Not Drugs The Anatomy of Melville's Melancholy (Thoreau: "when men are prepared for it")

[Robin Landseadel]

Terry—Ya needs an editor.

On Nov 14, 2009, at 8:09 AM, alice wellintown wrote:
>
>  . . . It's absurd to dismiss a Puritanical reading of the greatest
> post-modern Romantic writing in American Eglish. Absurd to knee-jerk
> after Doc strikes and kills or to flap about on the decks of the
> Pequad like a protected and privleged dolphin caught in  the net of
> what Poe called God's conspiracy. Absurd to disregard or dismiss,
> withouit serious critical evaluation, the deep and abdiding tradition,
> the strain of Puritan and Enlightenment pragamtism, and of
> Transcendentalism and Dark Romanticism, that is spun, as from the loom
> at the bottom of the sea where only God's foot may push the pedal,
> into the fabric of Pynchon's tapestry. . .

"I have what you may call Logorrhea, or diarrhea of the spitch . . ."
Nicholas Slonimsky

It's also foolish to pretend that Pynchon didn't imbibe all them  
"useful substances" and that the results of all those psychochemical  
experiments didn't wormhole their respective ways into his Opera. It's  
foolish to pretend that psychotropics are a side issue in the master's  
œuvre. The trajectory is as follows. LSD slithers into CoL49, explodes  
in GR, is in the background of Vineland. I'll have to re-read the  
glorious M&D in that light, knowing full well that Tom's chemical  
adventures altered the writer's P.O.V.  permanently. If you talk of  
Gnosticism, ya have to talk about visionary experience. AtD has peyote  
as a forensic tool and here we are in Gordita Beach—Fat City by the  
Bay City. So the Golden Fang offers Doc Coke, the latest in a long  
line of CIA experiments. LSD now is being sold that's not LSD,  
youthful protest movements that emerged in the early sixties—MLK  
anyone?—are confused and splintered by 1970.

"And the Band Plays on . . ."

If Inherent Vice isn't about drugs, what is?