Flying Towards Grace

[robinlandseadel at comcast.net]

          Welcome from Bagdad by the Blog!!!

Monte Davis sez:

          . . . . All this was part of the received story of 
          WWII in British, French, Belgian, some German 
          (and no doubt Soviet) popular as well as scholarly 
          history from the 1950s on. If Americans didn't 
          know it, it wasn't because the FBI, CIA, DoD 
          and NASA vigilantly burned all those books 
          and articles at our borders. It was because 
          we were so busy producing and consuming 
          *other* versions, the ones that featured the 
          urgent Cold War present and the shiny space 
          future rather than some boring old arcana 
          about German munitions procurement. We 
          didn't want to hear about WvB as an SS officer, 
          even pro forma. We were happy to hear 
          (and to the extent he talked about that time 
          at all, he was happy to tell us quite truthfully) 
          that the Gestapo had hassled him based on 
          accusations that his team was spending too 
          much time chatting about space, not enough 
          time heads-down thinking of ways to speed 
          up A4 production. Mort Sahl's wisecrack in 
          1960 and Tom Lehrer's song in 1965 weren't 
          encoded messages about suppressed history; 
          they were pointing to what was in plain sight. 

          Bottom line #2, which is really the same bottom line:

           Last week I quoted Proverbs for Paranoids #3 
          ("If they can get you asking the wrong questions, 
          they don't have to worry about answers"). When
           it comes to paranoia, OBA has acknowledged 
          his debt to Orwell. I think #3 directs us not to the 
          Orwell of _1984_, in which all the history 
          incongruent with the official version has been 
          erased. That's easy, in a way -- it's all about Them.

          It directs us -- more usefully, I think -- to the 
          Orwell who wrote "To see what is in front of 
          one's nose needs a constant struggle." That's 
          hard -- it's all about us.

And, rilly, rilly, rily I think that's great, and the mirror thing has so much 
use as a metaphor in AtD and I'm still paranoid. Of course, and 
consequently, my rants are onto the strength of ten, which, as you note, 
can be both good and bad. And it frees me up to look for more ways
to abuse commas, and ellipsis. . . .

I read Pynchon's intro to 1984 this morning, looking for 'clews'.

Oba's intro to Orwell's classic contains some of 
Pynchon's best non-fiction writing:

      In a 1946 article in The Managerial Revolution, an analysis 
      of the world crisis by the American ex-Trotskyist James 
      Burnham, Orwell wrote, “The huge, invincible, everlasting 
      slave empire of which Burnham appears to dream will not 
      be established, or if established, will not endure, because 
      slavery is no longer a stable basis for human society.” In 
      its hints of restoration and redemption, perhaps “The 
      Principles of Newspeak” serves as a way to brighten an 
      otherwise bleakly pessimistic ending—sending us back 
      out into the streets of our own dystopia whistling a slightly 
      happier tune than the end of the story by itself would 
      have warranted.

      There is a photograph, taken around 1946 in Islington, 
      of Orwell with his adopted son, Richard Horatio Blair. 
      The little boy, who would have been around two at the 
      time, is beaming, with unguarded delight. Orwell is 
      holding him gently with both hands, smiling too, pleased, 
      but not smugly so - it is more complex than that, as if he 
      has discovered something that might be worth even more 
      than anger—his head tilted a bit, his eyes with a careful 
      look that might remind filmgoers of a Robert Duvall 
      character with a backstory in which he has seen more 
      than one perhaps would have preferred to. Winston 
      Smith “believed that he had been born in 1944 or 1945...” 
      Richard Blair was born May 14, 1944. It is not difficult to 
      guess that Orwell, in 1984, was imagining a future for 
      his son’s generation, a world he was not so much 
      wishing upon them as warning against. He was impatient 
      with predictions of the inevitable, he remained confident 
      in the ability of ordinary people to change anything, if 
      they would. It is the boy’s smile, in any case, that we 
      return to, direct and radiant, proceeding out of an 
      unhesitating faith that the world, at the end of the day, 
      is good and that human decency, like parental love, 
      can always be taken for granted—a faith so honorable 
      that we can almost imagine Orwell, and perhaps even 
      ourselves, for a moment anyway, swearing to do 
      whatever must be done to keep it from ever being betrayed.

© Thomas Pynchon 2003
http://www.themodernword.com/pynchon/pynchon_essays_1984.html

But you known, Monte: This is not an either/or situation. The situation 
is summed up best by one of Thomas Ruggles Pynchon the 49th, 
failed successor to the throne of the House of Rothschild, resplendent, 
wearing a crimson robe and holding a pork roast aloft, with his now
doctrinaire Pynchonian Creed, the Proverbs For Paranoids. . . .

I mean to say, our boy has paranoia down.. Which in no way prevents him 
from being an all-around good dude, but the links the crazoids make up turn 
up in his books. The whole BBH/I.G Farben game of three-card-monte must 
have set his hair on fire and a long time ago at that. But what he really is 
into feels like crazy family stories, more and more as the Dude relaxes and 
just lets his warped take on history take control. His family has plenty of 
history to bounce off his connective verbal skills and vision.

Now I see all these confusing/obscure references in Pynchon as 
classic examples of family jokes gone haywire [we've got that going on here 
in my family, I swear my Mom lives in Vineland, I swear], I am sensing more 
of the humanity and the humor of Pynchon's writing. I remember in a blur of 
mental correspondences that one of the Pynchon yacht teams had an 
acryonym of C.o.C. And I think of the Pynchon & Co.'s interest in 
lighter-than-air flight, Edwin Pynchon's lighter-than-air 747, i think of days 
when petroluem [sudden shift to voice of Ishmael Reed or Gil Scott Heron or 
the Last Poets or maybe even Mumia Abu-Jamal] "ain't so damn relevant", 
and the 'Inconvenience' starts to look like a cool proposition. Maybe Pynchon 
has picked up on some of Orwell's cock-eyed optimism. Maybe the even deals
of his Fur Trading [or Henching] ancestors will eventually bear fruit. Maybe 
the Unitarian vision of commonality will take hold and people will start giving 
out bushels of sacred slack. Maybe William Pynchon was right. Maybe some 
of the C.O.C really will fly towards Grace, after all.