MDMD 487.18 This 'New World' a secret Body of Knowledge

[Doug Millison]

from the archives:
http://waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l&month=9802&msg=23897&sort=date

Date:	Mon, 16 Feb 1998 11:14:08 -0800
To:	pynchon-l@[omitted]
From:	millison@[omitted] (Doug Millison)
Subject: Re: MDMD(17) 487.18 This 'New World' a secret Body of Knowledge


At 8:23 PM 2/13/98, Peter Petto wrote:
>487.18 'This 'New World' was ever a secret Body of Knowledge, - meant to be
>studied with the same dedication as the Hebrew Kabbala would demand.  Forms
>of the land, the flow of water, the occurence of what used to be called
>Miracles, all are text, - to be attended to, manipulated, read, remembered.'

Texts, yes. And readers. The keepers of this secret history of America seem
a far edgier sub-group of the larger group of people who keep our common
History mentioned back in Chapter 35.

At 348.1, of History, Wicks says  "her Practitioners, to survive, must soon
learn the arts of the quidnunc, spy, and Taproom Wit,-- that there may ever
continue more than one life-line back into a Past we risk, each day, losing
our forebears in forever,-- not a Chain of single Links, for one broken
Link could lose us All,-- rather a great disorderly Tangle of Lines, long
and short, weak  and strong, vanishing into the Mnemonick Deep, with only
their Destination in common."

The keepers of this secret history of America seem far more marginal --
underground, criminal, cannibals, necromancers:  487.7 "Never Reporters
that anyone else was likely to believe,-- men who ate the Flesh and
fornicated with the Ghosts of their Dead, murderers and Pirates on the run,
monks in parchment Coracles stitched together from copied Pages of the Book
of Jonah, fishermen too many Nights out of Port, any Runagate craz'd enough
to sail West."

Others have presented some good background on "coracles". It may be worth
noting that Jonah himself was on the run, when he was swallowed up by the
whale. God had ordered Jonah to go to "the great city of Nineveh and preach
against it, because its wickedness has come up before me" (Jonah 1:2).
Instead, Jonah ran away to Joppa, caught a ship bound for Tarshish, the
storm comes up, the sailors decide the storm rages because God is angry
with Jonah, and throw him overboard. After God releases him from the whale,
Jonah goes to Nineveh, preaches as God instructed; the curious end of the
story is that a highly judgmental Jonah gets angry when God chooses to show
compassion to the city even though the residents do not give up their evil
ways.

Tempting to read those "fishermen too many Nights out of port" as Christ's
disciples, although they may just be the kind of fishermen who got lost and
"discovered" America as some historians believe may have happened more than
once in pre-Colombian times.

A quick Internet search  turned up this passage from The Pilgrim's
Progress, Section 6, where Judge Hategood addresses the Prisoner as
"Runagate":

44
         Then was Pickthank sworn, and bid say what he knew, in behalf of
their Lord the
         King against the Prisoner at the Bar.
  45
         Pick. ° My Lord,and you Gentlemen all,This fellow I have known of
a long time, and
         have heard him speak things that ought not to be spoke. For he
hath railed on our
         noble Prince Beelzebub, and hath spoke contemptibly of his
honorable Friends,
         °whose names are the Lord Oldman , the Lord Carnal delight, the
Lord Luxurious,
         the Lord Desire of Vain-glory, my old Lord Lechery , Sir Having
Greedy, with all the
         rest of our Nobility; and he hath said moreover, that if all men
were of his mind, if
         possible, there is not one of these Noble-men should have any
longer a being in
         this Town; Besides, he hath not been afraid to rail on you, my
Lord, who are now
         appointed to be his Judge, calling you an ungodly villain, with
many other such like
         villifying terms, with which he hath bespattered most of the
Gentry of our Town.
         When this Pickthank had told his tale, the Judge directed his
speech to the Prisoner
         at the Bar, saying, Thou Runagate, Heretick, and Traitor, hast
thou heard what
         these honest Gentlemen have witnessed against thee.