Graves, "The Return of the Goddess"

[Terrance]

Dave Monroe wrote:
> 
> ... well, just noting a few passages I thought might be of particular
> interest, is all.  

Yes, thanks. One of the problems with this chapter is that
Graves jumps all over the lot, but if you can't get through
the White Goddess, twuz no easy task for me, try reading
chapter 26 and maybe you will want to read more. Actually
the book is a good reference text. Graves calls "speculative
philosophy" an "infection." You might like to Check out
Walter Burkert (1985), Greek Religion. 

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.

Yes, it's difficult for me to make the connections
sometimes, is all. Wiener is a good one to link several of
your threads., it seems, but I've only read a little so I
can't say anything.  Thank Doug for that one. It's so
difficult to communicate here. 



> 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?).   

Lost me here. Are you referring to Graves? His Poetic and
Prose or what? 
 




Much on the religiosity of technology, the technics
> of religion, and so forth, in that Pynchonian ouevre, no?  

Yes. 


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) ...

Why have religions been largely ignored? Do you agree with
what Eddins says about this? The privileged postmodern
readings? I think there are many other factors, for example,
Mendelson, who wrote brilliantly about the science &
religion sacred & profane, claimed that Jewish Mysticism was
not a big deal in GR and could be simply footnoted. He was
influential, a big time scholar, and he was wrong. But even
with the publications of VL and M&D, again, books that are
loaded with religious material, religion, say compared with
TV, Music, Information, high/low culture in VL or science
and history in M&D,  is not given its due.     


> 
> 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 ....), 


Could not manage otherwise? Is that Wiener? Do you think TRP
would agree? 

Perhaps Incommensurable? Isn't this  a Big theme in M&D and
in all of Pynchon?

Roger Mexico becomes a prophet on page 54 and gets an
"angel's" view, but he says it's  all in the statistics book
(not the Pavlovian HOLY text) and that any one can look it
up and get the INFORMATION. Between Pointsman's Zero and
One, bombs are not dogs, not men, not animals to be
conditioned, no memory. But for Pointsman that's no HISTORY
and no cause and effect. One science undermines the other,
like math or statistics pulling the carpet out from under a
psychological position, and back to GR and now the priest is
introduced on page 56 and we flash back to a story, priest
was drunk and told a story about the Roman sieve on the
road, and Roger immediately, can't help it, wonders if the
grass that grew through the sieve in the road followed a
POISSON, but the priest gets angry and tells him that the
sieve was laid on the road to CURE the SICK. It was SACRED!
What a sick crew and these guys find soldiers very useful,
sick soldiers.     



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" ...

Yes, these important works, I'm real old fashioned and so I
hold onto the very Modern idea that there are in fact Great
texts, no quotation markers needed, but anyway these works
that I consider great have generated common discourse, I
would go so far as to wax poetically and say, a common realm
of discourse and that when we enter this realm, which we do
each time we discuss and or describe these texts, we do so
by connecting them through the act of interpretation. There
are so many different interpretations of the great texts and
this I take as an indicative of the formal nature of their
interrelationships.  

> 
> 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 ...).  

This is what? A critical argument about the openness of
interpretation? No problem. However, the text sets
parameters, the meaning is proscribed by the text. If not,
who needs it? Why discuss Shakespeare, the back of a pastry
box is a text and Moby-Dick is a story about a little black
monkey and a bathtub full of rubber duckys

But these are the days not of miracle and wonder,
but of language and texts. Some postmodern prophets are
foolish enough to believe that the world is a text. Now, we
look to the Word, no gods to silence the
machine gun syntax of our despair here in an
existentialist's no man's land where G.E. Moore despairs
that the problems of philosophy are not scientific, but "the
problem of trying to get really clear as to what on earth a
given philosopher MEANT by something which he said." 


Carnap wrote,  in  Logical Syntax of Language, "Only then
will it be possible to
replace traditional philosophy by a strict scientific
discipline, namely, that of the logic of science as the
syntax of the language of science." 
Replace, reinvent, murder and create, out with the old, in
with the new, down with my father's world and up with mine,
a big sky-scraper erected on the rubble of war torn women's
waste,
a Copernican turn, a linguistic turn, death of god, of
metaphysics, of the novel, of the novelist, of the
characters, of plot, of the reader, turn, turn, turn, to
everything.... 

        
Reinvent the wheel, but to be a wheel and not something
else, it must turn, turn, turn. Such turnings are often
accompanied by a blinding (even Kant had a blind spot,
didn't he?)
and by high hopes and enthusiasm, hoopla and fanfare--Great
Instaurations, Copernican Revolutions, Linguistic Turns,
post his and post that and we are beyond them, those dusty
greek tomes, the dead white men. 

Turning and Turning in some Irishman's gyre, mere anarchy,
some revelation at hand.  Or down the stairs with a bald
spot in the middle of Eliot's mind or that Hamlet's To Be or
not Being at the bottom looking up to Buck Mulligan
descending or Pirate Pretice with a load of bananas. 

Into the existentialist's flux of being, the ontological
flux of
coming-to-be and passing away, like that stream or snot
green mother of consciousness one cannot step into twice.
The flux of being becomes an ontic flux, the flux of meaning
a semantic flux in which the "text" never has the same
meaning twice, for meaning depends on a particular
interaction or transaction (Pragmatism's contribution to
reading process theory) of "text" and reader (can we put the
"reader" in quotes too?). 

Knowledge is perception says Theaetetus. Plato's Socrates
like Pynchon, never really concerned with getting the other
guy's ideas as the other guy would get them if he were not a
playful puppet on the stage, takes this idea and treats it
as if it were an alternative formulation of Protagoras'
doctrine (the mantra of the sophists old and new) that "man
is the measure of all things," and treats both as founded on
the view that all things are in flux and perception is but
the momentary interaction of the two. 

TRP ridicules the Sophists most of all. 

 Plato, and Aristotle (being Greek) considered this problem
of flux and the Word. 
Some Greeks saw that all this world of nature is in
movement, and that about that which changes no true
statement can be made,  nothing could truly be affirmed. It
was this belief that blossomed into the most extreme view, 
TRP satirizes the Extremes, that of the professed
Heracliteans,  such as was held by Cratylus, who finally did
not think it right to say anything but only move his finger,
and criticized Heraclitus for saying that it is impossible
to step into the same river; for HE thought one could not do
it even once.

"Silence is the consecration of the world. " 

			Melville