V-2nd Eigenvalue is a philosopher of history

[Joseph Tracy]

Yea, I think one of the things that ya gotta add to any list of the  
500 hats of Tom Pynchon is non-academic scholar of just about  
everything history, philosophy, spying, time-machinery.
But is Eigenvalue saying "we" aren't on that crest or that Stencil  
isn't?"Perhaps history this century, thought Eigenvalue, is rippled  
with gathers in its fabric such that if we are situated, as Stencil  
seemed to be, at the bottom of a fold" .  I get the sense that  
Eigenvalue sees himself as occupying the high grounds of power. But  
they Eigenvalue and company also feel they are missing something ,  
having to do with V.
Godolphin was guiding  civilian engineers into the still unexploited,  
the virgin, the world of the tattooed goddess. the resources yet to  
be colonized.   The civilian engineers didn't work out. Maybe  
psychodontia ?



On Sep 20, 2010, at 10:22 PM, Mark Kohut wrote:

> Browsed in an anthology of writings about the philosophy, the  
> writing, of
> history.
>
> One scholar sez the reputation of Toynbee as historian started  
> declining @1957.
> His vision of history, full of the cyclical rising
> and falling of civilizations contained an overt belief that the  
> Judeo-Christian
> civilization we were all in
> was an unfolding culmination.
>
> Might such an optimistic vision of History in the West be---that  
> 'crest' in the
> fabric fold that Eigenvalue said we were
> NOT on?......
>
> Anthologizer/scholar sez, since late in the 19th Century, best  
> thinkers about
> history believe--and show---more detail, more variety,
> more of all that is going on---like real artists/writers---which  
> sabotages all
> abstract Theories of History.
>
>
> ----- Original Message ----
> From: Mark Kohut <markekohut at yahoo.com>
> To: pynchon -l <pynchon-l at waste.org>
> Sent: Sat, September 18, 2010 9:52:31 PM
> Subject: V-2nd Eigenvalue is a philosopher of history
>
> p. 164 Stencil: "V. and a conspiracy"-- thinks a conspiracy lies  
> behind 'the
> surface accidents of history'?[ NP misc. When Joan [of Arc fame]
> invokes the fiends in Shax's Henry 6, she asks to see the future  
> accidents of
> history......]
>
>
> Eigenvalue presents a metaphor of history as a kind of folded  
> fabric, rupturing
> continuity, no overall conspiracy, no
> forward-moving eschatology to history [Get Thee Gone, Hegel, Marx,  
> Christian End
>
> Times] and
> sez, we are now [1956] in a fold, not on a crest. We cannot see/ 
> predict
> the future.
>
> Vico--in Joyce--Spengler and Toynbee had prominent cyclical  
> theories of
> history circulating on their guitars around now. Eigenvalue, pretty
> sophisticated
> for a dentist, sez we know there is a localized 'gather', therefore  
> there are
> others,
> which we tend to overgeneralize about.
>
> P's thinking? If not, ????
>
> Yeats had a cyclical theory too. We know "as above, so below" came  
> from A
> Vision.
> "One of the underlying assertions of A Vision is that the  
> spirituality of
> Christianity is a partial one, which by its nature denies the  
> validity of a
> different, more humanistic one, so that Yeats, a naturally  
> spiritual man, feels
> that his innate form of spirituality is denied by the religious  
> ethos of his
> epoch."
>
>
>