Oh, no! War talk on Pynchon-L?

[Doug Millison]

Barbara,

I'll share a secret with you.  The first time I read Thomas Merton's
autobiography, The Seven Storey Mountain (I think that's where he says
this, although I've read several of his books and it's been a few years ago
now), I had a hard time with one statement that he made, to the effect that
- and this is only a paraphrase, I don't have the book at hand --"if not
for the prayers of the saints" (and by that he meant not just the dead and
antique saints of the Church but everyday people right now -- or right
then, in the 50s when he was writing that book -- who do their best to live
Jesus' teachings of love and non-violence) "the world would have been
destroyed by evil long ago." But it started to make sense to me after I met
a few such "saints" myself. What goes around, comes around, I think.   We
do tend to get what we give.  This is not to say that people necessarily
die and suffer as a direct result of what they have personally done -- of
course people get caught up in conflicts over which they have no control
and into which they have, at best, indirect input:  the unfortunate victims
in New York and Washington on September 11, or the civilians getting killed
and maimed right this minute in Afghanistan, to name two groups a lot of
people are concerned about these days. Good thoughts, prayers, positive
vibes (George Harrison's passing has me in something of a 60s mood tonight,
I guess) all have an impact, sometimes obvious, sometimes not, at least
until the good thoughts and wishes and prayers are withdrawn and the
negativity emerges unopposed.   I'm as guilty as anybody of failing to
practice this, of course. But I've been in situations -- certain rooms,
certain street corners, certain meetings, certain interpersonal
interactions -- where that transition is palpable, when the good thoughts
evaporate and the negative vibes come into their own. What I'm leading up
to is that, in my reading of Pynchon at least, I don't think he's offering
negativity or despair, not in the final analysis, not the after-taste.  He
offers a cold, hard look at evil, and the complexities of human affairs
that make us all complicit in the bad shit to some degree, but I don't feel
soiled or diminished when I read him -- he offers enough transcendent
beauty and penetrating insight to lift me up out of the negative crap that
sometimes threatens to swamp me. I think that's because, in the midst of
all the crazy, evil stuff that he riffs on in his fiction, he lets just
enough light shine through to offer a bit of hope:  Pokler slipping his
wedding ring on the Dora slave's finger,  or Dixon raising his hand to --
non-violently -- stop the slave driver from whipping his slave and thus
enabling the slaves to run free, or Prairie finding it within herself to
forgive Frenesi and welcome her back into the family fold after all the
horrible stuff she's learned about her mother.  These moments are fleeting,
and I understand that it's easy to let them sink beneath the surface of all
that  bitter medicine Pynchon offers us to drink, but it's because of those
moments, because he can see how people yearn for something better than what
they get (and yearn to give better than what they so often give), and
because he can also see how tragic it really is that they get in their own
way and prevent themselves from reaching it, that I can come away from
Pynchon's books feeling refreshed.  (Of course it helps a lot that he
writes such beautiful prose.)

I can contrast that with somebody like Swift -- I recently went back and
re-read Gulliver's Travels.  Lots to laugh at in that book, but I found it
a bitter sort of laughter, and, finally, it left me feeling negative about
life and humankind in a way that  I just don't when I read Pynchon, even in
Pynchon's darkest moments.  Swift really pegs human beings, at least the
shadow side that acts out and creates so much misery, in the Yahoos, but he
doesn't -- not in my recent reading at least -- hold out much to keep me
from feeling soiled and shat upon; I'm sure I haven't read him closely
enough, and maybe some of my P-list colleagues will let me know where I've
gotten off track here.  But, I don't get that feeling with Pynchon, despite
the shadows that Pynchon sketches in, I can see the light, too. In that
resepct, Pynchon seems more like Cervantes -- Don Quixote is a figure of
fun, and Cervantes manages to bring a lot that's not very good about people
to light in that book, but he seems, to me at least, to do it with love and
a humor that may pinch but doesn't wound deeply.  Given the times in which
Pynchon writes -- he was just a little kid during WWII after all, and just
imagine how disappointed he might have felt when he started to learn the
grim truth behind all that glorious Home Front propaganda that he must have
soaked up, when he learned, among other things,  that Americans
(shareholders and directors of corporations that were playing both sides of
the fence during the war, like the Bush family, or so I hear) had profited
from all that death and slaughter and genocide through their investments in
companies on the other side -- I think he adds about as much sunshine as he
can and still be considered take things seriously.  But I do like to think
of him as one of the "saints" who helps to keep evil from destroying this
world, by injecting his humor and reflecting his sane, penetrating gaze.

Peace,
Doug




Barbara:
Platitudes are not all that are offered.  We offer influence and the weight
of support.  And for every pound the artist or the armchair critic or the
loud-mouthed p-lister contributes to an effort--whatever kind of effort--the
easier it makes someone teetering on line to throw in his/her weight too.
I'm not sure I was ever teetering, but if there was ever any doubt in my
mind, reading Thomas Pynchon made me want to run as far and as fast from the
middle as I could. He may not get his way in the end (his end), but he is
not "powerless," and neither are we. Just think what those lightbulbs coulda
did if they'da banded together and taken control (thier own little personal
circuits of *power*) from the Grid! Oh, Byron! Oh, Pynchon!  I throw my
weight with thee!



Doug Millison - Writer/Editor/Web Editorial Consultant
millison at online-journalist.com
www.Online-Journalist.com