James goes to the dogs

[Robin Landseadel]

On Jul 23, 2009, at 7:45 AM, Robin Landseadel wrote:

> How's about "Bi-Polar Realism"? . . .

Yeah, that post was a first draft. Sent it to you all instead of myself.

C'est la vie.

The Alice quote I was looking for was a line from the Red Queen to  
Alice.  I may have misremembered the particular character & this is  
probably paraphrasing, but it goes along the lines of—"In these parts,  
one must run as fast as one can to stay in one place. In order to get  
anywhere, one must run much faster than that." Which strikes me as the  
best description anyone has ever come up with of the Bi-Polar state.

LSD certainly set up quite an intellectual/spiritual conundrum. The  
fact that folks were experiencing Gnosis via a chemical points out the  
possibility that "seeing God" is a spot on the brain and a few  
chemicals. Further investigation into endogenous DMT demonstrated that  
messing with the serotonin levels might result in the brain producing  
higher than average levels of this vision producing chemical, which is  
also at higher levels during the moments of birth and death—or so I've  
been told. Other times as well. Pynchon seems to know and care about  
these things, considering how often these sorts of things get  
mentioned in his books.

Now I know that a phrase like "Visionary Poet" reeks of fan-boy-dum,  
but I'd guess that those of us still taken by Pynchon are attracted to  
it for much the same reasons one would be attracted to Proust or  
Rilke. There's something in the phrasing and how it scans and how it  
"sounds." Those who are bit hardest by Gravity's Rainbow sometimes  
don't see those sorts of passages in the later works, but they're  
still there.