New Age Imperialism

[Mark Kohut]

yes, Kai, very interesting...very...we haven't focused enough on that. He is a 
comic novelist who makes fun of about everything. 


I come up against this often now when I think of TRP as a novelist of ideas...he 
is, he uses ideas,  but as he
wrote about entropy, just for the story, ---for HIS vision. 

to use that Hobbes line, "nasty,brutish and short" as a law firm's name; to diss 
Descartes so totally is not a
philosopher's refutation, it should go without saying, but to make fun of 
--within what he associates Descartes with...........

When I studied Eastern religions in college, I remember thinking such small 
distinctions, such labels for the various attitudes...which might be seen very 
simply. (As I suppose any Eastern-raised religionist might find about the 
Judeo-Christian tradition..)

And I do remember someone writing that the Buddha could not have been the Buddha 
anywhere else....


 


----- Original Message ----
From: Robin Landseadel <robinlandseadel at comcast.net>
To: pynchon-l at waste.org
Sent: Sat, November 13, 2010 9:50:17 AM
Subject: Re: New Age Imperialism

Very interesting proposition, seems as though your observations would apply to 
an even greater degree to "Against the Day."

There was never any doubt in my mind that Mystical Female figures play prominent 
roles in Pynchon's novels, never really looked at Sister Rochelle in that light 
before but what you've posted certainly applies. It appears to also apply to the 
other MFFs in Pynchon's novels. Oedipa experiences change at a basic level of 
consciousness, becomes aware of the social context of her life in a way she was 
closed off to before. Geli Tripping deals with a harrowing social reality and 
has spells that work. There's all sorts of Western Mystic Mumbo-Jumbo throughout 
Mason & Dixon that just happens to be completely intertwined with social context 
of these two scryers of land. There is a great deal that points to the loss of 
our western spiritual traditions during the so-called age of Enlightenment. 
Ironically, M & D is the author's darkest novel, leastways as far as the 
lighting is concerned. Sortilège always seems perfectly practical, least until 
she slips over into Lumeria and who knows? Maybe there's practical knowledge in 
that, like "Run For The Hills!"

And then there's Cyprian.

On Nov 13, 2010, at 6:25 AM, Kai Frederik Lorentzen wrote:

> 
> In all his books, from V to Inherent Vice, Pynchon is making fun of us 
>Westerners trying to learn
> from the wisdom of the East. There is not only something helpless about it, 
>it's also politically
> problematic. Just some minutes ago I read a passage from David Cooper's "The 
>Death of the Family"
> [1971] that sheds some light on this. Since I read it in German I give you a 
>short summary of his
> basic argument and just (back)translate Cooper's final sentence. What he says 
>is that - although
> the cultural imperialism the West is forcing the East into is bad enough - the 
>true crime is the
> expropriation of the Eastern traditions by our Western cultures. Cooper says 
>we're "parasites"
> sucking out older civilizations. This he calls "reactionary mystification". His 
>example is the selective
> transplanting of elements of Mahajana Buddhism from Bhutan to San Francisco 
>without taking into
> consideration the different social contexts. The outcome of this is a political 
>"quietism" which,
> according to Cooper, goes along only too well with the global exploitation. 
>David Cooper finishes
> the passage with the sentence: "True Mystics were always very conscious of the 
>nature of society
> they lived in and, thus, really political human beings."
> 
> Is Vineland's Sister Rochelle a "true mystic" in this specific sense?
> 
> Kai
> 
> 
> "Es gibt heute in der Ersten Welt eine weitverbreitete Sehnsucht nach großen 
>Lehrern und geistigen
> Meistern, die, wenn sie auch nicht alle Probleme lösen können, doch zumindest 
>den richtigen Weg zum
> richtigen Ziel zeigen können. Eines der ausgeprägtesten Merkmale des 
>kulturellen Imperialismus sind
> nicht die kulturellen Modelle, welche die Erste Welt der Dritten aufzwingt, was 
>an sich schon brutal
> genug ist, sondern ist die Weisheit, welche die Erste Welt jeder älteren 
>Zivilisation wie ein Parasit aussaugt. So entsteht eine reaktionäre 
>Mystifikation, die von Mystik keine Ahnung hat. Wenn zum Beispiel einige 
>Elemente des Mahajana-Buddhismus nach dem Westen verpflanzt werden ohne 
>Rücksicht auf die unterschiedliche soziale Realität in Bhutan und San Francisco, 
>dann ist das Ergebnis ein Quietismus, der insgeheim völlig mit dem 
>ausbeuterischen System übereinstimmt. Echte Mystiker waren sich der Natur der 
>Gesellschaft, in der sie lebten, immer äußerst bewusst, und in diesem Sinne 
>waren sie wirklich politische Menschen."
> 
> (David Cooper: Der Tod der Familie. Reinbek bei Hamburg 1972: Rowohlt, p. 61)
> 
>