Plato & One History * One Bad Earth & One God

[Scott Badger]

> I think, that gnosticism is evil in GR not
> because it was or is an evil religion or a "heresy" any more
> than it is a good  in GR because it was purged and condemned
> by the Church-- a victim, although of course it was not
> completely purged (Dante has Gnostic elements, Milton,
> Blake, so on). It is an evil trope in GR, for two basic
> reasons, first, its contempt for Nature and the Earth and
> its stated goal to transcend this evil place, Earth is the
> product of a demiurgic process, second because it, like the
> particular  Jewish mysticisms in GR that are also a trope of
> evil in GR, it has an Elect, the Gnostics, those that know.
> BTW, Those that know in GR, the YOU that knows, are made fun
> of by the narrator for exactly this reason. This gnostic or
> neo-platonic disdain for the earth goes to P's view of
> History.

I won't have time to go digging till Monday, but in MD there seem to be
several allusive (and not so allusive) references to an innate evil in "the
land" - specifically, America.  There was some discussion during MDMD about
a possible (and somewhat surprising) change in Pynchon's attitude in this
regard.  Check out Vaska's posts, if you can find them.

Scott Badger