V-2nd, Chap 7
Robin Landseadel
robinlandseadel at comcast.net
Mon Sep 27 14:50:06 CDT 2010
Consider, if you will, the when and where of Thomas Pynchon.
Inherent Vice gives a few clues. Gaia seems to be major backwash of
the "Acid Experience." Just ask Sortilège. One can argue as much as
one wants concerning the intellectual validity of the LSD experience.
But when you see the trees breath, when the concept of "the gnostic
experience" in all its dubiousity and gloriosity inundates your
senses, sense and sensibility takes a back seat to the vision.
As to "What Happened????" a lot of that wound up in Pynchon's books.
But look at Vineland closer, look at Inherent Vice closer, look at
Against the Day and Mason & Dixon. Those shamans, those drug dealers,
those -- Yes -- witches. They didn't wind up in those books by
accident, they certainly didn't land there because TRP was building an
intellectual argument concerning the Romantic tradition of American
literature in the middle of the 19th century. Earth, one way or
another , is a living being in all these books, one of the characters.
Post Acid, Post-Moonshot, Post-World War II. Post-"The Bomb."
If anyone was/is a creature of the times, it's Pynchon.
On Sep 27, 2010, at 11:10 AM, Ian Livingston wrote:
> 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.
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