V-2nd Eigenvalue is a philosopher of history

[Mark Kohut]

Yeap...I did not reread the quote.....this does make more sense....Eigenvalue 
thinks he is on top of History.....




----- Original Message ----
From: Joseph Tracy <brook7 at sover.net>
To: pynchon -l <pynchon-l at waste.org>
Sent: Mon, September 20, 2010 11:44:11 PM
Subject: Re: V-2nd Eigenvalue is a philosopher of history

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."
> 
> 
>