TV v. God

[Doug Millison]

In one deeply Christian sense, in the sort of Christianity practiced and
preached by mystics such as Meister Eckhart (and his contemporary
interpreters, including Matthew Fox) for example, there is no such thing as
the "inanimate" because everything in our universe is part of God and is
thereby "animated" by God's spirit.  (In terms more familiar to Eastern
traditions, as I understand them, this could be expressed as the One
manifesting as the Many, myriad forms that express the same underlying
Spirit or energy; some physicists -- as well as their popularizers --
postulate something like that on the other side of the Big Bang, or see
fundamental energies animating everything, at the quantum level at least.)  

Pynchon's universe is alive; even the technologies that humans seek to
manipulate take on a sort of life (the Rocket).  Pynchon also appropriates
the Frankenstein story and, arguably, uses it to show what can happen when
humans, with limited perception, usurp God's creating role for limited and
selfish ends -- the War that never ends and which seeks to feed profits to
the corporation that create the weapons that kill the people and fuel hatred
and revenge and perpetuate the War, being one of those sad results of human
creation gone beyond human control.