AtD/VL-related: The Varieties of Religious Experience

[Robin Landseadel]

And don't forget that the focus on Religious Experience as a negative  
ultimately reinforces a focus on the heretical.

I see Pynchon embracing heresy, allsorts -- the darker, the nastier,  
the better. This reaches a hysterical peak in Gravity's Rainbow, but  
it is fully plowed up in "V." Again --  Alice -- this is a Chicken/Egg  
question. You point, correctly, to Melville and company, I point to  
Pynchon's personal heritage. I say that a lot of Pynchon's writing  
derives from William Pynchon's tales and his offspring and the shoots  
and leaves that sprang out of our Nation's first great heresy. There's  
enough particulars scattered and repeated throughout Pynchon's books  
that point to how personal and particular the author's concerns are.  
The witches are in his books not only because it ties in with the  
American Romantic tradition and the whole New England  
Transcendentalist thing, but also because he must have dated [briefly,  
they remained friends] a Sortilège. Or two. Whoever "Doc" is, that's  
more or less what happens, and if the young author is anywhere near  
Venice CA or the Ren Faire circa 1969/1970, he's gonna run into a  
reader or advisor or two, particularly if the circles he's running  
with regularly partake of "that useful substance." These subjects are  
all over all his books, they didn't get in there because of a class he  
took at Cornell, it clearly comes out of personal experience and  
interest.

On Nov 21, 2010, at 5:49 AM, Mark Kohut wrote:

> Fascinating....another must-read...
>
> Do ya think that what you focus on in V of RE and V & AtD are part
> of a move on P's mind from, say, 'the spiritual', "the otherwrdly'  
> in religious
> thinking to......................an embrace of some kind of  
> pantheism or whatever?