AtD/VL-related: The Varieties of Religious Experience

[Mark Kohut]

A friend of mine quotes the concept of 'the twice-born' [re life's experiences 
and religious embrace]
and sources it here.....Is that right in your reading....

And so is this where the concept of "born again', so cheapened since, was born?


----- Original Message ----
From: Kai Frederik Lorentzen <lorentzen at hotmail.de>
To: pynchon -l <pynchon-l at waste.org>
Sent: Sun, November 21, 2010 7:52:50 AM
Subject: AtD/VL-related: The Varieties of Religious Experience


When I first read Vineland, back in early 1990, I was kinda surprised to find 
the William James
book title dropped on page 369, since it did not exactly seem necessary to bring 
over Jess's
Emerson quote. I took this as a hint and, like perhaps the one or other of you 
too, read the
book later on in the 1990s. [My experience with philosophical pragmatism in 
general is: Dewey,
any time I try to read him, gives me narcoleptic seizures, but George Herbert 
Mead is a still
underrated genius!] As the title already suggests, one of the basic thesisses of 
William James is that
the religious needs of people do differ. They are not identical. In Jamesian 
terms (see the beginning
of lecture XX) we can observe the Vineland scene as 'religious' insofar as there 
is a new taste for
life, experienced as a gift plus manifested in forms of lyrical enchantment AND 
[James says: "or"]
in gestalt of a call for seriousness and heroism. Right on, right on!

In Pynchon's books one can find all kinds of religious bzw. magical practices; 
what interests me
here is: Can you find other explicit refs to the Jamesian phenomenology of the 
religious mind?

Maybe I did. Having started my regular AtD re-read, I had a good laugh last 
night. Please do note
the last sentence!

"An old aerostat hand by now, Pugnax had also learned, like the rest of the 
crew, to respond to 'calls
of nature' by proceeding to the downwind side of the gondola, resulting in 
surprises among the surface populations below, but not often enough, or even 
notably enough, for anyone to begin to try to record, much less coordinate 
reports of, these lavatorial assaults from the sky. They entered rather the 
realm of folklore, superstition, or perhaps, if one does not mind stretching the 
definitions, the
religious." (p. 5)

This is, of course, (also) satirical, but my association machine spat out the 
Vineland ref at once. And then we should remember what William [Pugnax reads 
rather Henry] James tells us in lecture XIV (am
back-translating, again, from the German edition, this time pp. 336-7):

"WE cannot distinguish between natural and supernatural effects, nor recognize 
among the supernatural effects the ones coming from the grace of God in contrast 
to those being falsifications
done by the devil."

Personally I think that taking into account to piss down on people is less 
problematic than Benny
Profane's wish to piss out the sun.


Happy Sunday!

Kai