Gorman ("The Specter") Takeshi & Neo-Freudian Revisionist Quackery

[Otto]

----- Original Message -----
From: "Terrance" <lycidas2 at earthlink.net>
Cc: <pynchon-l at waste.org>
Sent: Monday, January 05, 2004 10:48 PM
Subject: Re: Gorman ("The Specter") Takeshi & Neo-Freudian Revisionist
Quackery
>
> > >Not sure what you mean by a default state of being.
> >
> > It is the condition of all human beings after "The Fall"
> > (consciousness).
>
> Postlapsarian Man on a quest to Salvation is imprisoned in his own
> consciousness:  Mind is cut off from the world and is thus incapable of
> relating to the world
> adequately or with any satisfaction and so with pornographies (Science &
> Technology mixed with corruptions of  myth, mystery, magic, religious
> ritual, sacrament, oral
> community rites, holy grail,  a plethora of quests for "salvation" ) Man
> Narcissistically projects an Image of his Solipsistic imprisonment onto
> the world.
>
> See
>
> Thomas Pynchon's Gravity Rainbow : A Study of Its Conceptual Structure
> and of Rilke's Influence (American University Studies : Series Iv, English
> Lan)  Charles Hohmann. (Out Of Print)
>

Please give us some text parts.

What Pynchon takes from Rilke in the opening sentence is the scream, and
following the Rilke-link in this get's us to the play of the binaries
(beauty vs terror), the reversal of the meaning of an angel:

"Who, if I screamed, would hear me among the angelic orders?
And even if one of them suddenly pressed me against his heart,
I would fade in the strength of his stronger existence.
For Beauty is nothing but the beginning of Terror
that we're still just able to bear, and why we adore it
is because it serenely disdains to destroy us."

By the way, with this quote ends the seventh chapter, the first
part of  "The Recognitions" (1955).

Maybe we shouldn't consider another group-reading of GR before the
Hilbert-novel is out but a thematic reading, for example following up all
Rilke-references and trying to put them into the context of the novel.


"And though Earthliness forget you,
To the stilled Earth say: I flow.
To the rushing water speak: I am."
(622)

vs

"And if the earthly has forgotten you,
say to the still earth: I flow.
To the rapid water speak: I am."

(Weisenburger p. 267)

Otto