Zoyd's Dream.2 Pluralized Ontologies

[Michael Joseph]

Thanks, Terrance. The holy city of Vineland, which the fallen Vineland
actualizes, or the paradisiacal (realm of pure signifiers/illo tempore) in
fruitful tension with the historical (fallen work-cursed Adam and
labor-cursed Eve), seems a very apt example of Eliade's sense of sacred
parodox.

Perhaps it would help to consider that Eliade was non neoplatonic - that
the realm of meaning manifested itself within the useless, contingent,
historical artifact, or event, without changing it, or being limited in
any way by it. The inseparability of the incommensurate sacred and the
bounded profane was, as it was for Kierkegaard, a compelling paradox, and
the symbol of this paradox, which he called the coincidentia oppositorum,
became the most important symbol in Eliade's religious studies. He saw
this symbol as being universal (which is as close to a direct ontological
statement as we get in Eliade's writing).

Even though he was criticized for of glorifying traditional society,
Eliade believed that trad. and modern humanity were essentially the same.
Although modernity camouflaged its reliance on the sacred, this reliance
was in fact an indispensable component of its nature, of human nature.
Rather than perspectivizing modern humanity as an irreligious opposite to
traditional/religious humanity, Eliade regarded it as a type of religous
humanity - one in whose culture the founding myths and rituals were not
overtly celebrated (a kind of wireless technology), yet functioned as
such. (Statistics serve a mythic function in modern society: a graph or
table, a specific date, is uncritcally accorded a degree of power. So,
after 9/11, the NYT published a daily tally of the numbers believed to
have been killed - as if the accurate count could in some way explain what
had happened and thus dispel some of the grief and horror. In reading VL,
I am moved to wonder whether Pynchon includes bracketed dates next to his
films because he wants to assert the actuality of verisimilitude of the
film or 'film' he's referencing, or whether he is spoofing our means of
establishing what is real, our blind faith in numbers.)



Michael




> For Eliade,  modern nonreligion  equals new and second "fall" of
> humanity where the
> sense of the sacred is hidden deep in the unconscious.
>
> The profane is progressively transformed into the sacred, into
> participation in ultimate reality.
>
> But n the modern, profane world,  this must be done in the face of
> desacralizing forces seeking to make the sacred into the profane.
>
> Therefore, the sacred is  seen as the deepest human destiny, the lived
> dream:
>
>       ... Redeem
>       The time. Redeem
>       The unread vision in the higher dream...
>
> -- T. S. Eliot, "Ash Wednesday"
>