The Afterlife

[Otto]

Toby G Levy:
> Whoa!  I don't want to get into "opinions of the author,"  but the
> continuity of life after death is one of the major streams that flow
> through GR.  And I never read anywhere that Von Braun was being cynical
> when he wrote those words.
>

One of the major streams that runs throughout GR in my opinion is that
there's evil being done with this kind of belief, as with dogmatic beliefs
in general. In GR the Other Side is only evil, there are no traces of a
forgiving fatherly God anywhere. It's my opinion (my judgement, if you will)
that von Braun is absolutely cynical here. I think I can follow Steven
Weisenburger very much who calls the von Braun-speech a hypocritical, "pious
self-serving homily" in his really fine, highly recommended essay on the
epigraph:

"I explore how, taking von Braun at his word, *Gravity's Rainbow* continues
the "spiritual existence" of the 1962 homily, "Why I Believe in
Immortality," ironies and all. I argue that von Braun's words haunt the
novel just as pragmatist inventor Ben Franklin's epigraph about the promise
of immortal justice evidently haunts von Braun's own text. But we should not
see this as only a one-way process of haunting. Instead, as counterspell or
reverse-magic, Pynchon's degenerative satire is meant to spook and thus to
disrupt the historical sources of its own--of *our own*--terror, sources von
Braun well represents. . . .
(...) One of (the) most insistent themes is the final solution or assault of
a bureaucratized, technologized fascism on human life, figured as the
attempt to colonize and dominate Death, to rationalize the Other Side. Of
course von Braun's mini-sermon implied that Science would eventually do just
that."
(Steven Weisenburger: "Haunted History and *Gravity's Rainbow*, Pynchon
Notes 42-43, Spring-Fall 1998, p. 13.)

>
> What about all those seances and the Angels in the sky and Enzian's
> debates with the nihilists (just to name a few examples)?
>
> Toby
>

Yeah, what about them? The guardian angel of our childhood's prayers has
become an angel of destruction. Read Rilke:

"Who, if I screamed, would hear me among the angelic orders?
And even if one of them suddenly pressed me against his heart,
I would fade in the strength of his stronger existence.
For Beauty is nothing but the beginning of Terror
that we're still just able to bear, and why we adore it
is because it serenely disdains to destroy us."
(R. M. Rilke, Duino Elegies, quoted by:
Richard Locke, One of the Longest, Most Difficult, Most Ambitious Novels in
Years, NYT, March 11, 1973)
http://www.nytimes.com/books/97/05/18/reviews/pynchon-rainbow.html

What do you believe Mohammed Atta was believing when he crashed the plane
into the tower? That there's continuity of life after death of course. That
he would be in Heaven immediately after his death, surrounded by fifty
virgins. This is how bin Laden is rationalizing Death and controlling the
Other side. The old Hassan I Sabbah-trick to get people die for you
voluntarily.

Otto

> On Sat, 27 Oct 2001 Otto wrote:
>
> > Doug:
> > > Does Pynchon never answer the questions he raises?
> > > Seems to me he affirms a small set of positives again and again
> > > in his writing:  love, community, family, respect for the Earth,
> > > the continuity of life after death.
> >
> > Ah, the last point . . . is said by the cynical Wernher von Braun as
> the
> > opening quote of GR and I don't believe that this is meant to be  seen
> in any
> > way as the opinion of the author of the novel.
>