V-2nd, Chap 7

[Joseph Tracy]

  On 9/27/2010 4:06 PM, Ian Livingston wrote:
>> If anyone was/is a creature of the times, it's Pynchon.

Deep agreement and hats off to a lively conversation.
> 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.
>>
>
>
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