Dependent Origination & Grace

[Anne Bradstreet]

The Buddhist concept, Dependent Origination is not so far removed from
American Romanticism & Transcendentalism or Modern Physics. Of course, the
literary ancestors of Pyncheon, Poe and Hawthorne and Melville, and so on .
. .American Literature, dark, gothic, romantic literature ...had their
 reservations
about Transcendentalism and the American Virgin (not Henry's Adams's Dynamo,
but Nature), not the least because they preferred ambiguities and
uncertainties to the new religion, the new "scripture" (as Thoreau was wont
to call his words), and because spending a spot in the Woods or in jail, or
preaching to a new congregation of transparent eyeballs would do nothing to
change the mechanistic machinations of Moderns or prevent or stop Wars on
Mexico or any other lands and peoples, or convert Americans to Indians
(American or Indian or any combination thereof).  Moreover, Pynchon's less
than sanguine literary grand-parents were ever cognizant that they had
brought sin and death unto the New World. Pynchon grew up reading those
Eastern books so popular with his peers, yet holding them always at a
distance, much as Melville refused to be harnessed in/under Emerson's sling/
rainbow (can't remember if it was a harness or a rainbow or a mixed
metaphor), because of the Calvinistic Blackness that he so admired and could
never quite quit. Still, there is, always, a hymn, if not a Him/him, in
Pynchon that is akin to Bryant's youthful exuberance exhibited in the poem,
"Thanatopsis." As for the slums, the violence, the dark and ominous gothic
forbodings ….these are as, all trades and . . . Pied Beauties.



GLORY be to God for dappled things—

  For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;

    For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;

Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches' wings;

  Landscape plotted and pieced—fold, fallow, and plough;         5

    And áll trádes, their gear and tackle and trim.



All things counter, original, spare, strange;

  Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)

    With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;

He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:         10

                  Praise him.
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