VL-IV: Chap 10 - Krishna

[Robin Landseadel]

>> ----- Original Message ----
>> From: "kelber at mindspring.com" <kelber at mindspring.com>
>> To: pynchon-l at waste.org
>> Sent: Tuesday, February 17, 2009 9:35:17 PM
>> Subject: Re: VL-IV: Chap 10 - Krishna
>>
>> Examples?

My take is [predictably] convoluted. Here are six [extended] quotes  
from Pynchon's six novels that deal in heresy.

I'd say that the key to the religious/spiritual world of Thomas  
Pynchon is heresy, that this is what the author is charting, all these  
heretical responses to dogma, heresy as mainstream religion's  
"counterforce."

Hamilton's "discovery of the Quaternions (or, as a disciple might say,  
theirs of him)" is heretical on multiple levels. We assume that  
scientific discovery is the result of scientific process, logic,  
observation of nature. But Quaternions came to Hamilton as a vision,  
akin to religious revelation. The revelation itself has no connection  
to the usual religious cliches but is a revelation of the engines of  
creation separated from issues concerning the creator.

An underlying theme throughout Pynchon's writings is the heresy of  
direct revelation, revelations that have no connection to accepted  
dogma:

	October 16, the anniversary of Hamilton's 1843 discovery of the
	Quaternions (or, as a disciple might say, theirs of him), by
	tradition the climactic day of each World Convention, also
	happened to be the day after the bathing-season at Ostend
	officially ended. This time Dr. Rao gave the valedictory address.
	"The moment, of course, is timeless. No beginning, no end, no
	duration, the light in eternal descent, not the result of conscious
	thought but fallen onto Hamilton, if not from some Divine source
	then at least when the watchdogs of Victorian pessimism were
	sleeping too soundly to sense, much less frighten off, the
	watchful scavengers of Epiphany.

	"We all know the story. It is a Monday morning in Dublin,
	Hamilton and his wife, Maria Bayley Hamilton, are walking by
	the canalside across from Trinity College, where Hamilton is to
	preside at a council meeting. Maria is chatting pleasantly,
	Hamilton is nodding now and then and murmuring 'Yes,
	dear,' when suddenly as they approach Brougham Bridge he
	cries out and pulls a knife from his pocket-Mrs. H. starts violently
	but regains her composure, it is only a penknife-as Hamilton
	runs over to the bridge and carves OIl the stone i2 = P = k2 = ijk
	= -1," the assembly here murmuring along, as to a revered
	anthem, "and it is in this Pentecostal moment that the
	Quaternions descend, to take up their earthly residence among
	the thoughts of men."
	Against the Day, pages 560, 561

Merely by citing the Gospel of Thomas in Mason & Dixon Pynchon makes  
explicit reference to Gnosticism, a subject sufficiently pertinent  in  
Pynchon's realm as to prompt Dwight Eddins to write "The Gnostic  
Pynchon."

	"In the Infancy Gospel of Thomas, you see, Jesus as a Boy
	made small, as you'd say, toy Golems out of Clay,- Sparrows
	that flew, Rabbits that hopp'd. Golem fabrication is integral to
	the Life of Jesus, and thence to Christianity."

	"Nor is it any Wonder here by South Mountain, anyway.
	Sometimes the Invisible will all at once appear,- sometimes
	what you see may not be there at all."

	"I am told of certain Stars, in the Chinese system of Astrology,
	which are invisible so long as they keep moving, only being
	seen, when they pause. Might thy Golem share this Property?"

	The Company rush to enlighten Dixon. " 'Tis shar'd with this
	whole accursed Continent," the quarrelsome Carrot-top lets him
	know, waving his Rifle and narrowly missing several Tankards
	upon the Table.

	"- Which, as if in answer to God's recession, remain'd invisible,
	denied to us, till it became necessary to our Souls that it come 	
	to rest, self-reveal'd, tho' we pretended to 'discover' it.. .. "

	"By the time of Columbus, God's project of Disengagement was
	obvious to all,- with the terrible understanding that we were to
	be left more and more to our own solutions."

	"America, withal, for centuries had been kept hidden, as are
	certain Bodies of Knowledge. Only now and then were selected
	persons allow'd Glimpses of the New World,- "

	"Never Reporters that anyone else was likely to believe,- men
	who ate the Flesh and fornicated with the Ghosts of their Dead,
	murderers and Pirates on the run, monks in parchment
	Coracles stitched together from copied Pages of the Book of
	Jonah, fishermen too many Nights out of Port, any Runagate
	craz'd enough to sail West."

	"All matters of what becomes Visible, and when. Revelation
	exists as a Fact,- and continues, as Time proceeds. If new
	Continents may become visible, why not Planets, sir, as Planets
	are in your Line?"

