C of L49...trot thru, redux

[Mark Kohut]

Granted.
   
  Do not know answers...did not write down sources......book was from a library and is now back......
   
  Yes, Wasteland is where the Nerval poem is wither quoted or alluded to......................
   
  Magic....I'm still learning from you.................
   
  MK

robinlandseadel at comcast.net wrote:
  I have recently reread L49. (I do not have a life and 
Pynchon is too much of it. But it could be worse.)

I also speedread some essays about it in New Essays on 
C of Lot 49. The indispensable one in that book, imho, if the 
one by Pierre-Yves Petillon. It is entitled Her Errand into the 
Widlerness--an allusion to a famous American historian (Perry 
Miller)'s book. Which is titled after a Puritan tract about the 
meaning of going and settling in the new country (that was 
America)......

Which brings us back to William Sloth---Pynchon.

He sees the book this way. He gives us the well-known---to 
French readers---poem which the magazine title of L49 was 
published under. "the World(one world), the Flesh, Etc.".....

And that would be. . . .

He gives us the Nerval poem alluded to by T.S. Eliot that is 
a source of the Tristero.

And that would be. . . .

Yes, Robin (and others) have written of 'waiting for the Word, the 
Paraclete in L 49. Lotsa religious meanings to number 49.....

http://cl49.pynchonwiki.com/wiki/index.php?title=7_x_7

This time I was lead to these thoughts: the Tristero could not, surely, 
be, as some say, 'set up" by Pierce Inverarity. There are elements 
he could not have set up....(when Oedipa acted on things, therefore 
when to have others interact with her....e.g. the letter carrier she 
follows.) So, what Oedipa sees re "an underground communication 
system" is real enough. I kind of see this as Pynchon writing out one 
of his lifelong themes---the existence of those 'off the grid', so to 
simplify. (Nothing too original here, I know).

I was much more aware of Oedipa's past: Suburban, young republican, 
unhappily? married, wanting, coming to realize it, more but not knowing 
what that might be. ?? She was a product of those uptight fifties TRP 
wrote about in Slow Learner....

So much is second-hand experience or miscommunicated experience
.....from the forgeries thru everything, I felt many of the themes of the 
Recognitions more than ever. Anyone?

You are probably right, though I did not finish the Recognitions, I got stuck on a 
quotation, where the narrator points that the elder gods are still accessible to 
those whose belief in magic did not decay into the empty ritual of religion.

So, "shall I project a world?"...."the tower is everywhere"........can the 
long story [I prefer Pynchon's way of calling it a story marketed as a 
novel] be a Portrait of the Artist Waiting for Her Voice? 

my new questions. Why was the door locked for the auction? Why 
does it matter whether a Tristero representative bids? or how will 
she know anything about who buys the lot anyway? does that matter?

We know from Vineland that she sems to have gotten out of that locked 
room ok and has had an amicable divorce from Mucho. So, what does 
that mean for the meanings of L 49?
Anything?

Something. First off [realizing that I'm starting to start sounding a bit like 
Timothy Leary in his heyday], the magical clues in The Crying of Lot 49 are in 
there, alright, but one must have already had some exposure to the "signs". I 
think it's safe to say that TRP's method includes the occasional "word mashups", 
that certain themes appear and reappear in his work because [basically] he 
likes the way they sound, that in many ways his muse is more poetical than 
anything else. But, as my Niece "Thelma" tells me, he'd make a good 
Ceremonial Magician, if he isn't one already. 

One of the meanings of CoL49 is that Mucho Maas' revelation really was a 
revelation, the one withheld from Oedipa. When he really realized that "She" 
most definitely loves him, and later that extended in a variety of timeless 
mystical rapture and awareness of his spiritual immortality. The door is locked 
at the auction in preparation of the crying of lot 49, much as a circle is closed 
in a magick ritual. Gengis Cohen is a warping of the Great Cohen, a term 
found in the context of the kaballah and ritual magic. Cohen's the probable 
rep from T-t-t-t-t-t. Oedipa's haunting by the Bay really is a haunting. And so on.

There are two works absolutely indispensable in understanding CoL49. One is 
T.S. Eliot's "The Wasteland", the other Francesco Arrabal's [nearly namechecked 
in the form of Jesus Arrabal] "The Automobile Graveyard", that early work by the 
co-creator of the "Panic" movement orf playwrights and artists dedicated to evoking 
Pan. The magickal references become more overt in Gravity's Rainbow and 
emerge in full bloom in Against the Day. There is great density of reference to 
various magic systems in Vineland---in particular a few concepts from the East 
that California took a hankering to and adapted to other local rituals. And then 
there's Mason & Dixon, a book I've nowhere plumbled the depths of in three 
readings and many samplings.


       
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