MDDM Christ & History

[Terrance]

Otto, you know I'm just playing the Devil's Advocate here, in the Jesuit
sense that is. 

Otto wrote:
> 
> Christ is only insofar mentioned as the "Manifest Destiny" rests upon the
> Christian belief.

How do you know this? 

> 
> When I said "textpiece" I meant that and not headline or postscript.

Fair enough, postscript. Nevertheless, it's there. Christ! Why try to
sweep Christ under the carpet? This is, after all, the REVd's writing. 

> 
> History is not mentioned? I read it twice. What goes for history in general
> of course goes for American history as well -- mostly myths and fairytales.
> 
> Otto

I did not say History was not mentioned. I said, American History is not
mentioned in the passage. My point being that RC has written something
about History and Christ and not Manifest Destiny and American History.
This is clear from the postscript and from the passage itself. 

Is History in general (and that would include American history)  mostly
myths and fairy tales? 

If history is mostly myth and fairy tale, is this a good thing, a bad
thing? 

Romance? 


More importantly, does RC agree with this? 

If so, what is he saying about Christ and History?

 What of the Chapter that proceeded this one? The History in that
Chapter, of a massacre?  Pynchon now goes to Mason's historical
record--his field record, as does RC. It's clear that RC is reading from
the field record here (perhaps the most important historical text
Pynchon employs and plays with in the book) and it's significant, I
suspect, that it is Ives who raises the question about Mason going alone
or with Dixon, in other words, he questions, as has been the habit of
the listeners, the RC's tall-tale telling or Stencilization from the
recorded facts. RC disputes Mason's account with his own remembrance of
a conversation he had with Dixon. (This is all beginning to sound more
and more like DQ, isn't it?)   We read that there are feuds going on,
people killing the grandfather of one family as revenge upon another. We
read that there is a forgetfullness in the Americans that the
Astronomers think of as Hellish, the river of time that runs around
America is Lethe waters and after Mason is guiltily reading his Ghastly
Fop and Dixon has contemplated falling to his knees (his Quaker
Conscience not yet asleep) or taking revenge himself, and of Flight,
they begin to wonder what part they are playing in this Drama Inferno,
who they are working for, and they move along the line as if on rungs of
a ladder, a ladder ascending.  Does remind of Jacob's ladder and
Remembrance. 

"Behind,--below,--diminishing, they hear, and presently lose, a Voicing
disconsolate, of Regret at their Flight." 

Has Pynchon or RC inverted the universe again? Yup! 

Isaac, the son of Abraham, married a woman named Rebekah.  (Couldn't
resist) 

When Isaac was 60 years old, Rebekah gave birth to twin boys, Esau and
Jacob. (Geminus) 

John 1:51 And he saith unto him, Verily, verily, I say unto you,
Hereafter ye shall see heaven open, and the angels of God ascending and
descending upon the Son of man.