AtDtDA(28): A Heavenwide Blast of Light

[Mark Kohut]

Robin,
   
  Yes, I'm reading ahead and preparing my stint re Cyprian, compasion, etc. I'm using some of your research and posts...........
   
  Here, I was sticking with just the beginnning of this section that Dave posted about.....
   
  A-and I think all of your associations are great......BUT I think TRP, as is his wont, merges meanings of illumination for savagely satiric--and illuminating----associative meanings.
   
  Here, just in this section, as in parts of GR,  I would argue that Religious Revelation, which used to be  "mandated from heaven" , which used to 'give meaning' to whole communities, whole countries, is gone..............is now Death...........
   
  We, the world, are more than half "in love with easeful death" as GR embodies....................
   
  As AtD also has within it.  Here. 

robinlandseadel at comcast.net wrote:
  He had entered a state of total attention to no object he 
could see or sense, or eventually even imagine in any 
interior way, while Prance was all but hysterical.
AtD, 782

But the private eye sooner or later has to get beat up on. 
This night's profusion of post horns, this malignant, 
deliberate replication, was their way of beating up. They 
knew her pressure points, and the ganglia of her optimism, 
and one by one, pinch by precision pinch, they were 
immobilizing her. 

Last night, she might have wondered what undergrounds 
apart from the couple she knew of communicated by WASTE 
system. By sunrise she could legitimately ask what 
undergrounds didn't. If miracles were, as Jesus Arrabal had 
postulated years ago on the beach at Mazatlan, intrusions 
into this world from another, a kiss of cosmic pool balls, then 
so must be each of the night's post horns. For here were 
God knew how many citizens, deliberately choosing not to 
communicate by U. S. Mail. It was not an act of treason, nor 
possibly even of defiance. But it was a calculated withdrawal, 
from the life of the Republic, from its machinery. Whatever 
else was being denied them out of hate, indifference to the 
power of their vote, loopholes, simple ignorance, this 
withdrawal was their own, un-publicized, private. Since they 
could not have withdrawn into a vacuum (could they?), there 
had to exist the separate, silent, unsuspected world. 
CoL49, Perennial Fiction 124, Perennial Classics 101

That miracle, the miracle of Jesus Arrabal, the "intrusions 
into this world from another, a kiss of cosmic pool balls",
is depicted in the Tunguska event. This is really at the heart 
of Thomas Pynchon's unique "magical realism". The Tunguska
event is clearly linked to G-D [you know, the "real" God, the 
one you dare not speak the holy name of, the G-D you better 
not invoke], perhaps tripped off by Kit passing through the 
Prophet's Gate.

The cover of "Vineland" comes to mind, the felled trees signifying the 
Angel of Death, the footprint left in its path. This theme, this imprint of 
the Gods/Goddesses, imps and other spirits, pops up in any number 
of forms in Pynchon's writing. There is an echo in Vineland's 
Japanese Insurance Adjustors, checking out what might very well be 
Godzilla's footprint in the Gerasimoff/Padzhitnoff meditation on 
possible causes of the "event", including Chinese and Real Estate 
interests. There is this new "eye in the sky" Point Of View available
for spywork, a new kind of omniscience---so very different from the 
omniscience of Avalokiteshvara:

Of all the deities in Mahayana Buddhism, the bodhisattva 
Avalokiteshvara, Chenrezig, is one of the most celebrated. 
He is the lord endowed with complete illumination, who 
refrains from entering the blissful state of nirvana to remain 
here below and save the creatures of the earth. This 
devotion to the salvation of others emphasizes the profound 
compassion this bodhisattva represents.

http://www.souledout.org/healing/healingdeities/avolokiteshvara.html

Lord of Light. Look up the references to Avalokiteshvara, the very soul 
of compassion. And, as furthur events in the novel transpire, 
compassion as a force, as a different path, emerges as a major 
theme. Did you think that all this Buddhism landed in the novel by 
accident? And here, as elsewhere, Pynchon underlines the paradox 
of revelation/illumination---the representation of Kit's illumination [he 
was in Shambhala, the Lord (over lunch) proves it to Kit by showing him 
the postage stamps he's collected from Shambhala. Of course they exist, 
the Lord showed them to Kit, didn't he?]

But still that paradox. As Kit passes through the Prophet's gate there is a 
Heavenwide blast of light. This is Kit's illumanation. I do belive that OBA's 
rather keen on illumination, and yet is also aware of the scorching 
possibilities of too much light. Complete illumanation might also be 
complete annihilation. There's that wonderful passage in Gravity's 
Rainbow, where the various cells, components of the skin, are talking 
amongst themselves about "going epidermal", feeling the full radiance 
and then. . . . 

Here's a link to the Chumps of Choice Blogspot, with some interesting ideas:

http://chumpsofchoice.blogspot.com/2007/07/deus-ex-machina-i-presume.html



       
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