Fwd: VL-IV pgs. 98/99: Postmodern Mysticism

[Michael Bailey]

Robin Landseadel wrote:
> My sense of postmodernism kicked in around 1969. My math/reading teacher
> handed me a copy of Catch-22. I loved the book. My main takeaway was the
> emerging awareness of how profoundly degenerate war—any war— is, and a
> nagging sense that corporations were at the corrupt center of this decay,
> that they were an innately entropic force. Up until reading Catch-22 I
> assumed that the Allies were the Good Guys in World War II,

to accept a Manichaean dualism momentarily, and answer the statement
in its own terms: instead of being the slightly less bad guys?

realistically, you've got to admit that national socialism would not
be fun to live under.
(and I'll admit that the political praxis of the allies aren't so
amazingly far up the scale of goodness from das dritte Reich, and note
that targeting civilian populations was a particular congenial notion
to Churchill, and go out of my way to stress the role of international
bankers, who ought to be the jewel in the crown of free enterprise, in
arming Hitler - shouldn't they have been, I dunno, investing in
constructive things instead?)

>
> In part postmodernism is looking at the Modern era through the mentality of
> the post-hippie scare, our nation's collective freak-out in the wake of
> acid, duly noted by the post-Count Drugula Mucho Maas on pages 313 and 314
> of Vineland.

okay, the p word...i'm training myself to be all "lines of flight" and
"rhizomes" when I read that.  Now you've thrown me for a (froot) loop
- you say the Nixonian Lobster Thermidorian reaction was postmodern?

> The us/them divide was pretty clear and pretty wide at the
> time, what with straights and freaks and little in-between, leastaways if
> you were even a little bit awake the time. Note that Zoyd and Mucho's big
> takeaway from the LSD experience was profoundly spiritual. The two of
> them—as did many others did at the same time—had religious visions.
>

I tried to be a medium, 'cause of relatives and family friends of the
staunch Republican persuasion and many of the buddies I hung with
being of the mildly roseate neck persuasion, but my reading tastes
were all psychedelicized. Natural role, I was raised middle-class (or
muddle-crass, as James Joyce put it somewhere in FW)

> Something Happened, as Joseph Heller noted, and that particular Something
> Happened at a particular time, the era of Vietnam and Richard Nixon. The
> current state of trust—our collective lack of trust—in institutions of power
> and control is the sort of rejection of old paradigms that I perceive as the
> condition of Postmodernism.
>

wasn't a meticulous reporting of abuses in more of a modermist
tradition largely responsible for this distrust?  the postmodernist
thrust that I'm trying to grok has to do with coming to terms with the
imperfection of the institutions and allowing the insights of the
psychedelic experience to guide one's course - correcting for the
errors of capitalism and colonialism without erecting equally
uncongenial juggernauts?

> This loss of faith goes right to the heart of established religion,
> inevitably leading to heretical impulses. I would gather that Thomas Ruggles
> Pynchon has an intense personal interest in heresy, being that his most
> famous ancestor is famous primarily as a heretic.

i always start misreading heresy as hearsay...
ideally religious and even political institutions would strive for a
consultancy status, like an Underwriter's Labs of the soul or of the
socius.  so in that environment, heresy would be equivalent to putting
out a circuit breaker that didn't do the job.

It's a loaded term, anyway, and somewhat obsolescent in a way, for me
anyway: like reading "aroint thee" it just seems to come from another
time.
but I guess the meaning lingers on, just expressed in different terms:
aroint thee becomes "get out of here you knucklehead" in Bill Murray's
lexicon...

the notion of heresy, then, that you keep tickling us with...
it's like the nomad thing or the whatchacallit war machine thingie in
D&G, tickling us like a feather duster...

I mean, I guess the Catholic Church had these councils, or Councils -
in fact the Council of Trent (Zoyd's friend, the sensitive poet-artist
from the City), the Nicaean Council, and the one I like the very best,
Martin Luther and the Diet of Worms (just because of the name, of
course)...not to mention the Defenstration of Prague....where they
would get together and declare that somebody's point of view
sucked...and since they all spoke Latin, they called it heresy?
(more about this later)

o

>



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http://www.powells.com/biblio/9781593762131?&PID=27627
Get Your War On!



-- 
--
http://www.powells.com/biblio/9781593762131?&PID=27627
Get Your War On!