The Quest and the Grail (or Logocentrism)

[Terrance]

Mark Wright AIA wrote:
> 
> PS -- I had occasion the other day to freak an inert, indolent and
> perhaps even coworker out with the thought that there is a soul in
> every stone, and that his might be one of them.  Ha! Naturally, he's
> been avoiding me ever since...


     Avenge, O Lord, thy slaughter'd saints, whose bones
         Lie scatter'd on the Alpine mountains cold,
         Ev'n them who kept thy truth so pure of old,
         When all our fathers worshipp'd stocks and stones;
     Forget not: in thy book record their groans
         Who were thy sheep and in their ancient fold
         Slain by the bloody Piemontese that roll'd
         Mother with infant down the rocks. Their moans
     The vales redoubl'd to the hills, and they
       To Heav'n. Their martyr'd blood and ashes sow
       O'er all th' Italian fields where still doth sway
   The triple tyrant; that from these may grow
       A hundred-fold, who having learnt thy way
   Early may fly the Babylonian woe. 

			---Milton

On page 281 ( where Slothrop and Enzian come together) there
is talk of ancestors. Enzian, a postmodern Herero,  is a
Moses figure, sort of crossing over to the Ancient Jews, he
is closest to the Zero and trying to stay there. Slothrop of
course, is crossing over too, but he  slides on the Ouija
board or the ship's deck or whatever, moving from various
forms of paranoia (anti-paranoia being the state of Modern
Man--the center did not hold, where no god can connect the
universe, and nothing is connected, "not a a state anyone
can stand for very long", Tch--at the end, so they try
everything under the sun and in the sun and in and on the
earth to control what they believe is this centerless
universe--science/religion, but this leads to a bomb over
our heads. The Calvinistic determinism (isn't Roger a Weber
figure as Pointy is a Mill figure, in a way?), that Thomas
summarized is all quite correct, but the longing is for an
earlier time (Pynchon's interest in the Anabaptist is very
revealing of his politics/religion as in Dante), and Pynchon
has sympathy for us all, Truck, the linguist, like a Derrida
figure in a way, is as word-smitten as Slothrop, Slothrop's
ancestors packing bibles around the hills, but they also had
a certitude that Modern man has lost and all his attempts to
recover it (Faustian or pseudo mythical) lead to inanimate,
solipsistic, annihilation. The sympathy is for all the
"primitives" that have become WASPS or been infected by the
christian sickness or the NTA, or Modern evolution of the
mind, body and soul, but Slothrop's Puritan ancestors also
"heard God clamoring to them in every turn of a leaf or cow
loose among apple orchards in autumn...." 

There is museum out in California where the wind blows
through an instrument constructed there, here, on Long
Island Sound, there is the voice of god, or the wind god
anyway, I go and listen to it, no one constructed it, it's a
natural instrument, the shape is natural,  the configuration
of rocks on the shore, people stand around and listen, some
try to explain it with technical terms, but I only listen
and remember Ireland.