V2nd - the ecclesiastical history read

[Robin Landseadel]

My point is that Pynchon gets into the specifics of heresy. "The  
Courier's Tragedy" appears [to these eyes] to specifically point to  
Giordano Bruno, the renegade Dominican who famously had his tongue cut  
out while still alive, just before being burned at the stake.

	The act itself closes with Domenico, to whom the naive Niccolo
	started it off by spilling his secret, trying to get in to see Duke
	Angelo and betray his dear friend. The Duke, of course, is in his
	apartment busy knocking off a piece, and the best Domenico
	can do is an administrative assistant who turns out to be the
	same Ercole who once saved the life of young Niccolo and
	aided his escape from Faggio. This he presently confesses to
	Domenico, though only after having enticed that informer into
	foolishly bending over and putting his head into a curious black
	box, on the pretext of showing him a pornographic diorama. A
	steel vise promptly clamps onto the faithless Domenico's head
	and the box muffles his cries for help. Ercole binds his hands
	and feet with scarlet silk cords, lets him know who it is he's run
	afoul of, reaches into the box with a pair of pincers, tears out
	Domenico's tongue, stabs him a couple times, pours into the
	box a beaker of aqua regia, enumerates a list of other goodies,
	including castration, that Domenico will undergo before he's
	allowed to die, all amid screams, tongueless attempts to pray,
	agonized struggles from the victim. With the tongue impaled on
	his rapier Ercole runs to a burning torch set in the wall, sets the
	tongue aflame and waving it around like a madman concludes
	the act by screaming,

	Thy pitiless unmanning is most meet,

	Thinks Ercole the zany Paraclete.

	Descended this malign, Unholy Ghost,

	Let us begin thy frightful Pentecost.

Now, not only is this a dramatic re-enactment of the means of Bruno's  
execution, but by virtue [absolutely the most perfectly wrong word in  
this context] of calling down an "unholy ghost" and waving around  
Dominico's flaming tongue as a 'frightful Pentecost', Ercole is  
essentially committing a parodistic form of black magic. There is an  
amplification and focus specifically on black magic in Gravity's  
Rainbow, no question that our boy is rather specifically obsessed with  
black magic, this goes far beyond the "Romantic Impulse" even of  
Goethe's Faust. There is something considerably darker going on here,  
a diorama of heretical impulses.

On Sep 23, 2010, at 6:17 AM, David Morris wrote:

> Of course, because all heros are rebels, breakers of ranks.  The
> opposite of heresy is obedience/acceptance, and how boring is that?
>
> David Morris
>
> On Wed, Sep 22, 2010 at 5:56 PM, alice wellintown
> <alicewellintown at gmail.com> wrote:
>> The Romantic Aesthetic always includes, first the heretical impulse,
>> and then the act of heresy.  The "the human heart", as Hawthorne
>> describes it in his famous Preface to _The House of the Seven Gables_
>> beats a steady rebellion. The Romantics, be they American Scholars
>> following in what Whitman describes as the "parade" led by Emerson,  
>> or
>> French novelists complicit in the "killing of the cathedrals" with
>> books and the Gutenberg Press (Hugo's HND),  heresy is heresy is  
>> their
>> religion.