AtDTDA 24: Psychical Espionage 670/673

[robinlandseadel at comcast.net]

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     Laura:
     TRP always seems close to satirizing the psychical... 
     mocking and reverent... love-hate...

      I take this to mean that TRP believes in the psychic 
      realm while feeling that 
      most of its devotees are full of shit.
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That "mocking and reverent" tone is also found in Crowley, manifests
in all sorts of dialogs I've had with practioneers. Koans are explored
in Pynchon's books: little packets of paradox designed to loosen
up thought processes and let the silence in. There is much
room for the antic spirit in magickal practice. Don Frew comes to
mind: http://www.researchpubs.com/books/mpex_frew.php
I've have many conversations with Don, his extraordinary depth
of knowledge of Magic and the Occult has always been buffered
[and possibly protected] with generous helpings of humor, quite
reminiscent of TRP's take on the subject.

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     Monte Davis:
     Bingo: I've never seen it better expressed.

     My guess is that even (or especially) as a quintessential 
     word guy, he believes that the transcendent really is 
     transcendent, the unspeakable really is unspeakable. 
     The minute we start *talking* about it, carving it into 
     doctrine and precept, the distortion and debasement begins. 

     "Whereof we cannot speak, thereof we must be 
     silent." Or Campbell: "The best things cannot be 
     said, the second best are misunderstood." 
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Silence is an essential principle in magical practice and just like 
Yasmeen, isn't the only thing that's eneffable 'round here. 
Monte will doubtless find this introduction right on the money:

http://www.themodernword.com/pynchon/pynchon_essays_stone.html

. . . ..in particular:

     He takes the Diamond, and then the Diamond takes him. 
     For it turns out to be a gateway to elsewhere, and Daniel's 
     life's tale an account of the incarnation of a god, not the 
     usual sort that ends up bringing aid and comfort to earthly 
     powers, but that favorite of writers, the incorruptible 
     wiseguy known to anthropologists as the Trickster, to 
     working alchemists as Hermes, to card-players everywhere 
     as the Joker. We don't learn this till the end of the story, by 
     which point, knowing Daniel as we've come to, we are free to 
     take it literally as a real transfiguration, or as a metaphor of 
     spiritual enlightenment, or as a description of Daniel's 
     unusually exalted state of mind as he prepares to cross, 
     forever, the stone junction between Above and Below -- by 
     this point, all of these possibilities have become equally true, 
     for we have been along on one of those indispensable literary 
     journeys, taken nearly as far as Daniel -- through it is for him 
     to slip along across the last borderline, into what Wittgenstein 
     once supposed cannot be spoken of, and upon which, as 
     Eliphaz Levi advised us -- after "To know, to will, to dare" as 
     the last and greatest of the rules of Magic -- we must keep silent.