V-2nd, Chap 7

[Ian Livingston]

On Sun, Sep 26, 2010 at 10:11 AM, Robin Landseadel
<robinlandseadel at comcast.net> wrote:
> That's the thing that's different about Pynchon's rocks, see -- they're
> sensate, with a soul in every stone.
>
> The heresies of Pynchon go far past the borders of the Puritan, those
> sensate stones and Pan-Shamanic Empires didn't storm their way into his
> books by virtue of a Pavlovian Calvinist counterinsurgency, but by having
> his doors of perception blown off.
>


Okay, I'll bite. Reading W. James lately. In A Pluralistic Universe he
discusses Gustav Fechner:

"The original sin, according to Fechner, of both our popular and our
scientific thinking, is our inveterate habit of regarding the
spiritual not as the rule but as an exception in the midst of nature.
Instead of believing our individuality to be sustained by the greater
individuality, which must necessarily have more consciousness and more
independence than all that it brings forth, we habitually treat
whatever lies outside of our life as so much slag and ashes of life
only; or if we believe in a Divine Spirit, we fancy him on the one
side as bodiless, and nature as soulless on the other. What comfort,
or peace, Fechner asks, can come from such a doctrine? The flowers
wither at its breath, the stars turn into stone, our own body grows
unworthy of our spirit and sinks to a tenement for carnal senses only.
The book of nature turns into a volume on mechanics, in which whatever
has life is treated as a sort of anomaly; a great chasm of separation
yawns between us and all that is higher than ourselves; and God
becomes a thin nest of abstractions.....

"...[T]he whole human and animal kingdoms come together as conditions
of a consciousness of still wider scope. This combines in the soul of
the earth with the consciousness of the vegetable kingdom, which in
turn contributes its share of experience to that of the whole solar
system and so on from synthesis to synthesis and height to height,
till an absolutely universal consciousness is reached."

Fechner seems to fall just short of the "soul in every stone", and he
talks of having experienced a profound moment of what might be called
'nature mysticism' in which he sensed the besouled consciousness of
all of nature. Some of his insights seem to recur throughout P's opus,
but whether that is due to familiarity or parallel conceptual schemes
I do not know.

On Sun, Sep 26, 2010 at 10:11 AM, Robin Landseadel
<robinlandseadel at comcast.net> wrote:
> That's the thing that's different about Pynchon's rocks, see -- they're
> sensate, with a soul in every stone.
>
> The heresies of Pynchon go far past the borders of the Puritan, those
> sensate stones and Pan-Shamanic Empires didn't storm their way into his
> books by virtue of a Pavlovian Calvinist counterinsurgency, but by having
> his doors of perception blown off.
>
> Once you start hanging out in that neck of the woods, it's only a matter of
> time before the Witches come out to play with you.
>
> On Sep 26, 2010, at 9:33 AM, alice wellintown wrote:
>
>> We mentioned David S. Reynolds's _Beneath the American Renaissance:
>> The Subversive Imagination in the Age of Emerson and Melville_ where
>> we find in the chapter, "Types of American Womanhood", a discussion of
>> the profound influence the "last puritan", as he is called, Jonathan
>> Edwards had on American thought and on its literature. Edwards's brand
>> of Calvinism (he had one foot in the Puritan world and one in the
>> Enligtenment world..not unlike Henry Adams who had one foot in the
>> 20th century and one foot in the 19th leaning toward the 18th)
>> combines the Enlightenment cosmology that features a God who has not
>> simply turned His key in the Newtonian clock-work-universe and walked
>> away, but has deliberatley cut Himself off from Humanity. In His
>> terrifying inscrutability He still torments Man who is reduced to a
>> worthless wretch. The response to Edwards, in part, is the Angel, who
>> functions as Angels do in Roman Catholicism. This Angelic figure is
>> familiar to readers as Hester Prynn who is, of course, no mere Angel,
>> but the Virgin whose child is the Magical Pearl.
>> Earth, that nourished thee, shall claim
>> Thy growth, to be resolved to earth again,
>> And, lost each human trace, surrendering up
>> Thine individual being, shalt thou go
>> To mix forever with the elements,
>> To be a brother to the insensible rock
>
>



-- 
"liber enim librum aperit."