V--2nd, Chapter 11 p.324 A room is all that is the case

[Mark Kohut]

Michael writes:
But I think there is a fundamental need for something like confession.
You can get sanity checks from your friends and family, and that's
valuable.  If you're in school, the feedback from your teachers helps
you figure out some of the tough questions and so forth.


Someone commenting psychologically on Catholicism I once read
said it fulfilled our need to confess, to be heard about our weaknesses
by authority we respected. As MB writes. (this writer also said Catholicism
was real good about the aesthetic experience of an externalized communal
ritual---the Mass.)

Whatever. Anyway, I was raised Catholic and I can remember lots emotionally.
One memory relevant here is a high school one where for some reason---surely
to force goodness on the bad kids--we all had to attend confession one school
day. Some kind of retreat in place, I guess.I remember feeling like a wit--not 
that
common to me--when, after we were all back from confession I ad libbed using
the old Zest commercial "How does it feel to be really clean?"....Got big laughs
yet, now, I would say I had the witticism because I FELT that---really clean---
cause I was an earnest good boy who just had impure thoughts and might not even 
have
been playing with myself yet, can't remember, who took confession seriously.

I might suggest that the experience of confession, internalized, led, after 
discovering Freud and jung
 to Pynchon's wonderful offhand truth about self-criticism---it wouldn't seem to 
work but it does. 

I always thought the Protestants---I knew no Jews nor people of any other 
religions---
had it easy. It was all between them and their God one-on-one. 
My earliest crisis-of-faith went like this: Some people feel even their little 
sins more than
others, so those insensitive buggers, if they don't even think of what they've 
done, can't
feel guilty so what is there to be 'forgiven'?....Sociopathic bastards, I might 
say now jokingly.

Augustine's Confessions, as Alice cites, must have been read by intellectual 
Catholic Tom. 
I can't relate it to this chapter, maybe cause I never read it all....I feel 
Adams strained through
Pynchon's added vision via a confessional as influence, but  I would now. 


----- Original Message ----
From: Michael Bailey <michael.lee.bailey at gmail.com>
To: P-list <pynchon-l at waste.org>
Sent: Wed, November 17, 2010 9:09:43 PM
Subject: Re: V--2nd, Chapter 11 p.324 A room is all that is the case

alice wellintown  wrote:
> Grant sez to check out Alaine Robbe-Grillet. Makes sense to me.
>

I was just trying to think of his name.

Also the confessional angle: a bird, or maybe a gargoyle, has perched
on my shoulder and keeps telling me this is an important theme in the
book: Godolphin, Stencil, Eigenvalue, and now poor Fausto.

Not being brought up Catholic, it's always held a certain amount of
fascination for me.  I remember asking one of my buddies as a teenager
about it.  He didn't seem nearly as interested in it as I was: he said
you just say something like "forgive me Father, I have sinned," and
they tell you to say some Hail Marys.

Then of course I got into riffing on blessed is the Fruit of the Loom,
and I think he was, not exactly offended, but put off.

But I still imagine sitting in a confessional and telling all the
stuff I feel bad about, and what would the priest do?  I guess it's a
little more formalized than that, and there are people waiting in line
behind you.

But I think there is a fundamental need for something like confession.
You can get sanity checks from your friends and family, and that's
valuable.  If you're in school, the feedback from your teachers helps
you figure out some of the tough questions and so forth.

So the formal church confession could be a prototype of this sort of
action - deconstructed to a form of primate grooming even, if we are
into that sort of not-very-flattering analogy.

Stencil's father confessed into his journal, I guess - and there's
some kind of mutuality intended.  My friend's feeling about it sounded
to me (although I realize he was probably downplaying it) like the
interplay of gravity between a person and the earth: I jump up and the
earth's gravity pulls me down/he confesses and feels better - in
return, when I land, the earth is jogged a zillionth of a
centimeter/and the Church feels a minuscule outpouring of grace (about
as much as the world is moved by my mass when I jump) -- or so I
pictured it and maybe still do...

Whereas, Fausto confesses to Paola and I think that is actually
efficacious upon her to some degree, causing her to act differently
going forward.

But, again, this is a long, detailed confession.

And written, if that makes a difference...???