V-2nd, Chap 7

[Mark Kohut]

Robin:

What means this?
"if one gets the "Gnostic Message" of Sandoz's best, then there will be a 
therapeutic breakthrough".........



----- Original Message ----
From: Robin Landseadel <robinlandseadel at comcast.net>
To: pynchon-l at waste.org
Sent: Tue, September 28, 2010 9:19:58 AM
Subject: Re: V-2nd, Chap 7

On Sep 28, 2010, at 5:33 AM, Kai Frederik Lorentzen wrote:

> This makes sense for "all these books" you named plus Gravity's Rainbow.
> 
> But also for CoL49 or V?
> 
> In both of them nature does not exactly come over as "Gaia" or your latest acid 
>dream with
> sparkling galaxies in every blossom.
> 
> It's more like the author wasn't interested much in nature at that time.
> 
> And IF Pynchon makes nature a "character" in those early books, it's not 
>necessarily a
> benignant one:
> 
> Check out the "waterspout" in V's final paragraph!
> 
> I guess that there is no 'intelligent design' on this planet.
> 
> KFL
> 
> PS: Just had another look at CoL49 and found Oedipa's meditation on the Pacific 
>("the
> umimaginable") in chapter three which is foreshadowing the surfer-cosmology 
>from
> VL and IV, but in V (or the early stories) these traces of Californication 
>cannot be found,
> as far as I can see. So what's young Pynchon's attitude towards nature?

Good question, good point.

I suspect that young TRP had a little exposure to Maryjane and relatively little 
to the world at large. I do believe the tipping point can be found in some parts 
of The Crying of Lot 49. I've posted this line so many times you can 
understandably confuse this with OCD, but here goes:

    "Mucho," she said, impatient but also flirting with a wild suspicion. "Is 
this what
    Punch means when he says you're coming on like a whole roomful of people?"
    "That's what I am," said Mucho, "right. Everybody is." He gazed at her, 
perhaps
    having had his vision of consensus as others do orgasms, face now smooth,
    amiable, at peace. She didn't know him. Panic started to climb out of a dark
    region in her head. "Whenever I put the headset on now," he'd continued, "I
    really do understand what I find there. When those kids sing about 'She 
loves
    you,' yeah well, you know, she does, she's any number of people, all over 
the
    world, back through time, different colors, sizes, ages, shapes, distances 
from
    death, but she loves. And the 'you' is everybody. And herself. Oedipa, the
    human voice, you know, it's a flipping miracle." His eyes brimming, 
reflecting the
    color of beer.

It looks like insanity but "those who know, know" and if one gets the "Gnostic 
Message" of Sandoz's best, then there will be a therapeutic breakthrough. At 
least that was what psychiatrists/ psychotherapists thought they were doing with 
the stuff back in 1964. What it seemed to be was God [the big "G" stands for 
"PAY ATTENTION!!!"] in a bottle, though later experiments seemed to point to 
Pandora.

So that's the glimmer of the vision, and that vision sounds suspiciously Gaian, 
though Lovelock's Gaia was not yet between the covers so to speak. Of course, 
LSD is all over Gravity's Rainbow, surprise, surprise. But Pynchon regularly 
makes the Gnostic/Visionary/Chemical/Shamanic connections from this point 
forward and is rather specific about the whole thing in Inherent Vice.

Now, making the visionary connection to nature is a stretch for most, but simply 
in terms of his awareness of the physical world beyond the public library, 
moving to California [with earlier side excursions to Mexico] exposed the author 
to remaining bits of "Vineland the Good." I know he regularly took trips to the 
Bay Area by 1964, I spoke to a lady that made him Tuna Casserole [which he 
loved, she sez] and witnessed the birth of "San Narcisco" as they approached the 
freeway sign that says "South San Francisco."

I'm sure that by 1990, he saw where all that was heading. I know I was, I was in 
the thick of it.

> On 27.09.2010 21:50, Robin Landseadel 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.