MDDM Ch. 78

[cathy ramirez]

--- Otto <ottosell at yahoo.de> wrote:
> 
> What is remarkable again (see 136.17-19) is the fact
> that Astronomy and
> Astrology aren't divided yet into science and, what
> science and
> enlightenment have made of Astrology later, a
> superstition.
> 
> Otto


Is that how it happened? Did science and enlightenment
make of astrology a superstition? What the line
divides, I suspect, is no more or less important that
what it unites or what it merges and blends and 
commercializes on technical and political 
sacred/profane ground. 

Ambiguities, metamorphoses, flux. 

In Pynchon's fiction we don't see science and
enligtenment, despite the reasoned attempt to dismiss
these (astology etc),  making a superstition of
astrology and the ancient arts and sciences. What we
see is integration, assimilation, amalgamation. From a
negative POV, what we get is profane and secular
abuses and grotesque travesty of the sacred and
ancient arts and sciences. The Gnostics of GR. The
holy grail, the cup and blood are platics. But eh
grail is not dismissed as superstition, it is
transmogrified.


We see that "one dimentional thinking", dispite its
attempts to dismiss the ancient arts and sciences does
not reason astrology and the sacred out of existence.
Science is mixed with magic, religion with
psychoanalysis, the rocket&gallows with the cross. 



"The formally antagonistic realms merge on technical
and political grounds ---magic and science, life and
death....

 Marcuse, One Dimensional Man   

 
Life and death. And there are other forces working on
these marriages and divorces. 

  see Marcuse, One Dimensional Man   

 


But the Virgin never quite becomes the  dynamo.
Extinction is never total. Nature is always in the
state of Becoming. Flux! Scaterbrained mother earth is
only won over as a sytem, rigid and calulated, but she
repudiates that system, even as the rocket tears
through her virgin robes and rapes her, even as the
rocket descends on the theater of America. 

And there are Ambiguities, metamorphoses, and flux. 
It's not all bad shit. Flux and flow. 



Again, it's an American traditon that can be traced,
as Tony Tanner has traced it his wonderful study, to
Emerson 

(ultimately it can be traced, in the West anyway, to
the Great Grand father of the Postmodernists and
Existentialists, the Sophists, specifically,
Protagoras--on an ontic level it is a coming-to-be and
passing-away, like that famous stream one can not step
into twice; on the epistemic level it is apparent in
the "postmodern" stream of consciosness narratives,
and on the semantic level it is also the "postmodern"
(not reader response)  particular flow of reader and
text)

  
The flux or "ubuity of flow" opens the way for
metamorphosis. Ambigiuously, it involves both  Lines
and Cirles. The rainbow, if the earth did not prevent
us from seeing it in its entirety, is a circle. A
promise of eternity not extinction. But a closed
circle or system, is also that nightmare lashing its
tail. 

see THE AMERICAN MYSTERY American Literature from
Emerson to DeLillo, Cambride, 2000

To Lucky chapter number 13

Not sure that this chapter demonstrates the efficacy
of astrology at all. It's more to do with politics and
paranoia. But there is ambiguity enough to suggest
that Astology, despite Mason's skepticism and abuse of
it, may yet hold some power. And Mason's admiration
for Dixon's skill seem to  be something of a
metamorphoses in his own thinking about the art, but I
think his comments reflect his admiration for Dixon
and and Dixon's ability to merge and combine the old
arts and the new sciences with such wonderful affect
with all they encountered, including themselves. 

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