V-2nd. Pissing at the sun/: Ahab

[Mark Kohut]

Nice....

I also want to add a possible allusion--in the 'sun beat down out of an umprotective heaven'....
That so-influential, read-by-everyone novel, "The Stranger" is perhaps the most famous novel
with a pitiless sun from an unprotective heaven....................

I want to pick up on Ian's post about Benny and otherness wherein he observes that it is largely a binary--
bifurcated--relationship. Seems right on to me.......VERY Sartrean, very Being & Nothingness where
there is a famous distinction between the en-soi and the pour-soi.............
"Sartre made the distinction between things that exist in themselves (en-soi) and human beings who exist for themselves (pour-soi). ...
kirjasto.sci.fi/sartre.htm- Cached "        point being: a binary division, no unitary possibility, all middles excluded?...........................

Which adds to my speculations that, consciously, or just as an/the ethos that prevailed, 
TRP wants to scorn this kind of 'existentialism--or the times that led to such a 'philosophy'? 
Leaving aside any dicey philosophical allusions, one might argue America in the fifties
was very .......narrowly so bifurcated? 

I will throw in here Rachel's little riff on those piles of "dead rocks that were here before us and will be here
after us"...things that exist in themeselves"         p.20 perennial edition...........

in later books, with TRP's near-animism and something-like-pantheism [panenthism], he offers a very different alternative metaphysics
of life...........

Mark



----- Original Message ----
From: Kai Frederik Lorentzen <lorentzen at hotmail.de>
To: markekohut at yahoo.com; pynchon-l at waste.org
Sent: Thu, June 24, 2010 8:05:46 AM
Subject: RE: V-2nd. Pissing at the sun/: Ahab


In my Picador UK [Hey you Englishmen, this will be fun on Sunday, right?]
edition it's page 26:

" ... with some intention of pissing on the sun to put it out for good 
and all ..." 

This is obviously a Melville reference:

" ... I'd strike the sun if it insulted me."

(Moby Dick, chapter 26: The Quarter-Deck, p. 167, London 1963: OUP)

And Benny  - "Profane, fat, sweated." (p. 25) - IS insulted, because 
"(s)un beat down out of a cloudless, UNPROTECTIVE [emphasis added] heaven"
(ebd.) [Interesting, this is like German where we don't have the
heaven/sky-distinction and it's all "Himmel"!kfl], plus he
feels "uncomfortable" (ebd.). Of course also wg. Rachel ... 

No hermetic arts involved so far, imo.


Kai  

----------------------------------------
> Date: Wed, 23 Jun 2010 16:54:03 -0700
> From: markekohut at yahoo.com
> Subject: V-2nd. Pissing at the sun
> To: pynchon-l at waste.org
>
> p. 19 Seems to be astrology humor?...Don't know if it is almost as old a joke as astrology,
> but I thought I had heard a similar drunken pissing story back in the day........but
> I may always have been remembering this one???
>
> http://www.astrologyweekly.com/humour/pissing-on-sun.php
>
> I have always just seen it as a(nother) profane joke--this one directed toward the sun
> god, the god left by default, maybe, if the Sacred God is blasphemed--- if one wanted to play them ole
> kosmic blues again.
>
> What yu'all think?
>
>