VLVL2 (9.5): "Purring into Transcendence"

[Dave Monroe]

"What if, wild and unreasonable hope, she'd only been
putting him on all this time, and this was her
eccentric, even weird idea of flirting with him? [...]
It was driving him toward what, in fairly close to it
now, he could detect as some state of literally
mindless joy.  There was no way he knew of to
experience such joy and at the same time keep his
mind.  He wasn't sure this might not be her real
mission--to make of his life a koan, or unsolvable Zen
puzzle, that would send him purring into
transcendence." (VL, Ch. 9, p. 180)


"mindless joy"

Cf. ...

"remember that these are mostly brains ravaged by
antisocial and mindless pleasures" (GR, p. 681)

http://www.hyperarts.com/pynchon/gravity/extra/gr-what.html


"koan"

Cf. ...

"li'l kinda Zen meditation" (VL, Ch. 3, p. 29)

"was it a koan she was meant to consider in depth"
(VL, p. 141)

And see as well, e.g., ...

http://www.ciolek.com/WWWVLPages/ZenPages/KoanStudy.html

http://waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l&month=0109&msg=60225&sort=date


"purring into transcendence"

Porush, David. "'Purring into Transcendence':
   Pynchon's Puncutron Machine."  The Vineland
   Papers: Critical Takes on Pynchon's Novel.
   Eds. Green, G., D.J. Greiner and L. McCaffery.
   Normal, IL: Dalkey Archive, 1994.  31-45.

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