VL-IV pgs. 98/99: Postmodern Mysticism

[Robin Landseadel]

On Jan 17, 2009, at 2:09 PM, Michael Bailey wrote:

> Robin Landseadel wrote:
>> . . . 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?

Being, in fact, the same kind of bad guys—at least in the long run. As  
"they" have proven to be during the last eight years.

> realistically, you've got to admit that national socialism would not
> be fun to live under.

A more extreme example of pretty much the same thing. If Prescott Bush  
succeeded it really would have turned into the same thing.

>> 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?

Postmodernism is also a pointer to a particular time period, something  
that happened after modernism. The bail-out point is somewhere between  
Truman and Nixon. And I'm saying that the most notable artifacts of  
the movement happened around the time of Nixon.

>> 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)

And I was raised left of the left, as Eric Blair once described the  
condition. My point of view, my natural distrust of anything from "on  
high" didn't prevent me from having visions—a potentially  major- 
league social problem if you allow it to get the best of you. In a  
way, my p.o.v. concerning postmodernism is that it's post-God. And if  
you no longer believe in God, but you're still having visions, than  
you are in the condition of a postmodern mystic.

Like the dude sez: "If the tower is everywhere and the knight of  
deliverance no proof against its magic, what else?"

>> 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?

The meticulous reporting of abuses is a modernist tradition, the  
surrealistic and self-centered reporting of the Tom Wolfes and Hunter  
S. Thompsons of the world is what emerged once the writer/reporters  
figured out that the old role wasn't really working anymore. Pynchon  
methods are closer to Tom Wolfe and Hunter S. Thompson than to  
Woodward and Bernstein.

>> 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.

>> . . . 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...

Got to learn more about D & G [and F], but the anti-fascist language  
found in all three seems like a natural carry-over from the radicalism  
of the late sixties/early seventies. Heresy is demonstrating that the  
"Elect" is an artificial classification, a role that's played, not  
some innate or deserved quality. If you are a Catholic [for example]  
and you say that the Pope is full of it, you have committed an act of  
heresy. In his own way, William Pynchon was doing a very similar thing  
in "The Meritorious Price of Our Redemption."