Stone profile w/ Pynchonian gnostic reverberations

[pynchonoid]

from:
Publishers Lunch
Wednesday, April 30:

On Stone
The LA Times has a visit with Robert Stone: "If any
single idea has 
defined Stone's nearly 40-year career as a writer, it
is this notion of chaos 
and how we behave in its presence, the way it can
consume us at the 
core."
Stone profile
<http://click.email-publisher.com/maaa2zKaaXHqJa5kyATb/>

...from the LA Times article, some Pynchonian gnostic
reverberations:

"[...] The question of soul — of gaining it and losing
it, of how we nourish it or how we don't — is another
central element of Stone's fiction, the idea that,
even in the most hallucinatory moments, a spiritual
quest is going on. Over the years, his characters
(many of whom are drug cases or alcoholics, lost souls
in the most fundamental sense) have been labeled
burnouts, but really, just the opposite is true. For
men like John Converse or Ahearn, it's not that
disassociation leads to chaos, but the other way
around.

In Stone's universe, then, everything — alcohol,
narcotics, lust, religion — is a tool, a way of
navigating the darkness, of making meaning where there
is none. What's striking, Stone insists, is that the
deeper we delve into disorder, the more orderly it
seems.

"There was this scene in one of the towns in the Gaza
Strip," he says, recalling a 1992 trip to the occupied
territories. "The Palestinians are on strike because
the U.N. can't give them enough work. They're having a
sit-in, but the Israelis only allow us to employ so
many people, so what are we going to do? And the girl
who is the go-between for the Israelis and the
strikers thinks everything is cool. But as it turns
out, everything isn't cool, and in the afternoon,
there's a bomb, and everything has gone as badly as it
can."

What Stone is suggesting is that, in almost any
situation, reality is a matter of perception, that
meaning, truth is relative and God is an emptiness
with which we must continually contend. This, too, is
a theme that marks his fiction including "Bay of
Souls" where Ahearn sorrows after (but cannot
reconcile with) his lapsed Catholicism.

Still, Stone insists, God is not an absence, not
exactly. "I feel something like the aftermath of a
divine presence," he says, "although I don't believe
intellectually in the divine presence. I feel an
order, a desired goodness that was presented to us,
and that we somehow ignored."

It is not, in other words, that God never existed, but
that at some point he abandoned us, that he created
the universe and moved on, leaving us to sift through
the shard ends, "les mystères," as Stone calls them in
"Bay of Souls," "very old things ... left over from
Creation," all the things we cannot know.

In the face of that, Stone's characters must
continually ask themselves how to keep on living, how
to face another day. "I think of Dostoevsky, who said,
'Suicide has gotten me through many a difficult
night,' " Stone says. "But on the other hand, I think
you take courage and do what has to be done.
Certainly, I have enough courage to see the sun go
down tomorrow."

As for what this means in an indifferent universe,
Stone admits he doesn't know. "It feels to me," Stone
murmurs, "very much that we are in a godless and,
finally, uncontrolled situation, although I agree with
Pascal who said, 'One sees the evidence every day.' It
is impossible for me to believe, and yet I desire to
believe." 





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