1945

[Terrance]

jbor wrote:
> 
> > For the culture of Death, the German Culture of Death that
> > includes the Holocaust with a capital H (German's burning
> > Jews in Ovens) also see 162 of GR,
> 
> Leni Pokler's viewpoint, a dig at Franz's naivety more than anything

Yes, "Leni has talked to psychiatrists, she knows about the
German male at puberty. On their backs in the meadows and
mountains, watching the sky, masturbating, yearning. Destiny
waits...Destiny...Destiny...Let him look for flight out at
the Raketenflugplatz, where he goes to be used by the
military and the cartels. Let him fly to the dead moon if he
wants to...."

step 3. 

This episode ends with the Heinz Rippenstoss, the
irrepressible Nazi wag and gadabout, asking Peter Sachsa,
"Is God really Jewish?" While we haven't the time to go into
all of the Jewish themes in this chapter (who or what is
Jewish, Shylock, Henry V, Leni, Leftys and Jews, and where
in
London the hits, "where Blacks and Jews live"), Leni and
Franz....) I think we have time to note the Jewish
Lightning, oy, oy, oy, GR.160 and GR.582, where again we
have the "paranoid" verb tenses and moods and modalities,
crucial because it's 1945. Whadayouknow. "...the Jew blamed,
fucked (yes it makes a difference, fucked and being fucked
that is) under by the courts, attached till his was
bankrupt, and in the fullness of time, sent east along with
many others of his race." Naphtha, not Jewish Lightning
Leni, her spell on the Jews come back to fuck her, "Instant
[BAD] Karma gunna get ya. GR.219 What is the Polock doing in
a row boat anyway, a chicken coop yeah. "Why are half the
Leftists she know Jewish? GR.163 A- and what is she giving
to her child, a crust?  

In these couplefew chapters of V. we have just read, the
Jews are threatened, fucked, again and again. WHY? Does
Bland know? Glad to see they permitted the Nativity in Gen
Cove. 

Pre-Hitler German History, "a Dynastic succession"

Step 4. 

This culture of Death, this Patriarchal bond of Absolute
Power, this teck-Dynastic Pathology, this Death of God
Nihilism (yes, I know what WTP is, I quoted it.  Kaufmann's
text is in many respects much more useful than Coli and
Montinari. I too tire of these peanut gallery pretenses and
pedantries). This Authoritarian Punishment, this Fear of God
Living or Dead, is a "German Sickness" in TRP's Fiction.  In
a limited sense, Pynchon identifies this pathology as the
cultural setting of pre-war Germany, (and thank you JBF,
first, second and third Reich).  It is the "primitive
German, God's poorest and most panicked creature" (GR.465)
or "the poor harassed German soul" (GR.426) whose mind "for
at last two centuries--since Leibniz" (GR.407) has been
strangely connected to "the rapid flashing of successive
stills to counterfeit movement....extended past images to
human lives" (GR.407). I say the Patriarchal God Dead or
Alive because the Death of God is Patriarchal Nihilism. The
Death of God is mourned, the Aesthetic is tragic.  Art
continues to be dominated by Patriarch, as guilt, as
rebellion, as lamentation. The subject of Tragedy, the
violation of authority. In TSZ and in GS N portrays the
Death of God as a precondition for Gaiety, disengaging from
the values, the absolutes. But the Influence, the Anxiety,
of those values also conditions tragedy. This presence of
Tragedy, I think, is still an appeal to Nihilistic
consciousness, although of course N hopes to reverse the
values of Nihilism in favor of an affirmative consciousness,
an affirmation of life and the power of creativity. But he
fails in some ways and in some places where Pynchon
succeeds. Yes, P succeeds where N fails, with the
perspectival strategies, but more importantly  I think, P
succeeds with his Song of Life, his celebration of
fertility, his religion. N celebrates gaiety and laughter,
the earth, the body human, the creative human. He affirms
life, and Z says he could believe only in god that dances.
P's god is a dancer mind and body whole. In a Patriarchal
culture, Nihilism signifies the death of the patriarch, the
death of absolute power and authority, control of life. Once
Dead, what will fill the void? Freud says it will  it will
be the Sons of the Fathers, but those sons will always have
a sense of guilt. Now N wasn't gunna have dat, no, no, so he
denied it and proposed what? Well, that the authority to
rule and the responsibility for governance should pass from
the representatives of God (the Priests) to the Higher Men,
thus reinstating the patriarchal and authoritarian Nihilism
he set out to cure.  N reliance on the value of Domination
for settling issues of authority in politics and in Morality
is still within the compass of self destructive Nihilism.  




