Sex & a Wimper

[Otto Sell]

Rastafari, Terence

----- Original Message -----
From: Mo Man Tai <lycidas2 at earthlink.net>
To: <pynchon-l at waste.org>
Sent: Friday, October 13, 2000 2:50 AM
Subject: Re: Sex & a Wimper
> In TRP's novels, the sciences cannot be easily separated
> from the Religions.   When I tried to figure out how the
> characters in GR deal with or cope with entropy or
> entropical history, I realized that one of the most
> important ways they deal with it is to have sex.
>

Science(s) cannot at all separated from religion, since "Aufklärung" meant,
among other things, freedom from religious bonds through knowledge and
science, opposed to belief and superstition. Maybe the 19th and 20th century
have taken that too literal, so our belief and trust in science has bordered
superstition.

The interesting thing about the binary opposition of religion vs science is
that they both claim to be the "origin" of everything, both claim to be able
to tell the Truth. I can see no logical reasons why this should be called
anti-religious. Those critics who say that GR is a secular attack on
Christianity (the novel surely is critical of Chr. but that's another thing)
haven't seen the other side or they must have said that at the same time
it's a "transcendent" attack on science too.

I'm not quite sure if I understand correctly what you mean by "entropical
history" but personally I have made the experience that sex can give the
"onthological safety" of "being here" - the nice feeling that *if* this
world is just a simulacrum or some virtual reality They programmed at least
this point quite good. Everything can be taken away, goods, freedom, life -
but not the remembrance of this experience.

>We did not discuss Greta much, but we know that she is the
>white women or V and so
> "each time Thanatz brought the whip down on her skin, she
> was taken, off on another penetration toward the Center"
> (509 TRP's Capitalization). The whip scars become text to be
> read. The Center, the All, the Absolute, these are all
> perverse inversions of various religious or transcendental
> experiences.  In V., the destroyer and the destroyed are
> united by acts of narcissistic historical violence, but in
> Gravity's Rainbow these acts are solopsisticlly and
> eschatologically motivated--to escape the human condition
> and unite with the Absolute or as we read on page 662, pass
> "into the All" (TRP's capitalization). Some critics read
> Gravity's Rainbow  as a secular attack on Religion, as
> anti-Christian, but such claims are absurd to anyone that
> takes the time to read the books religious references. The
> Center or the All or the Absolute is not Christian, but
> human, it is only figuratively here, the Merkabah, the
> antechamber of the Throne, but it is present in various
> forms throughout the book ranging across dozens of
> religions, Eastern, Western, Ancient and Modern.  Of course,
> TRP has a more intimate understanding of the Christian
> religion and so do most of his characters and most of his
> readers. It's not odd that Pointy is a Knight or Slothrop is
> St. George or that Pudding's war sins are  "purged" through
> a Jewish mystical journey on his way to communion with the
> body
> and blood of Christ defiled and corrupted in SM ritual. No,
> it is not coincidental that both Enzian and Gottfried are
> the ritual sacrifice, the "pure word." It is no coincidence
> that the book of Isaac is a Pynchon favorite. ]
>
No, no coincidence at all - it should become conscious even to those cold
technicians that they are *not* doing their jobs just out of pure
professionality, that there are layers underneath they're not necessarily
aware of - for example that the originally religious sacrifice system has
creeped even into the rocket-building society - as Mondaugen explains
somewhere in GR, when one of the first tests went wrong and people died.

> There are all the "sick" and infected religious systems--
> not a one whole and not perverted--;

Right you are.

 >And there are the Kabbalisms and Gnosticisms.

Aren't these more "authentic" religious experiences (I would add Sufism for
the Islam to it) mostly considered by the organized forms of religions as
some kind of weird hereticism?

>
> Entropy is a "centrifugal force" in GR (302, 324).
>
> We can think of it as a fictional analogue to the physical
> process we find in the second law of thermodynamics.  Henry
> Adams was an
> important (perhaps as important as Rilke was to GR) source
> for the novel V..  And it's my guess that TRP's interest in
> these ideas has a lot to do with Adams, so TRP is not so
> much interested in the second law of Thermo-D as
> he is in its application to a whole bunch of subjects,
> including, sociocultural phenomena, like religion and
> characters like Slothrop.
>
> In GR, Entropy operates on not only the cosmic level, the
> Big Bang (no, not an orgy, the theory-396), but also in
> physical processes like radioactivity (479), mineralization
> (167,351), and vegetal and organic decay (10, 166, 678,
> 688,). This natural death, decay,  (what about Benny's
> decay?) is
> contrary to the "Death" of the characters-fictional/cultural
> "Death", a "Death" that is transfigured-Fear of God becomes
> fear of cultural "Death."
>

Yes, and again yes! The original second law of thermodynamics only works on
the nanolevel. One of its "effects" is the bigger number of possibilities
than in organized systems. This reverses for example in communications
theory, where the possibilities are reduced by a higher degree of entropy.

> In the Zone, zones scatter and cities crumble  entropically
> (519,524, 3-4, 682, and, as I will try to demonstrate, the
> history of the Jews (again see that wonderful essay on Dante
> by Santayana), the Gypsies, the Herero, and Slothrop's own
> family religion, are all subject to entropical forces (391,
> 737, 318, 170,).
>

The Diaspora surely is an entropic process if you describe it in these
"technical" terms. But for Slothrop the scattering means freedom from the
paranoia he suffered from at the beginning of the novel. In Pynchon's
fiction entropy (nothing is connected) is the binary opposition to paranoia
(everything is connected). In reality I would wish the European Jews had
been more paranoid between 1933 and 1938. But who could imagine...

>
> But it is the holy SOULS of the characters, their living
> selves, that are most affected: Pointsman (142) , Katje
> (209), Enzian (321) and Slothrop, who scatters or
> disintegrates in a lot of ways but certainly spiritually,
> emotionally, psychologically, physically,
> characteristically, and most importantly, isotropiclly.

It is Pynchon's way of telling us that this is waiting for everyone of us
who still lives in the luxury that there is a soul, understood as an
undividable unity. But psychology has taught us there is no such thing. I
have to repost (with one more sentence) here what I wrote to Kai:
"We have now reached an interregnum. Stagnant (...)  Now memory is a
traitor: gilding, altering. The word is, in sad fact,
meaningless, based as it is on the false assumption that identity is single,
soul continuous." (V. p. 307)

As Andreas Freitag puts it in his essay "We hold these truths to be
self-evident"
http://www.freitagweb.de/texts/mason.html  Pynchon is formulating in advance
here what later became the postmodern view of history. Maybe this could be
called "entropical history."
Fausto in his four Majistral-versions of revised history is standing between
the
entropic Profane and the paranoid Stencil.

>
> This is the way the world ends
> This is the way the world ends
> This is the way the world ends
> Not with a bang but with a whimper.
>
> - T. S. Eliot (1925)

This also goes for everbody, not only for The World. The world ends when "I"
close my eyes forever. And it began with a scream . . .

Jah Otto
(me, myself and I)