Plato & Spengler - sorry very long, but little cfa

[calbert at tiac.net]

Terrance:

> > 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.

Scott Badger:

> 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.

M 'boy Oswald Spengler:

"A race has roots. Race and landscape belong together. Where a 
plant takes root, there it dies also. There is certainly a sense in 
which we can, without absurdity, work backwards freom the race to 
its "home", but it is much more important to realize that the race 
adheres permanently to this home with some of its most essential 
characters of body and soul. If in that home the race cannot now be 
found, this means that the race has ceased to exist. A race does not 
migrate. Men migrate, and their successive generations are born in 
everchanging landscapes; but the landscape exercises a secret 
force upon the plant-nature in them, and eventually the race- 
expression is completely transformed by the extinction of the old and 
the appearance of a new one. Englishmen and Germans did not 
migrate to America, but human beings migrated thither as 
Englishmen and Germans, and their descendants are there as 
Americans. It has long been obvious that the soil of the Indians has 
made its mark upon them - generation by generation they become 
more and more like the people they eradicated. Gould and Baxter 
have shown that Whites of all races, Indians and Negroes have 
come to the same average size in body and time of maturity - and 
that so rapidly that Irish immigrants, arriving young and developing 
very slowly, come under this power of the landscape within the same 
generation. Boas has shown that the Amercian born children of long-
headed Sicilian and short headed German Jews at once conform to 
the same head-type. This is not a special case, but a general 
phenomenon, and it should serve to make us very cautious in 
dealing wiht those migrations of history about which we know 
nothing more than some names of vagrant tribes and relics of 
languages (e.g. Danai, Etruscans, Pelasgi, Acheans, and Dorians)."

The Decline of The West   (yet another example of the babelfish 
translation method - a more approriate, but less melodious 
alternative to "decline" would be "waning" , this would also reflect 
Oswald's brand of "organic" history more accurately.) Vol. 2 pg. 119
Knopf's Complete Edition.....

another matter:

A confirmed franco-phobe, I refuse to read Foucault in any 
language.....but my host last week saw fit to leave some west coast 
theology prof's sketches of postmoderns by the 'throne".....while 
killing time thereon I skimmed his chapter on Mike and came across 
something which tripped the Vhiessu debate. Is there anyone versed 
in F who can elaborate on his concept of "history" and 
"anthropology" - particularly regarding the issue of "illusion" 
informed by a kind of rearward projection? I think there may be an 
answer in there somewhere......


love,
cfa