ATDDTA 741-444 Tancredi reprise

[Mark Kohut]

Tancredi's "infernal machine": From American Heritage
infernal machine
 
NOUN:An explosive device designed to harm or destroy, especially with criminal intent. 




And the title of a 2007 book on terrorism in history.......

----- Original Message ----
From: Glenn Scheper <glenn_scheper at earthlink.net>
To: P-List <pynchon-l at waste.org>
Sent: Thursday, February 14, 2008 10:00:24 AM
Subject: ATDDTA 741-444 Tancredi reprise

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.


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