"You're gonna want cause & effect"---GR

[Ian Livingston]

Kathryn Hume says, in Pynchon's Mythography, regarding this particular
subject in GR, "Where Pynchon is most serious and most literal is in
his insistence on an Other Side, on some kind of irreducible mystery,
on there being something beyond the world acknowledged by empirical
method.... We know more or less how gravity, magnetism, and
electricity work, but not really what they are. We now know there are
some things we cannot know--the simultaneous momentum and location of
an electron, for instance. We are philosophically aware that the
concepts of force and of cause and effect are human projections upon
the world.... Pynchon seems at times to be creating a metaphoric
extension of subatomic realities into the quotidian level of
existence. He knows that the cosmos looks to us as it does because we
have been taught to see it that way. If another perspective were to
develop--for instance, if we were to evolve an outlook that valued all
life, not just human and not just one's self--then the cosmos we would
see would differ dramatically from what we see now" (85).

On Thu, Aug 18, 2011 at 6:07 AM, Mark Kohut <markekohut at yahoo.com> wrote:
> There are an amazing couple-three sentences in Understanding Media
> wherein McLuhan basically riffs on that line, virtually uses it without the
> direct address to the reader....or, changing up the metaphor,
> that concept in the West is the bassline way conceptual logical linearity is
> embodied in our [the West's] language, he sez.
>



-- 
"Less than any man have I  excuse for prejudice; and I feel for all
creeds the warm sympathy of one who has come to learn that even the
trust in reason is a precarious faith, and that we are all fragments
of darkness groping for the sun. I know no more about the ultimates
than the simplest urchin in the streets." -- Will Durant