OFF Re: pynchon's religion

[jbor]

Bravo! Without doubt one of the best posts I've ever read on the topic here
(or anywhere for that matter).

Thanks and best wishes

rob j

----------
>From: Eric Rosenbloom <ericr at sadlier.com>
>To: "Discuss.List Pynchon" <pynchon-l at waste.org>
>Subject: pynchon's religion
>Date: Thu, Feb 8, 2001, 6:26 AM
>

>
> I'm sorry to continue keeping this growing and useful discussion away
> from V, but it's been a long time since I read that book, and Gravity's
> Rainbow is freshly teeming . . .
>
> The beautiful passage on pages 127-136 is one of the more overtly
> "religious" parts of Gravity's Rainbow, so let's take a look . . .
>
> "Listen to this mock-angel singing ["the high voice of the black man
> riding above the others" (p. 129)], let your communion be at least in
> listening ... There must have been evensong here long before the news of
> Christ ... something to raise the possibility of another night that
> could actually, with love and cockcrows, light the path home, banish the
> Adversary, destroy the boundaries between our lands, our bodies, our
> stories, all false, about who we are: for the one night leaving only the
> clear way home and the memory of the infant you saw . . ." (p. 135)
>
> You know he will be crushed by the world, but "on the way home tonight,
> you wish you'd picked him up, held him a bit. ... As if it were you who
> could, somehow, save him." (p. 136)
>
> So this evensong -- "no counterfeit baby, no announcement of the
> Kingdom, not even a try at warming or lighting this terrible night,
> only, damn us, our scruffy obligatory little cry . . ." (p. 136)
>
> That "damn us" is important. The beauty here is the singing, human
> voices in human song, and it takes us right to the last page of the
> book: There is no salvation, only death . . . "There is time, if you
> need the comfort, to touch the person next to you, or to reach between
> your own cold legs . . ." (p. 760).
>
> And the way "back" that has been a hot topic of late? Salvation here is
> "only the clear way home and the memory of the infant you saw." Not
> recreating a mythologic Eden or New Paradise gated community, but a
> reminder of innocent harmony to take home with you. "My leaves have
> drifted from me. All. But one clings still. I'll bear it on me. To
> remind me of. Lff!" (Finnegans Wake, page 628). [On second thought, that
> Joyce quote doesn't quite fit, but leave it anyway.]
>
> On pages 751-752, superheros arrive too late, are aging, get lost, fail
> -- and are moved upstairs to watch new bright stars dismantle the old
> systems. And so this religion thing, this messiah drug, this salvation
> dream, with or without the State:
>
> "What better place than Zürich to find vanity again? It's Reformation
> country, Zwingli's town ... there are ex-young men ... who got initiated
> at Harvard into the Puritan Mysteries: who took oaths in dead earnest to
> respect and to act always in the name of _Vanitas_, Emptiness, their
> ruler . . ." (p. 267-268)
>
> "The only part of the epic [_Martin Fierro_] that really has von Göll
> fascinated is a singing-duel between the white gaucho and the dark El
> Moreno." (p. 387) (He will use Emulsion J to go under their skin . . .
> and there is "_Return of Martin Fierro_, in which the Gaucho sells out:
> assimilates back into Christian society, gives up his freedom ... A very
> moral ending ..." (p. 387).)
>
> "Eastern" religion:  Masonic magic finds Lyle Bland, who starts leaving
> his body, finally going to join the astral IG (pp. 587-591).
>
> "State" religion:  "You were never of the faith, Vaslav" (p. 704). The
> Kirghiz light did nothing for him, either. And his hatred of his black
> brother falls away when Geli's black magic, love, finds him.
>
> Final words: I think these excerpts support the idea that Pynchon thinks
> the State, the Firm, the System, the Faith are pretty much the same
> thing, and Their whiteness is the whiteness of Death. The salvation they
> promise crumbles even as They offer more, whiter, cleaner.
>
> Forgive me,
> Eric R
>
>
>
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