When Does Innocence End?

[Otto Sell]

"Cease to exist" - sez Charles Manson,
"Cease to resist" - what the The Beach Boys made of it.

"Imagine there's no heaven - above us only sky." (John Lennon)

> Otto:
> Fucking as "God" does not mean you've had a priest's schlong up your butt.

Dave
Seems as if we understand the passage up on p. 100 differently. What
blasphemy (in Christian terms) should it be Weissmann is thinking of the
missionaries could have committed if not molesting the boys?

> [It is a valiant reading nontheless.]
Thanks for calling me brave, but the point goes to Mr Pynchon. There's a
structural aspect that the camps, prisons, monasteries, armies all have in
common: putting men together without women.

> Fucking is potentially a rare moment of transcendence.

Might be, might be not, if transcendence is not just a word with no "real"
meaning in it - just invented by priests and other charlatans to get the
people. If there is "transcendence," if all things are connected on a cosmic
scale then paranoia is fully justified. But I must say that I believe that
the only force that holds this universe together is gravity.

>"God" is what one says during a really good fuck!

There are some rhetorical questions arising:
1. Is it allowed to say "Goddess" too?
2: What is a "bad fuck"?

"I wish either my father or my mother,
or indeed both of them, as they
were in duty both equally bound to it,
had minded what they were about
when they begot me;"
(Tristram Shandy)

3. If so then why the Christian belief has filled sexuality with guilt and
shame?

003:007
And the eyes of them both were opened, and they knew that they were naked;
and they sewed fig leaves together, and made themselves aprons.

I've only got the German versions of Lance W. Ozier's "The Calculus of
Transformation: More Mathematical Imagery in *Gravity's Rainbow*, Twentieth
Century Literature, 21 (1975), 193-210, and Lawrence C. Wolfley's
"Repression's Rainbow: The Presence of Norman O. Brown in Pynchon's Big
Novel," PMLA, 92 (1977), 873-889, and Charles Russel's "Signs, Symptoms and
Subversion" (copyright by the author), all in Heinz Ickstadt (Ed.), "Zum
Romanwerk von Thomas Pynchon," Reinbek bei Hamburg, 1981. Every German
reader should try to get this from his next library.

So I can give no page numbers from the essays but all three include major
text passages from the novel explaining the "Death-trip" mankind is on.
According to Wolfley Pynchon believes (with Brown) that a change in society
is impossible because the slaves *love* their chains: "(...) wäre es anders,
hätte unsere Welt ein anderes Gesicht." (Ickstadt, p. 205). Pynchon
exemplifies this with Puritanism, not Marxism.

"Living inside the System is like riding across the country in a bus driven
by a maniac bent on suicide." (GR 412)

To come back to the topic-line "When Does Innocence End?":
"It began when Weissmann brought him to Europe: a discovery that love, among
these men, once past  the simple feel and orgasming of it, had to do with
masculine technologies, with contracts, with winning and loosing . . ."  -
and so on (GR 324).

Otto (brave-hearted fighting his way through the text)