Graves, "The Return of the Goddess"

[Dave Monroe]

... well, just noting a few passages I thought might be of particular
interest, is all.  And, as with a similar posted of perusal of Norbert
Wiener's The Human Use of Human Beings (q.v.), in part in response to
your comments in re: (the balance of) science vs. (?) religion in (the
reading of) Gravity's Rainbow, of Thomas Pynchon's texts in general.
What I find interesting in this regard, in both Pynchon's texts and
their possible, likely, known (or otherwise) intertexts, is, indeed,
that "signal bleed" betwixt those languages, say, Robert Graves would
oppose to each other (as opposed to, say, Eric Vogelin, Scince, Politics
and Gnosticism?).   Much on the religiosity of technology, the technics
of religion, and so forth, in that Pynchonian ouevre, no?  Though, no
doubt, much first-wave, at least, Pynchoniana focused on the former
rather than the later.  But, of course, "there is a hand to turn," and
has been (STILL gotta finish that Eddins book) ...

But was interested in how, say, the scientist Wiener managed, perhaps,
interestingly, could not manage otherwise, to discuss statistical
mechanics, control mechanisms, information theory, whatever, in terms of
(perhaps incommensurable?) Augustinian vs. Manichean conceptions of
"evil" (and note how those "devils" present perditions, temptations,
even, not unlike those we, or for that matter, Oedipa Maas, face as
readers, interpreters, crrritics ....), or how the poet Graves managed
to link a goddess-eclipsing pantheon of gods to the military-industrial
complex (though how did he NOT make--explicitly, at least--the
connection between the bombing of Hiroshima and the Feast Day of the
Ascension?  A circuit, of course, that Pynchon completes for him ...).
Again, that "signal bleed" ...

Which, I'd argue, again, is not only a particular characetristic, an
aspiration of, even, "literary," poetic language, but the general
condition of language, that inevitable, inescapble, unavoidable,
ineluctable, whatever, dissemination of signification, an effect, affect
of the text exceeding even the so-called "intentions" (which are, of
course, subject to their own dissemination[s] ...) of the so-called
"author" (ditto ...).  And what I admire about those Pynchonian texts,
what the hell, about Pynchon, is that they, he, seem/s to realize that,
foreground it, revel in it, even.  It's that strong undercurrent what
drew me not only into Pynchon, but into Lit'rachure in general, in the
first place (trading an undistingusihed career as a physics student in
for ... oh, hell ...), and, whilst I might still be wading, splashing,
dogpaddling around in them waters yet, don't think I've been, will ever
be, dragged under, drwoned, and dashed on the rocks (okay, pushing my
tropological luck here, but ...) ...

Terrance wrote:

> Dave Monroe wrote:
> >
> > ... from Robert Graves, The White Goddess: A Historical Grammar of
> > Poetic Myth (rev. ed.  New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1966
> > [1948]), Chapter Twenty-Six, "Return of the Goddess" ...
>
> An interesting chapter, no doubt. I have mentioned it
> several times but I was reluctant to quote passages from it
> because it needs be read entirely to make sense of any of
> it. Well, that's true of text isn't it, oh well, you know
> what I mean.