V-2nd, Chap 7

[Ian Livingston]

> If anyone was/is a creature of the times, it's Pynchon.

Yes, and he's also a great reader. Fechner (mid 19th C. German) and
James (early 20th C American) are very likely influences whether
before or after the first trip or news of the bomb, etc.

On Mon, Sep 27, 2010 at 12:50 PM, Robin Landseadel
<robinlandseadel at comcast.net> wrote:
> 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.
>
>



-- 
"liber enim librum aperit."