Mondaugen's law

[Mike Weaver]

The midnight malapropagandist (that's me folks) parlayed instead of parried
and Dave Morris parlayed back
>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.

Doesn't Weed become a focus simply because he's tall, 
(nothing transcendent about that), and given how his fortune
 works out I can't see his tale as advocacy of "pure action" as
opposed to a wider temporal awareness. He gets right royally
 screwed by Brock and Frenesi doesn't he?

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

There's the rub. If you call consciousness a curse we 
are looking at human development in a very different way 
from me. 
What do you make of the CNS episode (p148-9) which ends
" Our history is an aggregate of last moments"

I don't believe that TP advocates both/and, but reckon he is 
saying that we do have to choose one way or the other in 
order to act effectively 

No time for more - midnight approaches ...

TTFN