Osmosis & P's Gnostic Cosmoses

[Paul Mackin]

Terrance wrote:

> I don't disagree with Paul M's comments on most of this. P
> probably did not read Scholem and Jonas prior to writing V.
> and yet the seeds of his Gnostic cosmos are present in his
> short stories. P has some sympathy for the Gnostics, not
> doubt about it, but not for their cosmogony, their disdain
> for the Earth. Fowler would go so far as to say that P has
> sympathy for Lucifer,  like the Romantics reading Milton,
> for Lucifer's  rebellion against a despotic King and God,
> and again it is clear that P does sympathize, even if this
> analogy doesn't quite work.

I never meant to imply Pynchon might relate to the Gnostics expressly
for their disdain for the earth, or that P himself held such disdain.
Rather, it would have been  the earth's disdain for the Gnostics, or at
least the poorer among them, and for the poor and down and out
everywhere,   which could have caught his sympathy. Perhaps Gnostics
could stand in his mind for poor preterite souls or something on that
order.  I'd only been riffing on the idea that spirituality of any
variety might be most likely  to develop out of a disenchantment with
earthly existence.

I have a memory of having commented to this effect on Friday evening but
upon looking in the archives I find nothing. Probably just as well as
Friday evening I was in a very silly state.

                    P.