V-2nd - Chapter 16 - Events Seem To Be Ordered Into An Ominous Logic

[Mark Kohut]

Coincidence in life was God's grace in action once upon a time...

When He disappeared, coincidence might now be.....conspiracy. 

Or, as is said herein, it may be psychologically worse.............random, 
chance. 

Which is one notion upon which GR is built, yes? ---re those bombs           


----- Original Message ----
From: "kelber at mindspring.com" <kelber at mindspring.com>
To: pynchon-l at waste.org
Sent: Thu, March 3, 2011 5:20:19 PM
Subject: Re: V-2nd - Chapter 16 - Events Seem To Be Ordered Into An Ominous 
Logic

It seems there are two types of real-life coincidence:  we run into an old 
acquaintance in an unexpected context and chuckling: small world.  Or we're 
running up against a corporate or governmental entity (say, Assange vs. the US 
government), when suddenly we face some gratuitous downturn that seems 
unrelated, but simply must be related (Assange's rape charges in Sweden).  Jane 
Eyre running into her long-lost cousins is one of those cute twists of fate.  
Stencil running into Fairing's name twice, Slothrop encountering Major Marvy, 
feels (to them at the very least) like a full-blown conspiracy.

Laura


-----Original Message-----
>From: Michael Bailey <michael.lee.bailey at gmail.com>
>
>> Coincidence is OK in the 19th century, because there's a benevolent God pulling 
>>the strings.  In the 20th century, there's no God, so coincidence means [well, 
>>to readers and movie-goers it means a stupid, contrived plot] to Stencil that 
>>there's an Ominous Logic controlled by whom? The British Foreign Office?  V. 
>>herself?  Some weird force of history that coughs up both coincidence and V?
>>
>
>hmm, I run into coincidences all the time in what passes for my life,
>doesn't everybody? if (with more than a little regret on my part) we
>completely Biz-Bag (remember that ad?) the concept of God (which in
>the 19th century - a-and even later than that - had several fairly
>attractive formulations) then for the attractive center of our thought
>instead taking something like a nucleus of
>Heisenberg/Goedel/Wittgenstein, still it's all about the observer and
>language - that is to say, if you assign meaning to something then
>it's meaningful, and what is a coincidence but a random event that for
>no particular reason has some meaning? so that if something makes you
>prick up your ears in Manhattan and then you hear it in Malta, that's
>the kind of thing a sensorium is prone to do
>
>> In GR, this dread of formerly benevolent coincidence is personified as Them. 
>> The military-industrial complex has taken over for God; death from above comes 
>>not from God, but from The Bomb.  All of that great stuff is born in Stencil's 
>>nightmares.
>>
>
>yeah, Stencil isn't just about V., he does have a touch of that paranoia too!
>
>
>
>-- 
>"The general agreement is that language should be a kind of honey.  I
>like it to be a kind of speed." - Michael Moorcock