VL-IV pgs. 98/99: Postmodern Mysticism

Robin Landseadel robinlandseadel at comcast.net
Mon Jan 19 12:36:45 CST 2009


On Jan 19, 2009, at 5:59 AM, Michael Bailey wrote:

> Robin Landseadel wrote:
>> 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."
>>
>
> Meritorious Price, it seems to me, was heretical to Protestants, and
> not so much to a Catholic sensibility.  Like you, it seems, I'm unable
> or unwilling to part with the 80 dollars for a copy of it . . .

  . . .however unwilling, I was able to obtain a copy of The  
Meritorious Price of Our Redemption.

It's 152 pages of smudgy photocopies plus a couple-two three essays I  
really need to get around to, with all of Willy the fur-hench-man's  
text laid out in the sort of Jacobean Olde English that drives OCR  
software batty—"s's" look like "f's", there's weird pre-Webster  
spellings, "doth's" and "thou's"—the sort of thing that made Oedipa  
just a whiz at deciphering old Elizabethan and Jacobean texts. As  
"Meritorious Price" is old enough to be in the public domain by now,  
it's time that it appear on the interweb all smoothed out and  
readable, though a pfd scroll of the mess would suffice. Though  
"Meritorious Price" is hard to read, William Pynchon's writing style  
is not at fault.

"Heresy" is nowhere near the free-range concept that we find in the  
term "Postmodernism." The term Heresy comes from Late Greek:  
"hairesis" meaning to take, so that the etymological root of "Heresy"  
is in the taking. Heresy attempts to take away power from those  
claiming jurisdictional authority from "on high."  At the bottom of it  
all, heresy is an act of anarchism. As the term was much used by the  
Roman Catholic Church "back in the day" it is associated with that  
church in particular, but anyone can play. There is political heresy— 
Christopher Hitchens anyone?—there is scientific heresy, I'm an  
actively heretical OBA non-scholar [a heresiarch of sorts.]

> but the drift of what I've read about it seems to go against the  
> "salvation by
> faith alone" that became a shibboleth of Protestantism.

William Pynchon's heresy was that it was Christ's obedience to God's  
will that constituted "The Meritorious Price of Our Redemption,"  thus  
Christ acted "by faith alone". It was not the sufferings of abject  
pain and those pangs of remorse he'd go through while burning in the  
fires of hell for those three days [as the story goes] that he was not  
on the scene that made him King of Kings, but obedience to the will of  
his father.

Getting a little fast and loose with these materials, we note that  
William Pynchon was [like Pierce Inverarity] a founding father [Pierce  
being the ostensible source point for all these far-flung business  
interests that Oed has to track down], a fur-trader and a bit of a  
wheeler-dealer, a sometimes judge and maybe even an early proto- 
humanist. This "skin" thing that's wrapped up so tightly in the  
Calvinist mentality [leading to Colonization/Missionary work, slavery  
and other forms of ethnic cleansing] didn't really apply to William  
Pynchon like it did to his other fur-hench-men.

William Pynchon's tenth generation great-grandson plays faster and  
looser with this material in Gravity's Rainbow. A lot of that library  
time OBA spent back in the stacks must have been devoted to  
researching family history.

http://waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l&month=0711&msg=122524&keywords=pynchon%20v%2e%20stearns

In the case of the William Pynchon story, TRP boiled it down to its  
essence in Gravity's Rainbow. Instead of  William Pynchon's "The  
Meritorious Price of Our Redemption" we have William Slothrop's "On  
Preterition" The issue of skin is of overwhelming importance in  
Gravity's Rainbow, in particular the notion that election or  
preterition is usually determined by skin color and other signifiers  
of ethnic difference coming from the self-styled "Elect."

> Also, if it refutes Election, the idea of the Elect is more of a  
> Calvinist forth-putting

William Pynchon apparently didn't have a problem with the election  
issue, his real issue was with the notion of Christ's suffering in hell.

Of course, Thomas Pynchon's cultural filters included Norman O. Brown  
& "Capitalism and Schizophrenia." As Vineland has a couple-two-three  
feminist allusions I'll bet he's at the very least familiar with the  
writings of Mary Daly:

	. . . Daly has published a number of works, and is perhaps best
	known for her second book, Beyond God the Father (1973).
	Beyond God the Father is the last book in which Daly really
	considers God a substantive subject. She lays out her
	systematic theology, following Tillich’s example. It is often
	regarded as a foundational work in feminist theology, Beyond
	God the Father is her attempt to explain and overcome
	androcentrism in Western religion. It is notable for its playful
	writing style and its attempt to rehabilitate "God-talk" for the
	women's liberation movement by critically building on the
	writing of existentialist theologians such as Paul Tillich and
	Martin Buber. While the former increasingly characterized her
	writing,, she soon abandoned the latter. . .

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Daly

I don't know if Pynchon is familiar with Starhawk's "Dreaming the Dark."

http://books.google.com/books?id=HJPYwFTG5H0C&printsec=frontcover&dq=dreaming+the+dark

Starhawk deals out the biggest possible heresies by positing Goddess  
as top of her non-hierachical heap 'o deities. Starhawk started out as  
a Jungian psychotherapist [and Jew] prior to becoming a full-time  
professional activist 'n author [and Witch.]  Her notions of social  
control were formed by the sorts of archetypes that Jung focused on.  
Starhawk claims Robert Graves' "The White Goddess" as a primary  
influence—didn't OBA name-check Graves in "V."? She's moved on since  
then and has backed up her work with plenty of hard science as regards  
ecology and permaculture.

In any case, Pynchon's writings often remind me of Starhawk—I take  
Geli Tripping's role in Gravity's Rainbow as a sign of where OBA's  
sympathies lie. Which brings me back to the concept of Post-Modern  
Mysticism. Once one knows that "heresy" is an artificially imposed  
notion that warps our ability to see what's really going on [Byron the  
Lightbulb anyone?], then one starts to look at all these spiritual  
concepts on a more level playing field. Folks that call themselves  
pagan or new-age or wiccan are really more the product of postmodern  
sensibility applied to the spiritual realms. Pull it all together and  
it spells "Pynchon."

> In the broadest terms, is it fair to say that heresy is a divergence
> from consensus reality?

No, it seems that heresy is usually limited to a particular mind set  
or a religious subset. Of course, it may just be that I'm just a pomo  
dude, that previous generations mapped their realities according to  
the orthodoxies of their tribe but right now we are beset with a swarm  
of different and non-assimilable value systems, all the way from  
deepest Islam to full-blown kosher Hippie, all attempting to live side- 
by side in an ever shrinking world.

> . . . reminds me of the really excellent "scrying" point you made
> about Prairie looking in the mirror and seeing first her mother and
> then DL.

Thanks, I really ought to post a number of Pynchon's scrying scenes,  
he's as familiar with the subject as any I've read so far—Hector  
Zugina's zomokepsis being a case in point.



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