V-2nd Eigenvalue is a philosopher of history

[Michael Bailey]

well, it's one of those extended metaphors that take on a life of
their own, isn't it?

for some reason I'm picturing the fabric of time as a pair of dress
trousers and a guy, maybe Eigenvalue himself, is wearing them and
sitting in a nice chair, and the gabardine or whatever has these
ridges and gathers, and well, I tend to zoom in on that and forget the
referent to some extent, since I'm wondering if it's a houndtooth
check pattern, and thinking about how I had some dress pants where
certain parts always stood up when I sat down...

I suppose this is in fact an example of what Eigenvalue's talking
about, getting into the details of the metaphor rather than vigorously
applying it to anything outside itself...like the details of the funny
looking autos and peculiar mores (bundling, line dancing, pep rallies)
that people concentrate on when thinking about history...

because there are so many interesting details that it's hard to trace
any kind of pattern in history via examining them

("What was that about the hats, again?")


On Tue, Sep 21, 2010 at 7:06 AM, Mark Kohut <markekohut at yahoo.com> wrote:
> 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."
>>
>>
>>
>
>
>
>



-- 
"I have left my book,
I have left my room,
For I heard your voice
singing through the gloom" - James Joyce