Mondaugen's_Law

[David Morris]

--- Mike Weaver wrote: 
> >> Mondaugen's law (from memory): Personal density
is
> >>directly proportional to temporal bandwidth. 
> >> This IMO is Pynchon's direct challenge to the
whole
> >> Be Here Now mentality.[snip]
> 
> David Morris counters:
> >I disagree. Try this one on:
> >(230.30) "I would set you free, if I knew how.  But
it
> >isn't free out there. [snip] I can't even give you
> >hope that it will be different someday - that
They'll
> >come out, and forget death, and loses Their
> >technology's elaborate terror, and stop using every
> >form of life without mercy to keep what haunts men
> >down to a tolerable level - and be like you
instead,
> >simply here, simply alive...."
> 
> Mike Weaver parlays:
> "I can't even give you
> hope that it will be different someday..."
> 
> Even if he could, how do we survive until that
> utopian time?
> It's the old difference between drop-out and
> revolutionary attitudes, that
> you can change things by being, on an individual
> level, utterly pre-cursive
> as opposed to finding strategies of engaging with
> and subverting Their
> hegemony, which IMO takes as much temporal
> bandwidth/personal density as we
> can muster.

But you don't really think that Pynchon espouses one
over the other do you?  If I had to pick his favorite,
I'd say it was the former, but that argument would be
quixotic.  Vineland seems a partial argument against
the latter.  Isn't this another example of a GR
unanswerable question?  O-or at least it's a
"both-and" answer.

I'd also "parlay" that there are numerous examples in
Pynchon's texts of what he calls "pure action" (see
Weed Atman), where at the height of direct physical
struggle against "Their hegemony," a character reaches
a kind of "Be Here Now" transcendence.

> Somewhere in his Prison Notebooks, Gramsci made the
point that the myth of
> grace from which humanity has fallen is a collective
yearning for a
> desireable future justified by casting it into the
long lost past (I paraphrase).  

The loss of innocence is the curse of consciousness. 
But this fact doesn't answer the built-in yearning.

Both-And,
David Morris

__________________________________________________
Do You Yahoo!?
Talk to your friends online with Yahoo! Messenger.
http://im.yahoo.com