VL-IV pgs. 98/99: Postmodern Mysticism

[Lawrence Bryan]

At this rate I expect mid 21st century literary critics to  be  
referring to literary fads of durations measured in six month or less  
segments, " The late post neo-romantic period of the last half of 2037".

Lawrence

On Jan 17, 2009, at 3:00 PM, Robin Landseadel wrote:

> 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."
>
>
>