Re. the "Slothropite heresy"

[Terrance]

David Morris wrote:
> 
> jbor:
> > > Rubbish.
> > >
> > > best
> >
> >The path back is a no no. Call it rubbish if you want.
> 
> jobor raises a valid issue (re. Pynchon's message to us via his text):
> predestination.  It might also be phrased "Are we all doomed?"  I would say
> that this is the razor's edge of his cosmology.  I agree with Terrance that
> a path back is not possible (but not a "no-no").  The way back is only a
> fable.
> 
> Here is maybe a more poingant question:  What is the way forward ?


Freud took very seriously the relationship between
civilization and religion. Indeed, in his framework the two
terms are synonymous. But as religious Things Fell Apart,
what rough beast slouched towards Bethlehem to be born? The
Rocket. And so perhaps reading Pynchon we need to take the
relationship between civilization and science very
seriously. Perhaps we can even go so far as to say that in
Pynchon's Freudian framework
Civilization and Science/Religion are synonymous. Don't
know. 

Sorry to cite another critical essay but in that OCULR 
see "This Network Of ALL Plots May Yet Carry Him Back To
Freedom: 
Thomas Pynchon And The Political Philosophy Of Anarchy" by
Graham Benton

Paradoxical, that's Pynchon, so too is his Anarchy. 
It's a wonderful essay for this discussion. It would be nice
if we 
could discuss it, but I think we prefer to deconstruct posts
and 
play language games first and foremost and blur and smear
and make ridiculous
generalizations about worldviews. How can I support my claim
that TRP has a Catholic imagination if I have defend myself
against against the bullshit that has become
the general conversation here. 

I'm out now, for good this time. I'm too busy for 99% of
what goes on here. 



The conscious effort to get back, to return to the Garden,
to the fork in the road that has made all the difference is
a no no. 
There is danger on the horizon but there is no hope in
history. 
We can not fight the past, we can even write it. Onward we
go into 
each other or into nothing but the abyss of consciousness
cut off from 
the paths we never took and the ones we can only hope to
find. 


Consciousness, as Pynchon portrays in his fiction is a
kind of second falling -- postlapsarian Man on a quest to
Salvation is imprisoned in his own consciousness:  Mind (and
Mind is both Reason and Myth) is cut off from the
world and is thus incapable of relating to the world
adequately or with any satisfaction. The route back, for
civilization,  for religion/science by myth, mystery, magic,
religious
ritual,  sacrament, oral community rites, holy grails, is a
quest for 
"salvation." I put down Vineland and mumbled, not "Who was
saved?", but 
who is in need of being saved and why. 
 
The quest, the 1960s "we have got to get ourselves back to 
the Garden," or "back take me way back to when the world
made more sense," is a religious quest, but the quest for
salvation, to go
back to that fork in  raod is Narcissistically driven. 
Humans  project an Image of their own Solipsistic
imprisonment onto the world. 
Pynchon never tires of representing this narcissistic
confinement, equating it
with history (mirrors in V.) and extending it to Solipsistic
history in GR (film). So Pointsman, the dogmatic Pavlovian,
is haunted by "the sound of the V-1 and V-2, one the reverse
of the other", because his spiritual mentor Pavlov
considered this type of association, which is manifest in
"irradiation" and "reciprocal induction", as the brain, in
the mind of history. (GR.144) Weissmann is affected by this
"pathology" since he holds on to a "Mirror-metaphysics."
"Self -enchanted by what he imagined elegance, his bookish
symmetries..." (GR.101) 

Why does W. Slothrop need to write it down? Why a parable of
pigs? 
Why has Newtonian Physics found its way into that religious
"On Preterition"? 

The Word against the Earth.  




I included what I think are a few very important Rilke
passages:  


Creation sees itself with both eyes
Open. Only our eyes are turned inwards,
Walls of circumvallation,
Against our own free beginning.
What it is like outside, we only know from glimpsing
The faces of animals. As soon as a child is born
We turn and force him so that he sees
All forms inside-out, not the real, that real
That shapes the animal's face--free from death.
Only we see it; free creation has its decline behind it
And before it, only God. And when it goes, it goes
Into eternity, as the fountains go.
We have never, not even for a day,
Looked into the world, into which the flowers
Eternally open. The world always is,
Not our narcissistic nothingness,
But the pure, the open, that one breathes in and out,
Always knowing and desiring. In stillness, children....

This is fate: to be opposed
And nothing more
and always opposed....

So who was it that turned us inwards, so that we,
And all we make, assume the posture
Of imminent departure? He stands upon the final rise,
>From which he sees our spreading lowlands.
He turns and stops and waits.
And here we live and take our leave. (DE VIII)


For a momentary sign, a reason for
Opposition will be prepared--laboriously;
We notice it because it is so meaningful
To us. We do not know the contour
Of feeling, only what facts it causes. (DE IV 9-18) 

A god can do it. But will you tell me how
a man can enter through the lyre's strings?
Our mind is split. And at the shadowed crossing
of heart-roads, there is no temple for Apollo. (SO I, III,
1-4) (GR.625-626)