MDMD Karma & Christ

[Terrance]

Karma is one of the more loosely used terms in the world. People throw
it around as if they know what they are talking about. "Ooh, bad karma!"
one might say or, "I guess it's just our karma that this happened." or
even "Instant Karma's Gonna Get You". But what is this interesting term,
what does it really mean?

Karma for Beginners  
http://buddhism.about.com/library/weekly/aa031698.htm

What is Karma? 
This is a very difficult question to answer.  Karma for beginners
doesn't help us answer the question. We can look the word up in the AHD
and get the same answer. 

Karma:   n. 1. Hinduism. Buddhism. The total effect of a person's
actions and conduct during the successive phases of the person's
existence, regarded as determining the person's destiny. 2. Fate;
destiny. 3. Informal. A distinctive aura, atmosphere, or feeling:
There's bad karma around the house today. [Sanskrit, deed, karma.]

We could write a book as thick as M&D attempting to define Karma. People
have. 

But what does it mean to Pynchon's characters and to us when we read it
on particular pages in GR, or in specific scenes  VL, or at particular
moments in M&D? 

Now that's a question worth asking? 

Thomas/Karma? What the hell is that? 
Is that St. Thomas? Oh girl, that would be a wonderful thread. 

Back in Chapter 7 of M&D we find  Dixon and Mason arguing like a couple
of paranoid lunatics out on leave. They have shared the data of their
dreams and they will soon off together to St. Helena, an island that
rumor has it can drive men insane. They wonder who or what is
responsible for their brush with death aboard the Seahorse and who or
what has brought them together. 

On page 75 we pick up the Wicks narrative in the house. 

"Brae, your cousin proceeds unerringly to the despair at the core of
History,-- and the Hope." 



"As savages commemorate their great hunts with dancing, so history is
the dance of our hunt for Christ, and how we have far'd." 

"If (ah, there it is again, that IF) it is undeniably so that he rose
from the dead, then the event is taken into history, and history is
redeem'd from the service of darkness,-- with all the secular
consequences, flowing from that one event, designed and willed to
occur." 

"Including every crusade, inquisition, sectarian war, the millions of
lives, the seas of blood," comments Esthelmer, "what happened? He like
it so much being dead he couldn't wait to come back and share it with
everybody else?"