Pynchon & His Moses (was Circle Game)

[Terrance]

Otto Sell wrote:
> 
> "We're captive on a carousel of time.
> We can't return, we can only look behind from where we came
> and go round and round and round in the circle game."

And on the painted ponies going up and down? 

Fortune favors the wha? 
Did you study your Latin O' Gogarty? 
Yes Father forgive me for I have been born. 
Good Lad. Now be Brave and bend over. WACK! (ha, ha, you
thought, it being a priest, he was gunna get the...here cums
that crazy screaming sound, Zap!).

Brave? 

Does existential WASPism involve the belief that reality is
an ugly, terrifying, or fundamentally painful thing that
everyone tries to avoid, but that the truly Brave individual
(and these are very rare, and fortunate in all these ironic
senses) is obliged to look it in the face and be miserable
for the sake of ... well, for the sake of more or less
nothing.  Maybe the the WASP existentialist has got a bad
case of Vanity, now there's a word P liked the history of.
But what is this existentialist's code, that Sartrean
thingy, that Beckett's brall,  has that got something to do
with imitating cops or Western movies, or some parody of
paradise, some elected few, we happy, happy few, are cursed
with faculties that enable us to to see through the lies.
The lie given in speech, in WORDS, LIKE love? Oh pity the
Village intellect, so smart he's got himself stuck in the
bitter money pot, oh bother, help me if you can Christopher
Robin I'm stuck in the destructive truth. Oh, but what can
be done? Tie a balloon around my neck and throw me into bed
I'll slip in and out of it, nothing I can do in the world:
the world is run-down, people are trashy, and there should
be no great effort made to save it or them or me.   Not to
offend any existentialists who might be lurking  on the
P-L... posting drunk again...but I'm Irish you know and
always working on my identity and my identity quest is only
masquerading as a no exit from current mainstream culture,
or perhaps reality itself. Cause being a bit of a Finnagan
risen from the dead here, always wanted to be a Dionysian
attending his  Greek sex festival with  wine and music and
not a Wake but that's my  "The Birth of Tragedy." 

Dave M, I didn't like it, but Derek Barker, a  real sharp
cookie, did. "The Tragedy of Political Theory: The Road Not
Taken",  J. P. Euben

http://www.pupress.princeton.edu/titles/4559.html


 "Hell is other people. "  hell can be something other than
the mythical idea,  an Inferno, a never-ending existence of
torture, fire, and all that. In Sartre's play, Hell is not
Dante's Inferno or Milton's bottomless perdition. From
Sartre's No Exit, we learn that Hell can be other people.
Hell can be the people that you despise: people that you can
not escape, who have the power to gnaw at your very soul. In
such a Hell, your  antagonist replaces the ever-burning,
unappeasable, shadows of flaming torture found in
traditional depictions of hell. To add insult to injury,
only your nemesis,  can provide you with what you and
everyone else for that matter, require--- understanding and
a feeling of worth.  What's more, from Sartre's Hell there
is no exit.

"Negative. Wrong story." GR.660 Yeah, wrong book, we want
the Old book here, not the new. 

"The Moses of Michelangelo" Papers On Applied
Psycho-Analysis in the 4th Volume of Freud's Collected
Papers. Or, try Harpers, 1958, Sigmund Freud, On Creativity
and the Unconscious: Papers on the Psychology of Art
Literature Love Religion, available in recycled paper or
paperback paperback under the overpass where the passed over
sell books for fifty cents. 

Freud was a smarty pants and he collected gods. It is not
surprising that Freud, an Agonist who claims to know little
of Art, but who specializes in intra-psychic
agony,  solves the riddle of the Moses statue. You could say
that Freud and Michelangalo (Shakespeare too Dave, yes those
History plays, gunna only say it fro the umpteenth time, see
Phyllis Rackin's essay, "The Role of the Audience in
Richard  II, and while I'm at it, here cum those Santayana
winds again, see Santayana's essay on Dante and the Jews)
are Agonists. Speaking of Vs and Virgins and the Vatican,
Michelangelo's Vatican Pieta presents a conflict between the
ageless Virgin and the aging and death of her Child. The
David (Michelangelo portrays moments of great crisis)
depicts a moment of confrontation, the Moses, a conflict of
Law and Passion. I wonder what Freud would write about
Pynchon's Enzian?? Or the Moses of Machiavelli? Or the Black
Saint Moses? 


"We remember the old saying: Si vis pacem, para bellum. If
you desire peace, prepare for war. It would be timely thus
to paraphrase it: Si vis vitam, para mortem. If you would
endure life, be prepared for death."

"Perhaps too in this enlightened age," says Benny "as his
mind expands and he takes a comprehensive view of this
period of progress,
the pupil of Moses may ask himself, whether all the princes
of the house of David have done so much for the Jews as that
prince who was crucified on Calvary? Had it not been for
Him, the Jews would have been comparatively unknown, or
known only as a high oriental
caste! which had lost its country. Has not He made their
history the most famous in the world? Has not He hung up
their laws in every temple? Has not He vindicated all their
wrongs? Has not He avenged the victory of Titus and
conquered the Caesars? What successes did they
anticipate from their Messiah? The wildest dreams of their
rabbis have been far exceeded. Has not Jesus conquered
Europe and changed its name into Christendom? All countries
that refuse the cross wither while the whole of the New
World is devoted to the Semitic principle and its most
glorious offspring the Jewish faith, and
the time will come when the vast communities and countless
myriads of America and Australia, looking upon Europe as
Europe now looks upon Greece and wondering how so small a
space could have achieved such great deeds, will still find
music in the songs of Sion and solace in the parables of
Galilee.
 
These may be dreams, but there is one fact which none can
contest. Christians may continue to persecute Jews and Jews
still persist in disbelieving Christians, but who can deny
that Jesus of Nazareth, the Incarnate Son of the Most High
God, is the eternal glory of the Jewish race?

                        -- Benjamin Disraeli

Piss on it son, piss on the sun, impersonate, oh  the Angel
of Death passing,  parodic,  "Mezuzah" it's an Old Testament
pun here, "prophylactic" and "phylactery", and you Catlicks
no you ain't supposed to use no plastics when you doing the
holy dance of love. So how has sexual desire co-opted
spiritual aspirations? Is the impetus of human history the
desire for sexual satisfaction? Put a cap on it,  son. Put a
cap in you, son. Love and death. Any language can say what
needs to be said. 

Oh Henry! Has moral certainty become impossible? A secualr
Quest, round and round and up and down in a world bereft of
any deity, any god that we may be a Job to or a descendent
of
Job to, a Moses to our people negotiating with a terrible
god,  a Prodigal Son to the Father (maybe that's why not too
many women read P) a Prometheus,
a singer of the song of King Lud, a culture that may rebel
against the machine, against the V and not seek Death and
annihilation of US US US and Them Them Them and we are all
together. 

Marlow notes the necessity for "a deliberate belief." It is
Marlow's ability
to maintain a deliberate belief that allows him to face and
comprehend the meaning of his African experience. Although
his journey follows the classic, mythic cycle of departure,
initiation, and return, his vision is darkened by Irony (oh
that IRONY!) for the world he perceives and acts in has been
unremittingly brutalized by human abstraction and avarice. 
It is a world where "rootless idealism"  (doesn't P use a
like phrase in his application, idealism leads to nasty wars
or some such?) gives way to brutal abstractions (maybe these
are the cannibalistic
Dave?)  and where a deliberately espoused morality opts for
studied cynicism.