]

... but back to all that shit 'n' sperm 'n' bodily contact 'n' such, have
mentioned before that countergnosticism in Gravity's Rainbow, the inevitable
irruption of the kenotic, Incarnation vs. Resurrection ("deliberate" or
otherwise, but I think there's a Clue here somewhere), life vs. life after
death, the thisworldly vs. the otherworldly, maybe even the ethical vs. the
moral (recall someone claiming that Judaicism is an "ethical," vs. a "moral,"
religion--say, Christianity--because it generally is not primarily concerned
with an afterlife, but, rather, with one's responsibilities IN life).

Consider this in re: that perhaps "nihilistic apocalypticism."   The issue
perhaps came to a sharp point during the Reagan administration, in which people
who did not think that nuclear (for starters ...) holocaust was necessarily a
Bad Thing, seeing as it might well have been Foretold in the(ir, as opposed to
our, here?) Bible, and, America, not to mention no doubt Themselves, being
Elect, were all gonna Ascend (like Christ ev'ry August 6th, 1945 or otherwise
...) to God's Own Heaven in/on all those "roaring and sovereign" "firebursts"
(V694--"The fireburst came rioaring and sovereign," "A screaming comes across
the sky" ...), had their finger on the finger on the Button (see Paul Boyer's
When Time Shall be no More: Prophecy Belief in Modern American Culture, as well
as his By the Bomb's Early Light).

Of course, Nixon, like Johnson and Kennedy and most other presidents before him,
was not Reagan (apocryphal RN/RR anecdote: after the Iran/Contra scandal broke,
Nixon's allegedly commented, "he can always plead ignorance; I didn't have that
luxury"), but the religious, philosphical, ideological, political, whatever
ground had already been landscaped, and perhaps Gravity's Rainbow is proposing a
bit of critical topography here ...

jbor wrote:

> the warning of *GR*, the one that WvB
> pooh-poohs in the opening epigraph, the one that hovers a bee's-dick over
> our heads at the novel's close, is that man will one day invent and unleash
> something so powerful that it *will* totally annihilate everything, that
> there will be no "green uprising" to follow it. The reason rational
> scientific man invents these ever more destructive mechanisms, the reason
> man is so pro-death and anti-Nature, is because of this "deformed and
> doomed" mind which assures him of his own mortality, his own personal
> apocalyptic end, finite and certain. I think that this is why we need as
> many myths of the afterlife as we can get, as many as Pynchon can cram into
> *GR*, as antidotes to the "crippled ... human consciousness" which knows its
> own doom, and so wants to take everyone and everything else along with it
> when it goes.