MDDM ch.67: "Yet, does it live" (657.13)

Doug Millison millison at online-journalist.com
Mon Aug 5 09:37:43 CDT 2002


The "gods" retreat:  an old, and hoped-for (by many discerning people --
I'm just fnishing up a reading of the Illiad, where the gods move men
around the bloody battlefield like pieces on a chessboard, and the men
resent it, when they're not high on the gore) story, given the nature of
the "gods" or "God" in many traditions, including the Old and New
Testament.  Mason senses this, feels it as a loss, his doubts (reinforced
by an experiment-based scientific-material worldview) won't let him do
anything about it except plunge into melancholy and stylized gothic
titillation, imo.

Dixon, at times (he wavers and wobbles; Mason does, too; Pynchon tangles
the lines), may represent another tradition, equally old, of humans finding
a way to find "God" or "Spirit" at or through the heart of human existence
and the "material" world-universe-all-that-is -- the "creation
spirituality" of Meister Eckhart (and Matthew Fox, in this 21st century) in
the Christian tradtion (and, in every other major faith tradition), which
sees, simply and clearly, that you can't escape "God" or "Spirit", can't
fall out of it, because everything is contained within it.

No simple dichotomy in P, of course -- with these two strands, and many
more, he weaves a tapestry, a world, worlds.




At 7:40 AM -0400 8/5/02, Bandwraith at aol.com wrote:
[snip some of a fine post]
>
>Catholicism with its various saints, purgatory, etc., seems
>not that spiritually far removed from what the natives
>are prepared to embrace in their own spirituality,
>which is probably why they allowed themselves to be baptised
>in the first place.


The Native American traditions I know a bit about include lots of stories,
characters, powers that lend themselves to co-optation by a catholic
institution. It's also difficult to say how much the early converts really
understood about what the missionaries were trying to teach them, given the
poor ability of the latter to speak the languages of the former.  There was
also an alarming tendency on the part of some of the misssionaries to just
wave their arms and sprinkle holy water and call them "baptized" -- sort of
like those U.S. military body counts in Vietnam, perhaps, as much to
reassure the men back at Higher HQ as for anything else



More information about the Pynchon-l mailing list