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

[Mark Kohut]

Robin writes, quoting:

"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." 

MK: I like this enormously in understanding---with his own more aslant non-fiction words--a major vision in his work, most fully expressed in AtD?
___________________________________________________________________


--- On Tue, 7/22/08, robinlandseadel at comcast.net <robinlandseadel at comcast.net> wrote:

> From: robinlandseadel at comcast.net <robinlandseadel at comcast.net>
> Subject: AtDTDA (37) 1046/47"I'd've let you do the cooking"
> To: "P-list" <pynchon-l at waste.org>
> Date: Tuesday, July 22, 2008, 10:15 AM
> 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.