ATDTDA (9): 239/251 Take This Chance, Chums

[Jasper]

Outstanding!  So but considering these passages are spoken by characters 
with questionable reliability -- the Cohen and Miles respectively --  
(and several times removed from Author), should we consider this 
platonic "more real" to be real?  Or is it an illusion?  Or a lie?  Or 
doesn't it matter?  Is it the seeking alone that counts?

Keith wrote:
> In this section Pynchon offers two significant passages juxtaposing 
> the rhetoric of capitalism/imperialism/visibilty and 
> spirituality/transcendence/invisibility. Alchemy/chemistry is 
> presented elsewhere in a similar fashion. Through the perspectives 
> quoted below he is presenting phenomenal reality as but a mirror image 
> of something greater, something "more real." Implied is that material 
> pursuits are the same, less real, inferior reflections, of greater 
> pursuits towards transcendence. I am not saying that these 
> perspectives represent "Pynchon's perspective," but that these 
> perspectives are presented alongside others in ATD and are one major 
> aspect in the thread of mirroring and reflections.
>
> Enlightenment is a dodgy proposition. It all depends how much you want 
> to risk. Not money so much as personal safety, precious time, against 
> a very remote long shot coming in. It happens, of course. Out of the 
> dust, the clouds of sweat and breath, the drumming of hooves, the 
> animal rises up behind the field, the last you’d’ve expected, tall, 
> shining, inevitable, and passes through them all like a beam of 
> morning sunlight through the spectral residue of a dream. But it’s 
> still a fool’s bet and a mug’s game, and you might not have the will 
> or the patience. (239)
>
> It wanted us to know that we, too, are here on a Pilgrimage. [...] 
> When all the masks have been removed, it is really an inquiry into our 
> own duty, our fate. Which is not to penetrate Asia in hopes for a 
> profit. Which is not to perish in the deserts of the world without 
> reaching our objective. Which is not to rise in the hierarchies of 
> power. Not to discover fragments of any True Cross however imagined. 
> As the Franciscans developed the Stations of the Cross to allow any 
> parishioner to journey to Jerusalem without leaving his 
> church-grounds, so have we been brought up and down the paths and 
> aisles of what we take to be the all-but-boundless world, but which in 
> reality are only a circuit of humble images reflecting a glory greater 
> than we can imagine - to save us from the blinding terror of having to 
> make the real journey, from one episode to the next of the last day of 
> Christ on Earth, and at last to the real, unbearable Jerusalem. (251)
>
> Slouching towards Bethlehem
> W.B Yeats
>
> Turning and turning in the widening gyre
> The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
> Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
> Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
> The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
> The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
> The best lack all conviction, while the worst
> Are full of passionate intensity.
> Surely some revelation is at hand;
> Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
> The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
> When a vast image out of Spritus Mundi
> Troubles my sight: somewhere in the sands of the desert.
>
> A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
> A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
> Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
> Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
> The darkness drops again; but now I know
> That twenty centuries of stony sleep
> were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
> And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
> Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
>
>
>