V-2nd - Chapter 8 - Section IV - Stencil's soliloquy

[Ian Livingston]

Michael wrote:

> The narrator notes that the perception of these events in any given
> individual's mind is subjective.  Interestingly, he seems to deplore
> this, calling the version of history liable to be held by an
> individual a "rathouse built of history's rags and straws."
>
> The implicit comparison is that there is, or ought to be, a (Marxist?
> Christian?) version of history more cathedral-like, more like the
> "Schein-Aula" described in GR.  This foreshadows even more explicit
> commentary on history in M&D.
>
> How would a more impressive version of history NOT comparable to a
> rathouse arise identically across a population?  Compulsory schooling?
>  2-way TVs like in 1984, all tuned to the History Channel? (How about
> a succession of reasonable and life-fostering actions by governments,
> pleasant to consider?)
>

First off, thank you Michael. Despite the fact that real world needs
have managed mostly to keep me away from my computer for the last few
weeks, I have been both delighted and intrigued by the insights I have
had the time to read so far. I'll get to the other 39 postings in
time, I trust.

Then, I quote Wm James from A Pluralistic Universe:

"Our philosophies swell the current of being, add their character to
it. They are a part of all that we have met, of all that makes us be.
As a French philosopher says, 'Nous sommes du reel dans le reel.' Our
thoughts determine our acts, and our acts redetermine the previous
nature of the world."

Add it to the great minds think alike category, I think. It seems
improbable, though altogether possible, that P would have read James
by the time he wrote V., so I hesitate to offer any causal link.
Still, this take on how the present recreates the past resonates,
along with James' avowed Bergsonianism, by which he claims that strict
idealist thought is inherently amiss in its definitions of reality
because it denies the continuity of subjective existence. The world we
experience is continuous, the one we define ideally is made of
discontinuous chunks. Such chunks can be rearranged arbitrarily in any
which way, dismissing whole lines of development. Information can thus
be managed (a la Bernays & co, e.g.) to recreate history into a
deformity of experience. However, memory is still capable of accessing
the subjective experience of personal events, so we can, if we are so
inclined, check the official versions of recent history against a
potentially more reliable narrator and extend the result beyond
personal experience and sort of guess the left-out parts outside our
experience. Thus, people may arrive severally at similar
understandings, yes? no?


On Sat, Oct 9, 2010 at 8:17 PM, Michael Bailey
<michael.lee.bailey at gmail.com> wrote:
> ...got the timeline wrong, have to really misstate things to make the
> Pentecost notion from my previous post work:
>
> From the non-sectarian Rusty Spoon communion, on the alarm raised in
> the faith-based community of saloons, bars and public houses, by
> Ben-Gurion's speech April 15th, Pig and Charisma bring (still
> Pentecostally - hey, the very name "Charisma" conjures such a notion)
> "a little bit of that gathering-place" ecumenically to the noted
> Prayer Warriors Roony and Mafia, they gather in the name of the Lord
> and celebrate the host (and Roony is a pretty good host) and 4 days
> later their efforts, and those of the other Baedeker postulants
> (because what is the Rusty Spoon if not a Baedeker outpost, too high
> class for Profane, a place with secluded wings for colonists like
> Mondaugen and Godolphin pere to confess - you could almost impute a
> slowly spinning ceiling fan and place the conversation in Raffles...)
> around the wide world inspire a conciliatory mood leading to the
> ceasefire...healing the sin-sick world's wounds by their partying
>
>
> This is not only countertextual, but counterfactual: the Suez crisis
> was just beginning by April 15th.
>
>
> Paragraph leading into Stencil's soliloquy:
> the ceasefire between Israel and Egypt melds in the public mind with
> the merger of Prince Rainier III of Monaco and Grace Kelly
> (rapprochement of New World and Old World and also reflects Mafia's
> statement on the previous page that "Aristocracy is in the soul.") and
> whatever other news they choose to read.
>
> The narrator notes that the perception of these events in any given
> individual's mind is subjective.  Interestingly, he seems to deplore
> this, calling the version of history liable to be held by an
> individual a "rathouse built of history's rags and straws."
>
> The implicit comparison is that there is, or ought to be, a (Marxist?
> Christian?) version of history more cathedral-like, more like the
> "Schein-Aula" described in GR.  This foreshadows even more explicit
> commentary on history in M&D.
>
> How would a more impressive version of history NOT comparable to a
> rathouse arise identically across a population?  Compulsory schooling?
>  2-way TVs like in 1984, all tuned to the History Channel? (How about
> a succession of reasonable and life-fostering actions by governments,
> pleasant to consider?)
>
> There are around 5 million rathouses in Nueva York, and one of them is
> Stencil's.  But before we focus in on this one, let us consider the
> heads of state - in the words of the 1984 preface, IIRC (*nope, SL
> preface*), "the succession of the criminally insane...with the power
> to do something about it"
>
> As long as we are getting quantitative, consider a normal distribution
> of types (it's implicit that the type of person will determine the
> type of rathouse, and thus the type of action) -
>
> first of all, we delineate the subset "cabinet ministers, heads of
> state and civil servants in the capitals of the world"
>
> then we speculate that that sampling might contain a normal
> distribution of types,  that the people controlling the levers of
> power are in fact ordinary people, "he came out of a quim just like
> you" (GR) -- that at least in the matter of Weltanschauung, there is
> no difference between the distribution of types found in the subset,
> and that found in the general population.
>
> This notion is proved by looking at the events they bring into being.
> Rather tough to sustain the Great Man notion of history, reasoning
> back from their fruits...
>
> Is that the point here? (maybe)  Or am I prone to dubious
> interpretations?  (yes)
>
> Or let's say the narrator in this pre-soliloquy passage is not "pure
> narrator" but is instead (in Deleuze-Guattari terms)
> "becoming-Stencil"
>
> Perhaps "becoming-Stencil"'s rejection of any special election among
> politicos explains Stencil's rejection of the diplomatic career, eh?
> And the fact that, among his father's diaries, the one thing he
> chooses to investigate is V., the thing (person, place) which his
> father hopes not to have to explain, specifically "not in any
> professional capacity"
>
>  What if the courtly tradition is true, the female *is* holy, and
> when the imperialist invokes divine mandate for his depredations, he
> misstates God's (ie, the female's) intentions, confuses her and
> commits her to a tragictory like V.'s?
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> --
> - But you can wade in the water
> and never get wet
> if you keep on doin' that rag (Grateful Dead, "Doin' That Rag")
>



-- 
"liber enim librum aperit."