AtDTDA (38) p. 1065 Dally on the Integroscope

[Dave Monroe]

On Mon, Aug 4, 2008 at 8:32 AM,  <robinlandseadel at comcast.net> wrote:

> If anyone has argued "all you need is love", that just might
> be our boy....

Playing, quite literally, Devil's advocate, here's Josephine Hendin,
from "What is Thomas Pynchon Telling Us?"  (Harpers No. 250  [March
1975]: 82-92) ...

"Thomas Pynchon knows the high.cost of living better than anybody
except the devil. Pynchon is the evil genius of our time, the man with
the quickest eye for what makes this an age of rapacity and sexual
hate. Heis the American Goya whose dazzling canvases are lit from
hell, whose message is: Death Rules.The dream of this age is the dream
of vulnerability conquered. Pynchon's first novel put life together as
a diabolic pact in which you could trade your soul for insurance
against hell on earth. At twenty-five he dared tosay that what his
generation required was salvation from death and life. His novel V.
showed the way to eternal experience without anger, pain,or fear.
Published in 1963, it was set in 1955 because the Cold War was an
unbeatable image for the stand-off between Eros and Thanatos in
suburban marriages, in New York games of musical blankets, for the
deadlock whose linear representation was the symmetrical letter V.
Pynchon saw the freeze as an emotional necessity. He wrote about
people who knew that love could not diminish suffering because it was
love that produced half the anguish there was. He knew what the world
wanted was notanother Christ but an end to the daily passion play.:
(p. 82)

   "Life is best as a machine! The degree to which men and women want
each other to be ever-ready erotic tools, needing neither tenderness
norlove, is one sign of sexual hate. Pynchon is saying that men
control their destructiveness through Profane-like passivity and
disengagement; that women conquer their vulnerability to men, life,
and death by becoming virtual automatons who cannot feel a thing.
'Keep cool, but care,' some-one advises. The only way to contain your
destructiveness is to deadlock the two, to be the partridge and
peartree locked in endless, profane life, forever content." (p. 83)

"... Pynchon had the clarity, the guts to see that what makes people
kill and hate is not a lover's rejection but a beloved's
responsiveness.Given a choice between exaltation or sensory amusement,
people prefer the limited kick. What they cannot transcend is their
gravity ...

[...]

   "Love is a great reminder of limitations, of what you are not. The
man who needs to dominate, control and crush spends his life hating
his finite powers and trying to limit love...." (p. 90)

http://harpers.org/archive/1975/03/0022215

http://waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l&month=0806&msg=127178

> Note as well the significance of marriage in Alchemy,...

The Chymical Wedding of Christian Rosenkreutz (1616)

http://www.crcsite.org/wedding1.htm
http://www.levity.com/alchemy/chymwed1.html
http://www.soul-guidance.com/houseofthesun/alchemy_6.htm
http://www.alchemylab.com/chemical_wedding_rosenkruetz.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chymical_Wedding_of_Christian_Rosenkreutz

All of the following references are from 'Chymical Wedding' ...

http://waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l&month=9801&msg=22977

A few tidbits in ongoing research into Lepton Castle/Chymical Wedding
parallels ...

http://waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l&month=9801&msg=23125

Thanks again, Keith!  Also ...

Cf. The Chymical Wedding of Christian Rosencreutz (1616) ...

http://waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l&month=0203&msg=65349

And, by this point, see as well ...

Frances A. Yates, The Rosicrucian Enlightenment (1972)

http://waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l&month=0202&msg=65028

http://waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l&month=0203&msg=65347