	"Ye'd have to ask Mason, who should be here Hourly."

	"Howbeit,- the Secret was safe until the choice be made to
	reveal it.

	It has been denied to all who came to America, for Wealth, for
	Refuge, for Adventure. This 'New World' was ever a secret Body
	of Knowledge, meant to be studied with the same dedication as
	the Hebrew Kabbala would demand. Forms of the Land, the
	flow of water, the occurrence of what us'd to be call'd Miracles,
	all are Text,- to be attended to, manipulated, read, remember'd."

	"Hence as you may imagine, we take a lively interest in this
	Line of yours," booms the Forge-keeper, "inasmuch as it may be
	read, East to West, much as a Line of Text upon a Page of the
	sacred Torah,- a Tellurian Scripture, as some might say,- "

	"_ 'Twill terminate somewhere to the West, no one, not even you
	and your Partner, knows where. An utterance. A Message of
	uncertain length, apt to be interrupted at any Moment, or Chain.
	A smaller Pantograph copy down here, of Occurrences in the
	Higher World."

	"Another case of, 'As above, so below.' "
	Mason & Dixon, pages 486, 487

Though the Harleyite Order seems like it's only a gag [like so much in  
Vineland], it is a joke because it piles heresy upon heresy.

	"The Sisters have their headquarters in Walnut Creek," Van
	Meter twinkled, "so no prob." He referred to the Harleyite Order,
	a male motorcycle club who for tax purposes had been
	reconstituted as a group of nuns. Van Meter had run across
	them in the course of his quest after the transcendent, and been
	immediately surprised and impressed by the spirituality they all
	seemed to radiate. Taking as their text the well-known graffito "If
	they won't let Harleys into Heaven, we'll ride them straight to
	Hell," the Sisters pursued lives of exceptional, though
	antinomian, purity. They went on as before with all the drug and
	alcohol abuse, violence symbolic and real, sexual practices
	upon which Mrs. Grundy has been known to frown, and an
	unqualified hatred of authority at all levels, but with every act
	now transfigured, the vital difference being Jesus, the First
	Biker, according to Sister Vince, the Order's theologian.
	Vineland, pages 358, 359

A crucial heresy in Vineland is LSD as an agent of Gnosis:

	"Well I still wish it was back then, when you were the Count.
	Remember how the acid was? Remember that windowpane,
	down in Laguna that time? God, I knew then, I knew .... "

	They had a look. "Uh-huh, me too. That you were never going to
	die. Ha! No wonder the State panicked. How are they supposed
	to control a population that knows it'll never die? When that was
	always their last big chip, when they thought they had the
	power of life and death. But acid gave us the X-ray vision to see
	through that one, so of course they had to take it away from us."

	"Yeah, but they can't take what happened, what we found out."

	"Easy. They just let us forget. Give us too much to process, fill
	up every minute, keep us distracted, it's what the Tube is for,
	and though it kills me to say it, it's what rock and roll is
	becoming—just another way to claim our attention, so that
	beautiful certainty we had starts to fade, and after a while they
	have us convinced all over again that we really are going to die.
	And they've got us again." It was the way people used to talk.
	Vineland, pages 313, 314

Slothrop's divining rod of a male member appears to be his Calvinist  
inheritance. This is really TRP's backstory. William Pynchon [TRP's  
direct progenitor ten generations back] was driven from Springfield  
Mass. due to his heretical tract "The Meritorious Price of our  
Redemption." TRP warps "Meritorious Price" into the fiction of William  
Slothrop's "On Preterition."

	He wrote a long tract about it presently, called On Preterition. It
	had to be published in England, and is among the first books
	to've been not only banned but also ceremonially burned in
	Boston. Nobody wanted to hear about all the Preterite, the
	many God passes ovel when he chooses a few for salvation.
	William argued holiness for thes( "second Sheep," without
	whom there'd be no elect. You can bet th( Elect in Boston were
	pissed off about that. And it got worse. WIlliarr felt that what
	Jesus was for the elect, Judas Iscariot was for the Preterite.
	Everything in the Creation has its equal and opposite
	counterpart. How can Jesus be an exception? could we feel for
	him anything but horror in the face of the unnatural, the
	extracreational; Well, if he is the son of man, and if what we feel
	is not horror but love, then we have to love Judas too. Right?
	How William avoided being burned for heresy, nobody knows.
	He must've had connections. They did finally 86 him out of
	Massachusetts Bay Colony-he thought about Rhode Island for
	a while but decided he wasn't that keen on antinomians either.
	So finally he sailed back to Old England, not in disgrace so
	much as despondency, and that's where he died, among
	memories of the blue hills, green maizefields, get-togethers
	over hemp and tobacco with the Indians, young women in
	upper rooms with their aprons lifted, pretty faces, hair spilling on
	the wood floors while underneath in the stables horses kicked
	and drunks hollered, the starts in the very early mornings when
	the backs of his herd glowed like pearl, the long, stony and
	surprising road to Boston, the rain on the Connecticut River, the
	snuffiing good-nights of a hundred pigs among the new stars
	and long grass still warm from the sun, settling down to sleep ....

