AtDTDA (37) 1046/47"I'd've let you do the cooking"

[robinlandseadel at comcast.net]

Luca in Hermetic Heaven:

          Luca came in with a bag of groceries.

          "Evenin Professor," Merle with a quick social smile.

          "Somebody's told me you were coming I'd've let you 
          do the cooking" said Luca.

          "I could peel somethin. Carve it up?"

          "Most of it's growing out back, come on." They went out 
          the back door and into a sizable garden, full of long green 
          frying peppers, bush-sized basil plants,zucchini running 
          all over the place, artichokes with their feathery tops 
          blowing in a wind in today from the desert, eggplants 
          glowing ultraviolet in the shadows, tomatoes looking like 
          the four-color illustrations of themselves that showed upon 
          lugs down at the market. There was a pomegranate tree, 
          and a fig tree, and a lemon tree, all bearing. . . .
          
          Against the Day, pages 1046 & 1047

          The fundamental issue in our study is the human exprience 
          of nature. The average modern man's relationship with 
          nature is not the one that prevailed in the premodern "cycle" 
          to which, along with many other traditions, the hermetico-
          alchemical tradition belongs. The study of nature today 
          devotes itself exhaustively to a conglomeration of strictly 
          reasoned laws concerning various "phenomena"—light, 
          electricity, heat, etc.—which spread out kaleidoscopically 
          before us utterly devoid of any spiritual meaning, derived 
          solely from mathematical processes. In the traditional world, 
          on the contrary, nature was not thought about but lived, as 
          though it were a great, sacred, animated body, "the visible 
          expression of the invisible." Knowledge about nature 
          derived from inspiration, intuition and visions, and was 
          transmitted "by initiation" as so many living "mysteries," 
          referring to things today that have lost their meaning and 
          seem banal and commonplace—as, for example, the art 
          of building, medicine, cultivation of the soil and so forth. . . ."

          "The Hermetic Tradition", Julius Evola, page 15.

          . . . .Unless the state of our souls becomes once more 
          a subject of serious concern, there is little question that 
          Sloth will continue to evolve away from its origins in the 
          long-ago age of faith and miracle, when daily life really 
          was the Holy Ghost visibly at work and time was a story, 
          with a beginning, middle and end. Belief was intense, 
          engagement deep and fatal. The Christian God was near. 
          Felt. Sloth -- defiant sorrow in the face of God's good 
          intentions -- was a deadly sin.
          Thomas Pynchon: "Nearer, my Couch, to Thee"


Towards the end of Gravity's Rainbow we are witness to a number 
of magickal failures after Geli's magickal triumph. Vineland's finale 
is notable for the way all the plot lines single-up, fired more by the 
flames of family feuds & history than anything else, even Prairie
Wheeler getting seduced by the props of power in the forms of a 
badge and a gun—a Pavlovian response akin to Slothrop's thing 
for Impolex G. And in Mason & Dixon time takes its course.

But in "Against the Day" Pynchon is giving us little glimpses of 
heaven in the coda. Welcome to the Hermeticist's garden. There's
Pert's Ascent with Thomas Tallis, Cyprian's Covenant and soon
to come we will have Kit's transmigration, the lesson he learned 
on the way to Shambhala. It is the hopeful P.O.V.of a Buddah, 
working to see that everyone gets to heaven, that no-one has 
to stay exiled.

I'm not sayin' that TRP is Buddha, buddy but I am saying that, like the 
Beats, OBA's had his mind on the Bottisatvas for a while, little references in 
CoL49, bigger ones in GR but OTT in Vineland and AtD.