This "German sickness" is tied to an old Pynchon concern,
the influence of "texts" (books, film, architecture, etc.)
on the young mind.   

 "It brings up questions such as, Is there something about
reading and thinking that would cause or predispose a person
to turn Luddite? Is It O.K. to be a Luddite? And come to
think of it, what is a Luddite, anyway?"


The same theme runs through "The Secret Integration." Tom
Swift books, parental conspiracy, racist film and TV. 

In GR, Kurt Mondaugen, "One of these German mystics who grew
up reading Hesse, Stafan George, and Richard Wilhelm, is
"ready to accept Hitler on the basis of Demian-metaphysics
(GR.403) and Pokler was an extension of the Rocket, long
before it was ever built" (GR.402). 

Yes it is the  "German mania for subdividing" (GR.448) which
also infects and is infected by a cultural obsessed with
"name giving" (Enzian vs. Raketmensch), dividing the
Creation finer and finer, analyzing, setting namer more
hopelessly apart from named (GR.391, GR.366, GR.320-322).
the  German male at puberty who rebels against what he
considers a "detestable Burgerlinchkeit" (GR.162) and who,
in the wake of his "Wandervogel idiocy" (GR.162), reads
Hesse and company to become ready to accept Hitler on the
foundations of "Damian-metaphysics, a "Schwarmerei" that
soon degenerates into various forms of fanaticism for
technological specialization (GR.239) and fixed control
which is rationalized by those "folks in power" (GR.238). 

In a broader sense, these woes are Western and are caused by
the Western view of  Consciousness---the subjectivity, the
inwardly trapped mind that has separated from and divided
what was once Whole or unified so that human experiences
have become antagonistic.     

Jbor, "reading" consciousness? What is consciousness? And
what is reading? Just kidding!

Dave Monroe wrote:
"(and no wisecracks from the Peanut Gallery)" 

Nodding in and out of sleep, that's how Terrance read the
posts, those Crepiditions
.but how did he weave the teks and
texts
.Shhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh
Silence is the consecration of the theatre theater and the
world. Dada,
hmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm

My hypothesis about all this, this Pynchon stuff, is that P
thinks we are now caught in the apocalyptic dynamism of
Western Paranoid logocentrism. And  because this State of
affairs is a historical development, a vine rooted in Fallen
Man's inability, not His refusal, but His Inability to
accept the Postlapsarian State of affairs of the Postmodern
Condition and because Fallen Man is  aware of this state and
He is also aware that any and all attempts to escape, to
turn away and brood or turn away and then turn back throwing
open a postmodern cape revealing a tool-box that does but
doesn't seek a way out through a schizophrenic or play or
anti-paranoid something-or-other is auto-destructive. 


Creation sees itself with both eyes
Open. Only our eyes are turned inwards

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.  (DE VIII)


 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)

Again see, Egon Schwarz 

Schwarz approaches literature from a historical perspective,
studying history's influence on literary works as well as
the influence of an audience on the meaning of a work. This
approach was evident in the 1970 publication of an article
on why young Americans during the 1960s elevated German
author Herman
Hesse to the status of cult hero. Schwarz argued that
Americans discovered aspects
of Hesse's work that had gone unnoticed by German scholars
and the German reading
public. In approaching the poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke in
his book,
Stifled Protest: Politics and Poetry in the Work of Rainer
Maria Rilke (1972), Schwarz
created an ongoing controversy in Germany and Switzerland
over his thesis that
the mystical poetry of Rilke was influenced by the times in
which the poet lived.

Merry Little Christmas