	Could he have been the fork in the road America never took,
	the singular point she jumped the wrong way from? Suppose
	the Slothropite heresy had had the time to consolidate and
	prosper? Might there have been fewer crimes in the name of
	Jesus, and more mercy in the name of Judas Iscariot?
	Gravity's Rainbow, pages 565, 566 [Penguin edition]

Oed's obsessive search for patterning in The Crying of Lot 49 rotates  
around revelation deferred, with beaucoups symbolic language derived  
from Christian cosmology. But the symbolic order is of an inverted  
order of Christian heresy. Even Jesus Arrabal [a play upon Fernando  
Arrabal, author of the intensely heretical "The Automobile Graveyard",  
the crucifixion of Jesus Christ in an Automobile Junkyard] is  
expounding a heresy upon his heretical anarchist sources:

	"You know what a miracle is. Not what Bakunin said. But
	another world's intrusion into this one. Most of the time we
	coexist peacefully, but when we do touch there's cataclysm.
	Like the church we hate, anarchists also believe in another
	world. Where revolutions break out spontaneous and
	leaderless, and the soul's talent for consensus allows the
	masses to work together without effort, automatic as the body
	itself. And yet, sena, if any of it should ever really happen that
	perfectly, I would also have to cry miracle. An anarchist miracle.
	Like your friend. He is too exactly and without flaw the thing we
	fight. In Mexico the privilegiado is always, to a finite percentage,
	redeemed one of the people. Unmiraculous. But your friend,
	unless he's joking, is as terrifying to me as a Virgin appearing to
	an Indian."
	The Crying of Lot 49, page 97 [Perennial Classics edition]

"The Courier's Tragedy" is wall-to-wall heresy:

	The act itself closes with Domenico, to whom the naive Niccolo
	started it off by spilling his secret, trying to get in to see Duke
	Angelo and betray his dear friend. The Duke, of course, is in his
	apartment busy knocking off a piece, and the best Domenico
	can do is an administrative assistant who turns out to be the
	same Ercole who once saved the life of young Niccolo and
	aided his escape from Faggio. This he presently confesses to
	Domenico, though only after having enticed that informer into
	foolishly bending over and putting his head into a curious black
	box, on the pretext of showing him a pornographic diorama. A
	steel vise promptly clamps onto the faithless Domenico's head
	and the box muffles his cries for help. Ercole binds his hands
	and feet with scarlet silk cords, lets him know who it is he's run
	afoul of, reaches into the box with a pair of pincers, tears out
	Domenico's tongue, stabs him a couple times, pours into the
	box a beaker of aqua regia, enumerates a list of other goodies,
	including castration, that Domenico will undergo before he's
	allowed to die, all amid screams, tongueless attempts to pray,
	agonized struggles from the victim. With the tongue impaled on
	his rapier Ercole runs to a burning torch set in the wall, sets the
	tongue aflame and waving it around like a madman concludes
	the act by screaming,

		Thy pitiless unmanning is most meet,

		Thinks Ercole the zany Paraclete.

		Descended this malign, Unholy Ghost,

		Let us begin thy frightful Pentecost.

	The Crying of Lot 49, pages 49/50 [Perennial Classics edition]

I propose that Domenican monk Giordano Bruno is the model for Domenico.

Angel, in V., models herself after Joan of Arc, who was burned as a  
heretic.

	It came out then that Fina was spiritual leader or Den Mother of
	this youth gang. She had learned in school about a saint, called
	Joan of Arc, who went around doing the same thing for armies
	who were more or less chicken and no good in a rumble. The
	Playboys, Angel felt, were pretty much the same way.

	Profane knew better than to ask whether she was giving them
	sexual comfort too. He didn't have to ask. He knew this was
	another work of mercy. The mother to the troops bit, he
	guessed-not knowing anything about women-was a harmless
	way to be what maybe every girl wants to be, a camp follower.
	With the advantage that here she was not a follower but a
	leader. How many in the Playboys? Nobody knew, Angel said.
	Maybe hundreds. They all were crazy for Fina, in a spiritual
	way. In return she had to put out nothing but charity and
	comfort, which she was only too glad to do, punchy with grace
	already.
	V., pages 141, 142 [Harper Perennial Modern Classics edition]