why I am not a Hindoo

[Swing Hammerswing]

Mason: You expect me to live in the eternal Present
like some Hindoo?

Dixon does not say: "Thou must." M&D 166

Reading  Chapter 11 of V. again and  I am  convinced that those that would 
set the East above (Dixon is a man of Earth) the West  and set the West 
below the East (Mason being a man of the Sky) and suggest that  these are in 
a dialectic are misreading Pynchon. There is in no solution, no resolution, 
no dialectic as in Yin Yang or in Hinduism.  Pynchon's texts  never advocate 
or support a dialectical solution. Hinduism and the Yin Yang are not a  
solution, are not in P (in Brown's terms) "A Way Out" of the Freudian S&M 
(in GR's terms).  Yin Yang is dialectic, not a sustained tension, something 
has to give, Pynchon's texts sustain a paradoxical Agon.

The text of Hinduism, very, very old, is still perfectly contemporary. This 
is one reason why I insist, and think Pynchon's texts insist, that the 
Freudian/Marxist view of Religion, and by extension the denunciation of the 
Preterit's religious "opiates," is not only a misreading of P because it 
involves another dialectic (Marx materialism from Hegelian Spiritualism, one 
of GR's narrators calls Marx a racist), but because it fails to acknowledge 
what P's texts admit, that the great world religions continue to govern the 
ways in which the majority of human beings interpret the world and the 
alternative to these religions of the preterit masses, "critical masses" 
Teilhard, in P's texts,  is the religiosity of the Elect, a scientism that 
seeks to create a Total System of Synthesis and Control (Blicero GR.661) and 
"Death to Death Transfigured" (GR. 166-67), a pornographic imitation of 
scatter brained Mother Earth, or an  interruption (in I Ching terms) of the 
"constant" and "change," resulting not in death, which is only an aspect of 
Life, but "life's reversal, its perversion" (Wilhelm, Wilhelm, Understanding 
the I Ching, "The Concept of Change" page 26).

I disagree with Dewey's too  pessimistic and too "Western" and "narrow" 
assessment of what is in fact an Agon of West and East, not a privileging of 
the East or of African or Native American religion, a position  not 
supported either by the history and doctrines of these and, as I will argue, 
not by Pynchon's books.

As  Dewey explains it in his wonderful essay on M&D, to turn East from the 
West is not an easy thing to accomplish. Conversion form one religion to 
another, say from Christianity to Buddhism, obviously entails very complex 
stuff.

Also, replying to Otto's claim that P is an atheist, I would say, this is 
neither born out by the facts of his biography nor by his fiction and prose. 
In general, secularization usually involves replacing a Revelatory 
perspective with another, say, the Objective perspective of Science, or the 
Subjective or Personal Perspective, i.e., of Postmodernism and the Sophists, 
or  Nietzsche. On the other hand, conversion, in the religious sense, 
presupposes a metanoesis and either the retention of Revelatory Perspective  
or the transmission of the Revelatory via sacred doctrines within traditions 
and/or as is the case in P's texts, across them.  (see Waddell, * The 
Wandering Scholars*).

"O no man knows
Through what wild centureis
Roves the rose."
		--Terence


While I agree with Dewey's broader, and surely oversimplified point, that in 
the West, in the USA,  Eastern Religions are commonly perceived as 
fraudulent, fanatical, cultish; they are not considered as equally 
legitimate to the Christian traditions. What is considered acceptable, 
plausible even, for instance, the Virgin birth of Jesus, is not acceptable, 
not considered plausible, for instance, the multi-headed God. So, what is 
perceived as a matter of faith in the Christian tradition is perceived as 
fantasy when a principle of faith in an Eastern Religion.

In addition to these perceptions, there are the representation in media and 
text.  For example, of Hinduism as chanters in orange robes and shaved 
heads, Islam as a violent, fanatical, rigid, extreme religion. BTW, this is 
also, history reminds us, how America has also perceived various Christian 
churches, particularly Roman Catholicism.


Dewey says,

But to be misunderstood by the narrow Western mind is surely no surprise. 
The Eastern solution is so  fundamentally opposed to Western assumptions 
that outright rejections or deep superstitions or shallow  derision have 
always been our safest quickest response….

please see the entire paragraph, snipped here only to save my fingers.

Dewey end the paragraph pointing to one obvious  alternative present in 
America, Transcendentalism.  A subject that certainly is very important to 
Pynchon's VL.

In any event,  the point is that the one can't simply call the West narrow 
and the East open, the Sufi mystics are no less so than Plotinus, not more 
so than Erigena, Eckhart, Boehme, Cusanus.



Fausto says,

Losing faith is a complicated business
and take times. There are no epiphanies, no "moments of
truth." It takes much though and concentration in the later
phases, which themselves come about through an accumulation
of small accidents: examples of general injustice,
misfortune falling upon the godly, prayers of one's own
unanswered. Fausto and his "generation" (Chambers says, Eliot, Pound, Yeats, 
  http://www.hyperarts.com/pynchon/v/98.html) simply hadn't the  time...were 
more Maltese, i.e., than English.

Isn't Freemasonry that includes the Transcendentalism, Lyle Bland?




"But when, finally, advancing doubt made an end of God the
Creator, there was left in being no more than the mechanical
world-system which would never have been so crudely denuded
of spirit but for its previous degradation to the status of
creature."

               --Karl Jaspers, MAN IN THE MODERN AGE


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