rubrics (I like that word), wrecking crews and hugfests

[Ray Easton]

Mark Kohut wrote:
>
> I would argue the 'duality' thus: TRP likes most of the occult ways of trying to get us out of the linear mental structure of scientific cause-effect YETdoes not himself necessarily like many "occult" conceptual options he puts in his works. Some, though? 
>
>   


Does Pynchon offer us a critique of "the linear mental structure of 
cause and effect"?  Yes, with that I agree. 


The occult provides an elaborate and esoteric view of the world, as does 
modern  physics.  Some human beings use the world view offered by the 
occult in an attempt make sense of the world, just as some others employ 
the rational, scientific view in the same attempt.  Does the author 
endorse any such alternative to rationality?  I see no evidence for that 
in the texts.  What I do see in the texts is a critique of the occult 
world view, and other such alternatives, as trenchant as the one he 
offers of "rationalist" thought.


My only small contribution to the AtD read was the observation that the 
actual content of the mathematics in AtD is irrelevant to the novel.  
There's no secret, hidden, below the surface meaning to fact that the 
characters discuss the zeta function, say, rather than some other 
obscure and esoteric bit of modern mathematics.   Any mathematical 
concept will do, so long as it is obscure and esoteric, so long as it is 
the sort of thing that can be obsessed about, so long as it possible for 
human beings to see it as the sort of thing that can hold some most 
secret and important meaning.  What matters in AtD is not the 
mathematics, but that the characters are doing mathematics and the way 
they go about doing it.  Pynchon does not write about mathematics.  He 
writes about human beings doing mathematics in an especially obsessive 
way.  There is no hidden meaning to the mathematics.  Everything is on 
the surface.


In an entirely similar way, it seems to me that Pynchon does not write 
about the occult, he writes those obsessed the occult.   He does not 
write about conspiracy theories, but about those obsessed with 
conspiracy.  There are no hidden, "deeper" meanings in these cases 
either.  Everything is  on the surface.


The notion that these hobbyhorses are anything but hobbyhorses, the idea 
that Pynchon writes about such thing in order to point us towards some 
truth  in which he believes -- this is, to Richard Fiero's description, 
a trap.  A trap deliberately laid for us by the texts, to be sure, but 
still a trap.


Ray