bloom on kabbalah in gravity's rainbow

[Terrance]

Lorentzen / Nicklaus wrote:
> 
>  "comtemporary readers meet the  s e f i r o t  at the strangest places, for
>  example in malcom lowry's  u n d e r  t h e   v u l c a n o [?] or in thomas
>  pynchon's g r a v i t y' s   r a i n b o w, where these basic pictures of the
>  kabbalah are used to indicate the tragic patterns of over-determination through
>  which our lifes are somehow lived for us and not by us."
> 
>  (harold bloom: kabbalah and criticism [1975], quoted in own re-translation from
>  the revised german edition from 1997, p. 23)
> 
> actually, i do not think that this statement is in any way sufficient concerning
> trp's use of the kabbalah in gr. yet i thought some of you would be interested.

Quite right, but he certainly does get to the heart of the
matter here. 

And this goes to your other post:

ferruci states: 'if understood in its   
  proper perspective, the will is, more than any other
factor, the key to human 
  freedom and personal power. ... (however,) whenever the
will of an individual 
  is ignored, suppressed, or violated in a consistent and
enduring way---or if  
  it is stillborn or even nonexistent---pain and illness
arise.' assagioli   
  taught that the will regulates and directs from within and
that ultimate   
  freedom is not only development of personal will but
attunement with   
  transpersonal will. he explains: 'this relationship leads
to a growing 
  interplay between, and ultimately to the fusion of, the
personal and 
  transpersonal selves and in turn to their relationship
with the ultimate 
  reality, the universal self, which embodies and
demonstrates the universal, 
  transcendent will.' the late rabbi dovid din, a learned
kabbalist whom i 
  interviewed, elucidated the premise of will's importance:
'will is the 
  quintessence of the divine nature. the divine will is the
quintessence of the 
  divine nature. that means we are saying, in effect, god is
pure will. god is 
  pure will because god is pure integrative being...now,
that definition aligns 
  itself with a vision of the human predicament seen
kabbalistically, as being a 
  lapse of the will...so, it follows that the more
successfull i am at being a 
  person of will, the more i carry through my chosen
identity and true 
  nature...that is really creating in myself a clarity that
is the very essence 
  of the divine nature.' (...) a psychosynthesis approach
encourages the 
  individual toward an open receptivity to guidance from the
spiritual self."


> 
>   kai //:: ps: in between the years i read bloom's "the anxiety of influence"
>            [1973] in the german translation of angelika schweikhart. what a
>            passionate book! anybody interested in discussing pynchon's anxiety
>            of influence? some candidates could be: melville, joyce, eliot,
>            musil, borges, rilke, gaddis, and - here the "slow learner" intro
>            would probably work well as a starting point for a debate - the
>            beats, especially kerouac and burroughs. "i'm not saying my style is
>            better than yours ..." (jurassic 5).


Thinking of the Will and Freedom and God and Nature, I would
say Aquinas, Newton and Adams, probably in that order. 
Trying to discover the influence, the anxiety, is difficult.
Pynchon's Parody, his Irony complicates the task, but
Bloom's "tool-box" is a useful set. A close reading of TRP's
Short Stories and Minor Prose provides ample support for
naming Adams, Aquinas, Joyce, Conrad, others, but it is to
T.S. Eliot and Melville/Shakespeare that I would apply
Bloom's method. And turning back to the novel, the one TRP
wrote, V., and why I suspect that  the self-consciousness of
the author is not so PoMo, but rather poetic in a
traditional sense, or Anxious, I would say, P is  Anxious
about telling tales about the Sea (one of P's early
narrator/characters is so anxious about the distorting act
of telling tales that he spins a sophomoric yarn, black
love&death humor), about the Mother, the Earth, P tells
tales about the Virgin and Entropy, V and Dynamo, about
Oedipa and her American Oedipus, Pernicious Pops who sell
their children to science and masculinized Mothers who pray
for the transfigured Death of their sons of War, of Vineland
the Good, but his tales are all about that Chaucerian and
Freudian Triangle, Mother / Father / Child (of course
Mother's have been masculinized--the balloon has gone up). 

"Our poets write of nothing now but the rain of bombs from
what was once Heaven." --V.

"Are we only animals then. Still one with the troglodytes
who lived here 400 centuries before dear Christ's birth." 
--V.

"Shakespeare (Morality and Mercy) and T.S. Eliot (Lowlands)
ruined us all."  --V.

"Perhaps British colonialism has produced a new sort of
being, a duel man, aimed two ways at once..." --V. 




    I don't think The Beats, although obviously influential,
taken together add up to Anxiety. 

http://www.catholicity.com/school/icu/c01506.htm