The Quest and the Grail (or Logocentrism)

[Mark Wright AIA]

Howdy 

Should have read "perhaps even stoned co-worker"...
--- Terrance <Lycidas at worldnet.att.net> wrote:
> 
> 
> 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.


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