Pynchon's Winding Stair

[alice wellintown]

We have cycled over from everything is connected ("paranoia") to
nothing is connected ("anti-paranoia").

Remember Tantivy tries to convince Slothrop that "operational
paranoia" can be useful, "especially in combat...you know PRETEND
something like that."

Should one pretend that a Rocket is aimed at one's head, one's mind.
Would that do any good?

And what if a Rocket is really is aimed at one's head?

As Yeats, or rather, as the Self sez to the Soul in "The WInding
Stair,";  "What's the good of an escape / if honor find him in the
wintry blast?"

So we have several forms of Paranoia at work. The trick, it seems, is
to find a center, or a way to cope with "paranoia" (the
connections), the vast, differentiated, experiences of war, of
"peace", of Orwellian "War is Peace" of life's flips and flops, but
Pynchon's
characters can't abide such vicissitude. There are bandwidth problems.
There are too many personalities of pretense. Too many "mindless
pleasures" that infect
them, causing solipsistic views of (his)tory and me-story.


They try to escape, to Transcend, to Return, to Deny, to Repress, to
Imbibe some Higher Window view of the Truth , or to otherwise come to
terms with paranoid existence and with the big D or Death.

But all their attempts are but perversions of science or the occult or
cult or religion, and usually a blending or conflation of the
scientific and the occult.

The Winding Stair

My Soul. I summon to the winding ancient stair;
Set all your mind upon the steep ascent,
Upon the broken, crumbling battlement,
Upon the breathless starlit air,
'Upon the star that marks the hidden pole;
Fix every wandering thought upon
That quarter where all thought is done:
Who can distinguish darkness from the soul

My Self. The consecretes blade upon my knees
Is Sato's ancient blade, still as it was,
Still razor-keen, still like a looking-glass
Unspotted by the centuries;
That flowering, silken, old embroidery, torn
>From some court-lady's dress and round
The wodden scabbard bound and wound
Can, tattered, still protect, faded adorn

My Soul. Why should the imagination of a man
Long past his prime remember things that are
Emblematical of love and war?
Think of ancestral night that can,
If but imagination scorn the earth
And intellect is wandering
To this and that and t'other thing,
Deliver from the crime of death and birth.

My Self. Montashigi, third of his family, fashioned it
Five hundred years ago, about it lie
Flowers from I know not what embroidery -
Heart's purple - and all these I set
For emblems of the day against the tower
Emblematical of the night,
And claim as by a soldier's right
A charter to commit the crime once more.

My Soul. Such fullness in that quarter overflows
And falls into the basin of the mind
That man is stricken deaf and dumb and blind,
For intellect no longer knows
Is from the Ought, or knower from the Known -
That is to say, ascends to Heaven;
Only the dead can be forgiven;
But when I think of that my tongue's a stone.

II

My Self. A living man is blind and drinks his drop.
What matter if the ditches are impure?
What matter if I live it all once more?
Endure that toil of growing up;
The ignominy of boyhood; the distress
Of boyhood changing into man;
The unfinished man and his pain
Brought face to face with his own clumsiness;

The finished man among his enemies? -
How in the name of Heaven can he escape
That defiling and disfigured shape
The mirror of malicious eyes
Casts upon his eyes until at last
He thinks that shape must be his shape?
And what's the good of an escape
If honour find him in the wintry blast?

I am content to live it all again
And yet again, if it be life to pitch
Into the frog-spawn of a blind man's ditch,
A blind man battering blind men;
Or into that most fecund ditch of all,
The folly that man does
Or must suffer, if he woos
A proud woman not kindred of his soul.

I am content to follow to its source
Every event in action or in thought;
Measure the lot; forgive myself the lot!
When such as I cast out remorse
So great a sweetness flows into the breast
We must laugh and we must sing,
We are blest by everything,
Everything we look upon is blest.




Pointsman and Blicero are excellent of example of this perverse
blending of science and cult.
Both are, as are most of P's characters, on a quest.

What they are looking for is lost.

Henry Adams & the Moderns flushed it all down into the Waste.

In the Waste stumble about oblivious to this fact, so they are
constantly with keys without locks or locks without keys.