Religion

[Narcoleptic Fat Boy & Black Pip]

Mark David Tristan Brenchley wrote:
> 
>         Actually, I would disagree that the rocket is the absolute. What
> Pynchon says (forgive me I don't have a copy to hand) is that the rocket
> CAN be interpreted by any and all beliefs.
> 
> Mark


Sorry, reading the chicken scratches posted here by those
unlettered and  unedited scribblers Black Pip and the Fatboy
I can See why there claim to the "absolute" in GR is 
problematic. 

When I confronted the two castaways. This is the excuse they
gave me: 

"Like Harold Bloom, once having been  Bartlebys and now
nearly blind,  and owing to some idiosyncratic pedagogical
absurdities,  and being studied sluggish Gra Mary
Ann...and..."

At which point Pip was flushed into the great wintry waters
of the East river and out into the abyss and tossed about
till he was conscious of Nothing save his own soul in the
midst of that infinite sphincter and scrotum tightening sea
and the fat boy fell face first into his meat pie and began
to snore.  

Turn back to Bloom and Eddins for just a minute and maybe we
can save poor Black Pip. 

Dave has three suggestions: 

1. Not so sure if the "absolute," if
"transcendence" is being presented (or even absented)
as attainable possibilities--"toward the center," but
never to achieve it? All those deferrals, that
"antechamber," that "final delta-t"--

Absolutely.

2. or if Pynchon's religiosities are, indeed, religious
(think he's more
playing echoes, harmonics, resonances all up and down
the key/fret/whatever board), 

Positively

3. but the "futility" of that "sacrifice," that "particular
resonance," indeed.
 "I ain't your fortunate son"?  It ain't me (babe) ...

Or Machine Gun. 

You know, E.L. Doctorow says his was the generation that
"missed out on history." He's a bit older that P., maybe 4-5
years older, but he says that his generation managed somehow
to miss the central experiences of their times--too young to
painfully feel the Depression, or fight in WWII, and too old
for Vietnam, they were in a sense delinquents. 

Oh, sorry Eric, I should not have assumed that you are a kid
like me. It's just that you mentioned having a young child
and, well that's life for you, I have a friend  just had his
first child and he's no kid either. Me I'm one of those bad
girls that had a baby when I was a baby so...but the kids
are alright. 

Back to Bloom:  

Again, Dwight Eddins begins and ends his beautiful reading
of Pynchon's development as author of a traditional American
fiction from the Short Stories to Gravity's Rainbow with a
quote from Harold Bloom. At the end of Gnostic Pynchon
Eddins, responding to Bloom's statement that "Pynchon is a
Gnosis without transcendence" says, 

"It is a gnosis haunted by the possibility thereof-both
positively and negatively-and by a characteristically
modernist nostalgia for a quality of human consciousness
that a logos beyond human agency seems once to have
empowered." GP.154

"But the Rocket has to be many things  GR.727

The Rocket is a lot like that White Whale in Moby-Dick. 

Eric, the fatboy is stuffed into the Rocket, which at this
point is both womb and bomb as you note. I think that
homosexual sodomy is symbolic here as well. Just for fun
Black Pip says to check out Chapter 78 of Moby-Dick. 

It ain't over till the fatboy snore...