ATDTdA : 12 "My Native land is not a country" #1, 326

[robinlandseadel at comcast.net]

         Keith:
         He's may be critquing science as monotheism and offering 
         up a polytheistic view. I doubt he'd throw out the scientific 
         method as part of the whole.

         Robin:
         Tesla's description of his vision of the transmitting tower 
         has many parallels with Rilke's experience of 'receiving' 
         the Duino Elegies, and Pynchon is deliberately undermining 
         the sceintific method in the process, as he does many times 
         in AtD and all his other books.

There's a number of spots within Pynchon's writing where he's chronicling
some scientific "breakthough" that was a vision recieved, not a product of
a process metectiously followed through, but some sort of cosmic goof or
even the result of a magickal process metectiously followed through.
There's the Nefastis Box in the Crying of Lot 49:

http://www.pynchon.pomona.edu/entropy/col2.html

There's Kekulé dreams of the Great Serpent in Gravity's Rainbow:

         Kekulé dreams the Great Serpent holding its own 
         tail in its mouth, the dreaming Serpent which 
         surrounds the World. But the meanness, the 
         cynicism with which this dream is to be used. The 
         Serpent that announces, "The World is a closed 
         thing, cyclical, resonant, eternally-returning," is to 
         be delivered into a system whose only aim is to 
         violate the Cycle. Taking and not giving back, 
         demanding that "productivity" and "earnings" keep 
         on increasing with time, the System removing from 
         the rest of the World these vast quantities of energy 
         to keep its own tiny desperate fraction showing a 
         profit: and not only most of humanity -- most of the 
         World, animal, vegetable, and mineral, is laid waste 
         in the process. The System may or may not understand 
         that it's only buying time. And that time is an artificial 
         resource to being with, of no value to anyone or anything 
         but the System, which must sooner or later crash to its 
         death, when its addiction to energy has become more 
         than the rest of the World can supply, dragging with it 
         innocent souls all along the chain of life.
         --Gravity's Rainbow, V412

http://www.themodernword.com/pynchon/pynchon_quotes.html

Don't know about your reading of the man's work, but my take is that Pynchon
puts a lot more faith in deep nudges from far elsewhere than in the scientific 
method. I mean statistically speaking, in terms of karmic enterprise and what
sort of characters have what sort of outcomes in his books, real magic trumps 
scientific enterprise. In Against the Day, in particular, there's all sorts of 
little moral tales based on older fairy tales. 

You know, it's times like these that it wish I had Paris Hilton's term paper on 
magical realism in Gravity's Rainbow:

         The humour extended to guest stars, too: on one 
         occasion Paris Hilton, America's party girl supreme, 
         turned up on the show and surprised everyone by 
         discussing her passion for Thomas Pynchon novels, 
         especially the notoriously dense, borderline 
         unreadable Gravity's Rainbow.

http://news.independent.co.uk/media/article2125417.ece

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