Pynchon as propaganda

[Glenn Scheper]

Eisegesizing the text of the recent "nothingness..." post
from http://www.wlu.ca/~wwwsem/rak/baptism.html to contrast
the exoteric (esoteric) "defining Christian experience":
 
> Baptism, (autofellatio or autocunnilingus)
> the Word of God (self-referential erotic bodily speech act)
> communicated (spoken, written)
> through water, (ejaculation)
> is the event (death, rebirth, metamorphosis, metanoia, transcendence)
> that gives structure (gnosis, being, life, community, oneness,
divinity)
> to the Christian life. (Christ incarnate)
 
> This is because Baptism (AF, AC)
> is the beginning (theogony, calling, coming, washing, adoption,
communion)
> of the Christian life (an indwelling usurping overcoming Holy Spirit)
> of discipleship (alienation, abjection, bondage, othering, ego-death)
> and because Baptism (AF, AC)
> embodies (makes flesh)
> the fundamental mystery (hidden truth, taboo, name, word, work, etc.)
> of Christian existence. (atemporal, postmortal, slain, sacrificed
being)
 
> Baptism (AF, AC)
> makes us Christians (Christs ourselves)
> by making us participants (theurgists, central actors, he who washed
us)
> in the death (as humans)
> and resurrection (as aliens, spirits, angels, divinity, god)
> of Jesus. (prime exemplar demonstrating perfected resurrection)
 
> When we are baptized (AF, AC: intending once, or chronically?)
> we die and we are buried with Christ (hmmm... no, wait...)
> and we are resurrected from the grave in Christ,
> as indicated by immersion in the water.
 
That has no phenomenal basis in my personal experiences as yet!
So it appears to be speculative metaphysics from a non-gnostic
who cannot distinguish esoteric mystery from exoteric metaphor.
 
Let's consult the most prolific female exegete, Emily Dickinson.
Her 597 poems have 149 (die dies dying dead death grave* tomb*).
This first poem confesses that resurrection is taken on faith;
the second, mentioning a tomb, is a fanciful poetic excursion,
not like buried above, a mis-step onto an transcendental idea.
 
http://www.bartleby.com/113/1096.html
 Part One: Life
 XCVI
 MY life closed twice before its close;
 It yet remains to see
 If Immortality unveil
 A third event to me,
 So huge, so hopeless to conceive,
 As these that twice befell.
 Parting is all we know of heaven,
 And all we need of hell.
 
http://www.bartleby.com/113/4010.html
 Part Four: Time and Eternity
 X
 I DIED for beauty, but was scarce
 Adjusted in the tomb,
 When one who died for truth was lain
 In an adjoining room.
 He questioned softly why I failed?
 'For beauty,' I replied.
 'And I for truth,--the two are one;
 We brethren are,' he said.
 And so, as kinsmen met a night,
 We talked between the rooms,
 Until the moss had reached our lips,
 And covered up our names.
 
Resuming in-reading...
 
> We receive the gift of the Holy Spirit
  (Holy, hagios = set aside from common use = uncommon;
  Spirit, pneuma (breath, air-in-motion) = ejaculation.
  However spirit as Hegel set it out is just a mindset.)
> for a life of fruitful discipleship,
  (I hear profitable. But flower = mortality; fruit = divinity.)
> as indicated by the anointing with oil.
  (of gladness, joy, jouissance, ejaculation. Merci au francophones.)
 
> In this way, (the strait way of AF-AC)
> Baptism (AF-AC)
> is the work of the Holy Spirit (uncommon ejaculation)
> contradicting all of the values and
> expectations of normal existence.
  (Surely I come quickly to give a wider meaning to paraphilia.)
 
> Through Baptism the Holy Spirit
> overcomes the plight of humanity -
> our longing for immortality in the
> midst of the knowledge of death -
> by enabling us to die and to give up
> our delusions of grandeur.
  (Garp. Plight of Cartesian subject. What's grander than divinity?
  He does not know/savoir death, but only knows-of/connaitre death.
  "Enabling to die" suggests a displaced reward for one with none.)
 
> In this sense Baptism is rebirth.
> It is not that we once again come forth
> from our mother's womb,
> but that we become nothing and are
> created again from nothing.
  (Like the ever-evanescent Buddhist now? If you could have had
  my psychosis, you'd know that there is a profound equivalence
  of AF and maternal rape with patricide. I recognized in Hegel:
  "The ethical consciousness cannot disclaim the crime and its
  guilt. The deed consists in setting in motion what was unmoved,
  and in bringing out what in the first instance lay shut up as
  a mere possibility," and in Nietsche: "The good fortune of my
  existence, its uniqueness perhaps, lies in its fatality: I am,
  to express it in the form of a riddle, already dead as my father,
  while as my mother I am still living and becoming old.")
 
> We are sent into nothingness and called
> forth again into new personhood in
> Christ.
  (No, the nothingness is intrinsic to Christ, at least for now.
  Perhaps being a beast that "was, and is not, and yet is" will
  change at decease into him that "was and is and is to come".)
 
> Our new birth is a "birth"
> from the tomb,
> not from the womb.
  (Hear the agronomic metaphor: Flowers do not always fruit.)
 
But what is the relevance of all that to this thread?
 
    There were men called "army chaplains." They preached
    inside some of these buildings. There were actually
    soldiers, dead now, who sat or stood, and listened.
    Holding on to what they could. Then they went out, and
    some died before they got back inside a
    garrison-church again. Clergymen, working for the
    army, stood up and talked to the men who were going to
    die about God, death, nothingness, redemption,
    salvation. It really happened. It was quite common.
                                        (GR 693)
 
To Pynchon, possessing this understanding (more sure word
(AF) as Paul calls it, works (AF) to accompany faith) the
concept of general salvation obtained discursively rather
than by hearing (AF), confession (AF), and baptism (AF),
may be only an effete, hence fatal, placebo. Very ironic.
 
Yours truly,
Glenn Scheper
scheper at antelecom.net
http://www.antelecom.net/~scheper/
Copyleft(!) Forward freely.
 
Ps. Affected by the war? I wrote one payee as "Warterworks".