NP William James

[Dave Monroe]

Just happened to have read this in Thomas Moore's The
Style of Connectedness: Gravity's Rainbow and Thomas
Pynchon (Columbia: U of Missouri P, 1987).  "A
footnote in William James's Varieties of Religious
Experience describes a similar ontological plenum in
particulraly Pynchonesques terms:

"If I should throw down a thousand beans at random on
a table, I could doubtless, by eliminating a
significant number of them, leave the rest in almost
any geometrical pattern you might propose to me, and
you might say the pattern was prefigured beforehand,
and that the other beans were mere irrelevance and
packing material.  Our dealings with nature are just
like this.  She is a vast plenum in which our
attention draws capricious lines in innuemrable
direction.  We count and name whatever lies upon the
special lines we trace....  Yet all the while between
and around them lies an infinite anonymous chaos of
objects that no one ever thought of together, of
relations that never yet attracted our attention. 

"For Pynchon, reality may be just such a continuous
plenum, which might in some sense be insouled. 
Overfull, charged with meaning, it might, in certain
'relations that never yet attracted our attention,'
spill over into something like sentience ..." (p. 46,
citing the footnote on p. 429 of the 1936 Modern
Library ed. of WJ's TVORE; ellipses therein in Moore's
text) ...  

Which in turn reminds me of that "certain Chinese
encyclopedia, the Celestial Emporium of Benevolent
Knowledge" mentioned in Jorge Luis Borges' "The
Analytical Language of John Wilkins" (and in turned
namechecked by Michel Foucault at the outset of his
The Order of Things), "in which it is written that
animals are divided into: 

1. those that belong to the Emperor, 
2. embalmed ones, 
3. those that are trained, 
4. suckling pigs, 
5. mermaids, 
6. fabulous ones, 
7. stray dogs, 
8. those included in the present classification, 
9. those that tremble as if they were mad, 
10. innumerable ones, 
11. those drawn with a very fine camelhair brush, 
12. others, 
13. those that have just broken a flower vase, 
14. those that from a long way off look like flies."

And, hey, damned if John Wilkins wasn't an actual
historical figure--mathematician, astronomer,
cryptographer, inventor, was working on a universal
language when he died, and was a founding member of
the Royal Society, dedicated, among other things, to
solving that pesky longitude problem ...

http://www-groups.dcs.st-and.ac.uk/~history/Mathematicians/Wilkins.html

You learn something new every day, at least on the
Pynchon List.  But now, must ... host ... Ch. 14 ...




--- George Kolliopoulos <gkoll at mland.gr> wrote:
> Has anyone read The Varieties Of Religious
> Experience By William James,
> brother Of Henry James and father of pragmatism?
> An exciting book by all means, i think.
> 
> gkoll
> 


__________________________________________________
Do You Yahoo!?
Get personalized email addresses from Yahoo! Mail - only $35 
a year!  http://personal.mail.yahoo.com/