Pynchon & dreams & We

[Ian Livingston]

Well, kinda, yeah.  I think your first point works, that the "power of
the mind" is to perceive what it looks for and so you get what you
think about, after a fashion.  Or, where "it" (id) is, "I" (ego) shall
be, as Freud put it, though I would phrase that differently and say,
where I rest my attention is where my impetus follows.  If I think
about what a nasty, filthy world it is that has made me its victim,
well,  that will be my experience.  That, then, is the "procession of
fate" I call my life.  Objective reality may be nothing more than an
agreed-upon belief, or system of beliefs -- "such stuff as dreams are
made on."  In the end it comes down to being whatever we name and
define the limits of.  Now, I know that's just another
long-established approach to epistemology, but it's a factor few
people really pay attention to, and when folks do tip their hats to it
these days, that happens in form of "the secret" or some such
hocus-pocus.  But, I think we don't "create" reality, we define the
limits of our experience of it.

Now, as to Gnosticism as an anhedonic refusal of the world, well,  I'm
just not quite ready to go that far with it yet.  I suppose you could
say that about any religious or mystical philosophy.  Hinduism and
Buddhism seem to be the ultimate fosters of that approach, but
Christianity, scientism and Islam are close behind.  All that
pie-in-the-sky exclusivity stuff seems to me the foundation of the
victim response to the world.  Everybody's a victim these days,
because somebody ate all the pie up there.  As Alice might (or might
not) say, we ran away from Nobodaddy to come to America and found
Nobodaddy devouring every slice as soon as we noticed it and killed
off all the inconvenient possessors and all.  The demon that pursues
us is not an "other" at all, but the whole unknown shadow of
ourselves, both individually and culturally.  So what we really turn
away from is being obsessed with our judgments on the effects we and
our culture produce.  The effect is neither pleasurable nor painful by
itself, but requires the definition of itself as such to be so.  By
turning our attention to what we can do to produce the greatest good
for the greatest number -- as JS Mill would prescribe -- then we turn
to face the beast, the shadow, and turn the light of intelligence to
the business of discovering what we can recognize in it, integrate
that into our "power of mind" as you put it, and thus change its
nature (alchemically) from lead into gold, from the evil other to the
beloved.  From preterite to elect by the grace of... well, you can
name that according to your dominant metaphysical metaphor.  The point
is, discovery is really, really FUN and way cool, so I can't call it
anhedonic.  Of course, I have stretched the bejeezus out of
Gnosticism, but it serves as a sort of starting point.

And that is where the whole idea of "master" and "rebel" enters in.  I
am not sure I can blanket cosign on Alice's idea, though it is better
historically backed than my perusal of arcane philosophical systems,
but I think both might hold important places in TRP's opus.  There
must be a dominant schema for rebellion to reject.  And, it's true, we
Americans love to watch Underdog trying to impress Polly with his
refusal to accept the Evil Other, especially when Polly gets seduced
by the power of the Evil Other and Underdog has to save her from her
delusions.  All of these responses derive from archetypes now
concealed in our cultural shadow.  If we oppose "the slings and darts
of outrageous" fate, fortune, whatever you want to call it, we fight
our evil selves in every opponent and fail to discover any real
gratification in the fight.  It is fighting for the sake of the fight.
 Shadow boxing.  Like Frank Traverse, for instance, or Reef, for a
spell, certainly Deuce.  But if we turn from all those slings and
darts and look to who is hurling them, then we get to have a really
good time, discovering what has always been hiding in the full light
of day, where before we caught only glimpses of shadows played across
the wall.

It's just an idea I've been picking up this time through the opus,
reading at the same time what must be some of the background source
material that influenced TRP over the years.  His language repeatedly
calls some of these works to mind.  Jung, Eliade, Gnosticism, Tarot,
Zodiac -- all these seem to figure as much as does the history.
Always held lightly, never asserted as thus it must be or any of that
s**t, always with a grin.


On Wed, Aug 12, 2009 at 2:41 PM, David Morris<fqmorris at gmail.com> wrote:
> Yeah, like "it's the stones in the brook are what make it sing,” but
> with the self-induced (paranoia) thing.  Alice's post disallows the
> imaginary master in favor of the imaginary rebel, sort of the opposite
> of your "thesis."
>
> I like connecting this dynamic to Gnosticism, and its unseen semi-evil
> demi-master:  The very structure of the Universe is out to get/control
> you (or maybe you're just imagining it).
>
> Your characterization:  "turn[ing] ... attention from what happens to
> [you] to what [you] can enact" can be taken in many (well at least
> two) ways:
>
> 1.      Magical "power of the mind" stuff (like Christian Science) - what
> you think/will is magically what you get.
>
> 2.      Gnosticism's "turning attention away" thing is (in my mind) an
> anhedonic, reality-denying relationship with the world.  Mastery there
> is completely delusionary.
>
> David Morris
>
> On Wed, Aug 12, 2009 at 11:04 AM, Ian Livingston<igrlivingston at gmail.com> wrote:
>> It is an implicit tenet of Gnosticism that a person moves from being in bondage to fate into the estate of master of his destiny when he turns his attention from what happens to him to what he can enact.  I wonder if the master of his destiny need still be in opposition to some imagined hostile other.  It has been growing in my thoughts on TRP that he might be nudging our attention toward that line of thinking.  I have not tested the idea sufficiently to call it a thesis, but it seems to me possible.
>>
>