pynchon-l-digest V2 #1831

[Otto]

>
> "jbor":
> >Are you saying that human language(s) and culture(s) preceded human
> >history???!
>
>
> See Lascaux and other prehistoric paintings, please. Obviously human
> language development comes before writing, the watershed event that
> marks the beginning of history. Song, dance, painting, sculpture all
> predate written history. A number of credible researchers and
> thinkers also suggest that language and culture begin to evolve prior
> to the emergence of the human being.
> [snip]
>

A very ancient binary opposition is between the (original, God-given) word
and the (human, only diverted) script.
Don't forget that oral histories are the basics of the first "written"
stories.
Oral human history precedes written human history.

> Given the view of the Earth as a living being that emerges from
> Pynchon's novels, where sentience and some sort of spiritual
> existence appear to permeate all

Yes, the gothic intrusion of another world into this one: "You know what a
miracle is. Not what Bakunin said. But another world's intrusion into this
one. Most of the time we coexist peacefully, but when we do touch there's
cataclysm." (The Crying of Lot 49), not the gnostic search from this world
for another world.

> and where human existence continues
> across the life/death interface,

Yes, converting "Death into more death" (p.167), see Rathenau, Feldspath
etc.
If you really believe that Pynchon tells about a Christian Heavenly Kingdom
read Rilke's First Elegy:

"Wer, wenn ich schriee, hörte mich denn aus der Engel Ordnungen?
und gesetzt selbst, es nähme einer mich plötzlich ans Herz:
ich verginge von seinem stärkeren Dasein.
Denn das Schöne ist nichts als des Schrecklichen Anfang,
den wir noch grade ertragen, und wir bewundern es,
weil es gelassen verschmäht, uns zu zerstören.
Ein jeder Engel ist schrecklich."

"Who, though I cry aloud,
would hear me in the angel orders?
And should my plea ascend,
were I gathered to the glory
of some incandescent heart,
my own faint flame of being
would fail for the glare.
Beauty is as close to terror
as we can well endure.
Angels would not condescend
to damn our meagre souls.
That is why they awe
and why they terrify us so.
Every angel is terrible!"


> it's hard to see how Pynchon could
> be shoe-horned into a worldview as limited, spirit- and soulless,
> self-cancelling, and one-size-fits-all as social constructionism,
> that box just isn't big enough to contain Pynchon no matter how hard
> you shove and squeeze.
> --
> d  o  u  g

True, but nobody tried since there this no such thing as "social
constructionism," except in the head of Mr. Bauerlein.

Otto