Bible thumpers, old and newuaker, Catholic,

[Bryan Snyder]

Probably already mentioned but... Angel of Lubeck, from one of the coolest
passages in GR, in my opinion (obviously):

"But out there at the horizon, out near the burnished edge of the world, who
are those visitors standing . . . these robed figures—perhaps, at this
distance, hundreds of miles tall—their faces, serene, unattached, like the
Buddha’s, bending over the sea, impassive, indeed, as the Angel that stood
over Lübeck during the Palm Sunday raid, come that day neither to destroy
nor to protect, but to bear witness to a game of seduction.  It was the
next-to-last step London took before her submission, before that liaison
that would being her at length to the eruption and scarring of the wasting
pox noted on Roger Mexico’s map, latent in this love she shares with the
night-going rake Lord Death . . . because sending the RAF to make a terror
raid against civilian Lübeck was the unmistakable long look that said hurry
up and fuck me, that brought the rockets hard and screaming, the A4s, which
were to’ve been fired anyway, a bit sooner instead . . .

What have the watchmen of world’s edge come tonight to look for? Deepening
on now, monumental beings, stoical, on toward slag, toward ash the color the
night will stabilize at . . . what is there grandiose enough to witness?"

And the obligatory: I love that f'in book!

-----Original Message-----
From: owner-pynchon-l at waste.org [mailto:owner-pynchon-l at waste.org] On Behalf
Of mikebailey
Sent: Friday, May 25, 2007 11:28 AM
To: pynchon-l at waste.org
Subject: Re: Bible thumpers, old and newuaker, Catholic,



On Fri, 25 May 2007 robinlandseadel at comcast.net riposted:
>           have to be a Christian to appreciate the Bible as literature,
>           you don't have to be Jewish to appreciate Kabbalah.
>

to malignd's:
> >
> > Ah, yes; the occult.  Madame Blavatsky and all.  I forgot about that
> > rigorous source of evidence.
> >
> > Nevertheless, I feel as certain as you that Kushner doesn't believe in
> > angels and base that opinion on that fact that he's not insane.
>

big angels appearing over a battlefield in, what was it, WWI or WWII?  and
mentioned in GR - subjective reality shared by enough people that
for somebody who wasn't there to define an objective reality
that doesn't validate the experience of those present involves a value
judgement I'm not prepared to make...

just the very names, Ouspensky & Blavatsky...give me a
Zippy-the-Pinhead type of rapture
like Blake, they created systems, possibly self-consistent (and
therefore, by Goedel, not all-inclusive, or vice versa)
-- and possibly, given lexical imprecision, able to be mapped to
each other and even to other either partial or inconsistent
(or both) maps purporting to "explain it all", such as the Bible,
the scientific method (one of the best, but not completely immune to
misapplication) or postmodernism...allowing some future personage
with a research grant and more resources to compare and trace influences
and measure against yet better systems that have evolved...

but for me personally today, sitting down to a copy of, say,
the Urantia Book and having it speak to you so that you build it
into your set of associations and use its terminology in creating
your own explanation of the world, isn't impossible -
but time constraints function as a lovely Ockham's razor, so
that any one corpus (Crowley's Equinoxes, the Bible, Rosicrucianism,
calculus) competes with the others and with life tasks for attention,
which actually helps the evolution...feedback cycle

and speaking of evolution, the concept of Evolution merges with the
Kabalistic Angel known as Metatron - who appears in GR -
and in a manner of speaking, "Angels" in
some ways may be somewhat mappable to "Principles" -
It's like if I were sitting there with John of Patmos,
and saying "take your meds, I don't see no nine-horned beast"
- but that would miss his point...a value judgement I might
quite well make, as my internal evaluators don't make much sense out
of his vision...though thinkers who accomplished things undreamt of
to me - such as Isaac Newton - felt that devout study of
the Revelation to be worth a lot of their limited timespan...and
Newton is not on record as saying "yep, I studied it, and it's a load
of hooey"...(argument ad hominem...I'll be winding down shortly)

the dominant culture prefers the scientific paradigm, so to
speak and think in terms of Angels does indicate a willful
changing of the discourse (like Phoebe's refutation of evolution
as a fact on _Friends_, as put forth as a fact by "scary science guys",
who at various points have asserted untruths as fact - "rocks
do not fall from the sky", "there is nothing smaller than an atom" etc)

my point?  Terminology: maybe we're all talking about similar
experiences but "we just saw them from a different point of view"
(Bob Dylan)