Religion

[Narcoleptic Fat Boy & Black Pip]

Eric Rosenbloom wrote:
> 
> Well, the Nazis were really into that Buddhism, too!
> That's where that swastika came from.
> 
> --
> Eric R

Eric, you are a smart guy, look up Swastika in Britanica. 

I like your comments and I don't want to stink up  a breath
of fresh air as David Morris says, with my bellows full of
cranky old wind, even though I'm a kid like you. So please
don't take half of what I say seriously. As Kai says, if I
thought you were not saying something real interesting and
exciting I would ignore it. 


"It is this typical American teenager's own FATHER..."
GR.674




"He is the father you will never quite manage to kill. The
Oedipal situation in the Zone these days is terrible. There
is no dignity. The mothers have been masculinized to old
worn moneybags of no sexual interest to anyone, and yet here
are the sons, still trapped inside inertias of lust that are
40 years out of date. The fathers have no power today and
never did, but because 40 years ago we could not kill them,
we are condemned now to the same passivity, the same
masochist fantasies THEY cherished in secret, and worse, we
are condemned in our weakness to impersonate men of power
our own infant children must hate, and wish to usurp the
place of, and fail....So generation after generation of men
in love with pain and passivity serve out their time in the
Zone, silent, redolent of faded sperm, terrified of dying,
desperately addicted to the comforts others sell them,
however useless, ugly or shallow, willing to have life
defined for them by men whose only talent is for death. 
GR.747

When we read of perversions in the first series of Freud's
Introductory II Lectures we find that according to the old
coker first there are primitive, earlier forms of enjoyment,
then some progress toward genital organization and the deep
and intense conflicts and anxieties of the Oedipus complex,
and then a regression. And, remember, that Freud also said
that in a sense the neuroses are the negative of the
perversions. That is, what in the perversions is openly
enjoyed and consciously experienced becomes in the neuroses
the underlying layer against which the
symptoms are essentially, a defense. And we should remember
Freud's ideas on the relationship between obsessional
neuroses and the anal-sadistic drive components that
underlie them.

Four case histories illustrate the influence of the imago of
the father on the lives of the children. As the father's
personality is
overwhelming in each of these cases, it is postulated that
the power derives not
from the individual human being, but from the representation
in him of a
preexistent instinctual model or pattern of behavior, an
archetype. This is the
imago charged with dynamism that cannot be attributed to an
individual human
being. The first case, a woman who married a man much like
her father and on
being widowed remained so for years, provides an example of
living
out a copy of one's youth. The second case is a man whose
life repeats his
masochistic homosexual relationship with his father. The
third presents
a woman who sacrifices all present happiness on the altar of
being
dutiful to a now dead father. The last case concerns an
8-year-old boy who used
bed wetting to separation mother from father. These cases
show that the
parental influence, even though repressed into the
unconscious, directs the
maturing mind. The role of the father imago is an ambiguous
one, characteristic
of the archetype, whose potentialities exceed human capacity
in the
unconscious. 

See  Jung, C., Collected Works of C. G. Jung, Vol. 4.

What happened to Sons and Fathers in GR? Sons can't murder
the old man and marry Mom. Pernicious Pop can't kill the
Boy. What have They done to our Fathers and Sons? And
Mothers? 

Stencil might be looking for his Mother. 
Benny and the boys are Delinquents, children of the War
period.
 Mom works, Dad is off to war. Slothrop's Mom wants a war
hero, a dead one. 
After the war the Parents try to set it all back into the
boxes of conservative Ike at home and Dulles doing the dirty
work abroad. 
Mom's are back home with the Tube and Betty Crock of shit
cooking dindin for Papa knows best. 

"Wow," it occurs to Slothrop, "that's a shitty thing to
say." 

Springer shrugs. "Be compassionate. But don't make up
fantasies about them. Despise me, exalt them, but remember,
we define each other. Elite and Preterite, we move through a
cosmic design of darkness and light, and in all  humanity, I
am one of the very few who can comprehend it in toto." 

This is a typical conversation in Gravity's R. Springer
presents one of the larger themes of the novel here. TRP's
characters, at times, resemble Shakespeare's fools, they are
full of their author's library but they don't become stupid
mouthpieces. In this example, Springer gives some very
important discretion, his statement is "reliable" narrative,
he seems to know some very important stuff-cosmic design,
them, S&M, but after giving it to us, he lies, or at least
he exaggerates and seems to undermine his statement, but
does he? Can he comprehend it "in toto"? No, of course not,
so Springer, as the postmodern readings of the novel have
established, is like all the other characters in the book,
he has some knowledge, some information that is reliable but
he remains only a character caught in the text, and the text
and the characters in it are subjected to ontological and
epistemological "bombing. " So we don't want to attribute
too much to any one statement or any single character. And
we certainly don't want to confuse character or narrator
comments with those of the author.  yes even when he betrays
himself or even if he hangs himself upside down with a Wall
Street Journal stuffed in his mouth. You are not a character
in Gravity's R and neither is the author, although he tries
to get us in there, Yes YOU too.  By pulling out a phrase,
"Christian Sickness" or Marx is a racist or attributing the
word of a character or a narrator to TRP we go against what
the text is constantly reminding us it is doing.  

On Religion: 

The S&M of Gravity's R is a religious bond. The archetypal
relationship is that of Blicero and Gottfried-both male. 
Greta is the female for whom, "each time Thanatz brought the
whip down on her skin, she was taken, off on another
penetration toward the Center" (509 TRP's Capitalization).
The whip scars become text to be read. The Center, the All,
the Absolute, these are all perverse inversions of various
religious or transcendental experiences.  In V., the
destroyer and the destroyed are united by acts of
narcissistic historical violence, but in Gravity's R these
acts are solopsisticlly and eschatologically motivated-to
escape the human condition and unite with the Absolute or as
we read on page 662, pass "into the All" (TRP's
capitalization). Some critics read Gravity's R as a secular
attack on Religion, as anti-christian, but such claims are
absurd to anyone that takes the time to read the books
religious references. The Center or the All or the Absolute
is not Christian, religious trope-Human. So it also the
Merkabah, the antechamber of the Throne form Jewish
mysticism and is present in various forms throughout the
book ranging across dozens of religions, Eastern, Western,
Ancient and Modern.  Of course TRP has a more intimate
understanding of the Christian religion and so do most of
his characters and readers.  It's not odd that Pointy is a
Knight or Slothrop is St. George or that Pudding's war  sins
are  "purged"  through a Jewish mystical test on his way to
communion with the body and blood of Christ defiled and
corrupted in SM ritual. No, it's not coincidental that both
Enzian and Gottfried are the ritual sacrifice, the "pure
word." It's no coincidence that Isaac is a Pynchon favorite.
The futility of sacrificing one's Son to save the world or
to transcend it seems to have some particular resonance with
TRP's audience (yes of course he had/has an audience and he
wrote to them with intent and Joyceian carefulness)  and was
obviously on TRP's mind during the e 60s and early
70s-Vietnam! 

 Hey, it seems it was still on his mind  during the 80s,
right? 

Sweet Jane