TV v. God

[Doug Millison]

Thomas:
"(...) Fausto's kind are alone with the task of living in a universe of
things
which simply are, and cloaking that innate mindlessness with comfortable and
pious metaphor so that the 'practical half' of humanity may continue in the
Great Lie, confident that their machines, dwellings, streets and weather
share
the same human motives, personal traits and fits of contrariness as they.
(...)
It is the role of the poet, this 20th century. To lie." (V., 326)

"Is it possible to reconcile
this passage with your claim that "Pynchon's universe is alive"?"


"Fausto's kind" -- I read this as a 20th century artist of the world-weary
post-Romantic existential sort who has bought into the view, propagated in
the West in the Enlightenment, that the universe is material only, "dead" in
other words, and  if you can't measure it somehow it's not real (a way of
looking at the world that Pynchon examines in some detail in M&D),and who,
for reasons that are difficult in the end to fathom and which stem from some
contradictory and even schizophrenic impulses, feel compelled to perpetuate
a lie that lulls people into what Pynchon elsewhere calls the "dark dream".
We don't have any way to know if Pynchon considers himself in this category
of poet, do we, one of "Fausto's kind"?  By contrast, in GR, the poet who
sings of the Khirghiz Light would seem to be of a different "kind",
admitting of the possibility of transcendent experience.   


"The TV set at the beginning of COL49 is part of God and thereby animated by
God's spirit?"

The sacred is in the profane, some would say, admitting of no hard and fast
distinction between the two. If you start with the assumption that the
material universe is the manifestation of God and animated by God's spirit,
then everything in it, even TV -- even Pynchon-L -- is animated by God's
spirit, flowing out of the ultimate creative source that some people call
God. This is a view I believe to be highly compatible with the world of
Pynchon's fiction -- trees speak and humans can hear them speak if they've
let down their defenses to a sufficient degree, to name one example, and out
of dreams come the stuff that fuels industrial revolutions and Fascism, to
name another  

Otto -- When asked what was the greatest commandment, Jesus said  love God,
and, second, love your neighbor. The rest of the rules of "Christianity" are
propagated by the same kind of institutional religion/priestly caste that
Jesus appears to have despised, and which Pynchon also seems to castigate to
the degree to which religion along with other social institutions supports
the War that never ends.  Read through the Advent passage near the beginning
of GR again; the whole novel teeters along the edge of belief in the
transcendent and scorn at what happens under the eyes of watchful angels,
and which ends on a profound note of fear and wonder.  Is Death only the
gateway to a new level of consciousness, or is that just a con that the
people who want to use us up or kill us would like us to believe?  I don't
know that Pynchon resolves this question in any satisfactory way, but the
fact that he poses it throughout his works tells me that he takes both sides
of that binary opposition rather seriously.