ATDDTA 741-444 Tancredi reprise

[Michael Bailey]

Glenn - you are doing great!

I did have a stunned silence at your Tancredi revelations.
Tancredi and this section have been pretty murky to me.

I need to reread this with your posting in hand,
because I'm not sure I get all the implications.

Would also appreciate more of your observations
and more elaboration on that point - please don't feel
you're repeating yourself or talking down.  You bring
in references that are unfamiliar to me but that turn into
useful levers.  While I am pondering that, other points you
make slip by.

See, I didn't really get what happened to Tancredi in
the first place.  I was focussing on his talking about
an infernal machine and thinking myself clever for
believing that to be a reference to Deleuze-Guattari
and their various "machines"

If he is holding a firecracker, and if he is shot because
Vibe thinks he's a threat - I totally missed all that action!

Anyway, kudos and carry on.  I believe there's another
week in your hosting, you're doing great!

The ATD Rag

First you read it through for plot,
then you start your notes to jot
Rub your eyes, it's getting late, and
- explicate, explicate, explicate
(to the tune of "Vatican [Goettingen] Rag")



On 2/14/08, Glenn Scheper <glenn_scheper at earthlink.net> wrote:
> I checked my mail often yesterday, expecting
> thunderous applause, but met dropjaw silence.
>
> Tancredi's masterpiece is Pynchon's masterpiece
> of this section, and was my delight to unravel.
>
> Tancredi was armed with a firecracker, a hint
> pynchon dropped later in the tarantella, p 744!
>
> Thus armed, Tancredi set in motion the Hellish
> trap, the "infernal machine", to condemn Vibe,
> by causing Vibe to kill (have killed) Tancredi.
>
> This reminds me of the Pauline prescription to
> pray for, so "heaping coals of burning fire
> upon the heads of", our enemies.
>
> Why was Vibe not condemned sufficiently by the
> death of Webb? Because Webb was not an innocent.
>
> I stopped to read this great link from robinlandseadel,
> which introduces "massa damnata", a good google phrase,
> and was brought up to speed on Augustine, whom I have
> mangaged to avoid in otherwise avid religious reading:
>  -- http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/augustine/
>  Saint Augustine (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)
>
> Augustine bequeathed to the Latin West a voluminous body of work that contains
> at its chronological extremes two quite dissimilar portraits of the human
> condition. In the beginning, there is a largely Hellenistic portrait, one that
> is notable for the optimism that a sufficiently rational and disciplined life
> can safely escape the ever-threatening circumstantial adversity that seems to
> surround us. Nearer the end, however, there emerges a considerably grimmer
> portrait, one that emphasizes the impotence of the unaided human will, and the
> later Augustine presents a moral landscape populated largely by the massa
> damnata [De Civitate Dei XXI.12], the overwhelming majority who are justly
> predestined to eternal punishment by an omnipotent God, intermingled with a
> small minority whom God, with unmerited mercy, has predestined to be saved.
>
> --The grist of Pynchon.
>
>
> 2 needful terms to read it:
>
> Eudaimonism is a philosophy that defines right action as that which leads to
> "well being." The concept originates in Aristotle's Nicomachean ...
> en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eudaimonism
>
>
> pelagianism:
>
> The teaching of a monk named Pelagius in the fifth Century.
> He taught that people are free to choose good or evil
> and there is no inherited sin ...
> www.godweb.org/dictionary/dic_p-r.htm
>
> who denied the existence of original sin inherited from Adam.
> He taught that a soul created by god cannot inheret sin from
> an ancestor. Thus humans are born morally neutral. ...
> www.translationdirectory.com/glossaries/glossary007_p.htm
>
> The body of doctrines held by the followers of Pelagius, who
> denied original sin, confined grace to forgiveness, and affirmed
> that man's unaided will is capable of spiritual good
> www.innvista.com/culture/religion/diction.htm
>
> the theological doctrine put forward by Pelagius which denied
> original sin and affirmed the ability of humans to be righteous;
> condemned as heresy by the Council of Ephesus in 431
> wordnet.princeton.edu/perl/webwn
>
> Pelagianism is a theological theory named after Pelagius.
> It is the belief that original sin did not taint human nature
> (which, being created from God, was divine), and that mortal
> will is still capable of choosing good or evil without Divine aid.
> en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pelagianism
>
>        ---
>
> It it not textual fluff that Pynchon has Dally bemoan
> Tancredi's death as foreclosing the possibility of her
> choosing to be his lover.
>
> I said here that killing is abrogating the role of God.
> Hence, Vibe was feeling blessed, a false god, an idol.
>
> I said elsewhere that coitus is the Adamic law enjoined
> on all sexually created beings. But hidden in this is a
> more primary law, that to come, to ejaculate, is to kill,
> to become God on the same rule of killing one's partner.
>
> (However, at seal #2, the lamb first pleased the whore,
> whereby he was slain by her; then came, recovering from
> such a death... "The first and the last, that was dead,
> and liveth.")
>
> The covert sins of mother-cunnilingus, father-fellatio
> enacted upon an infant establish their (false) godhood,
> and the infant's death, as is described in the fourth
> letter of Revelation, to Thyatira; But the auto-erotic
> by his/her self-sacrifice is promoted to the aeternal,
> timeless pleroma, whereby they are from the beginning,
> by the spirit of adoption, what Augustine didn't grasp.
>
>        ---
>
> In Augustine, the threefold hierarchy of:
>        - exists
>        - exists, senses,
>        - exists, senses, reasons
>
> is missing it's capstone:
>        - exists, senses, reasons, divinity.
>
> Wherein, by divinity, I mean the ability to invert the
> natural order of reason according to karmic principles.
>
> The natural order seeks lessor goods (see that URL.)
>
> The divine order seeks eternal goods.
>
> The divine appreciates, either by direct tantric gnosis,
> or imperfectly by instruction from previous divines, a
> goal to die in self-sacrifice, to receive eternal life.
>
> It is only imperfectly reflected in humanistic altruism,
> for humanity is the massa damnata, an attempt to swim on
> an ever-sinking sea of other humanity. The self-sacrifice
> to others only makes them idols, and oneself an idolator.
>
> Jesus' salvific capability is pinioned on autofellatio,
> the slaying of the innocent by the innocent self-father,
> (perhaps requiring a prior originary wet-dream in naval)
> after which everything else to others is transactional.
>
> Yours truly,
> Glenn Scheper
> http://home.earthlink.net/~glenn_scheper/
> glenn_scheper + at + earthlink.net
> Copyleft(!) Forward freely.
>
>


-- 
Young Scrooge:
Life is filled with tough jobs, and there'll always be sharpies to cheat me.
Well, I'll be tougher than the toughies and sharper than the
sharpies...and I'll make my money square.

---From The Life and Times of Scrooge McDuck by Don Rosa