A Good Grace is Hardly Found

[alice wellintown]

I love that George Carlin rant on self-help books...I doubt that
Carlin's apparent anger sprung from his failed attempts to find
meaning or truth or whatever it is people turn to books, literature,
yoga...marathon running....occupying wall street ....whatever gets
that  zeal feeling flowing....not that this doesn't happen to smart
people like Carlin....and I wonder if his sense of humor, much like
O'Connor's in fact, prevented his fall into that kind of addiction. Or
maybe he had better vices to choose from. Who knows?


On Sun, Dec 2, 2012 at 11:35 AM, Joseph Tracy <brook7 at sover.net> wrote:
> Literature is not a religion for me. I have no intention of bending my knee at the altar of   any writer's holy halitosis in order to improve myself.  I have to like it or I don't read it, not enough time. I laugh all the time while reading, but not reading this dame. Just bein real. Happy for those who enjoy it and ready to acknowledge that thoughtful pleasure is good for the soul, just not my cuppa tea.
>
> As far as different visions of grace, Catholicism, Calvinism etc. , the historic and religious variations on this theme are far broader than Calvin or Roman Catholic interpretations and that diversity is evident in P's work where we find every permutation  and anti-permutation of spirituality, social affinity,  thinly disguised cruelty, cosmic wars and  anarchist golfing fun .
>  There was a time when I read almost exclusively the Bible for 7 years followed by  a long investigation of Jewish mysticism and history, Christian history, textual analysis and similar writings.  During that  second period of time Pynchon provided a POV that helped me begin to  disentangle myself from both anger and reverence for western history.  Still I find the ancient Hebrew priests who wrote the Bible and Orthodox high priests of Catholicism or Calvinism to all present a particularly loathesome, colonialist, xenophobic ,nasty and useless vision of God, cosmic law , Jesus, the way etc. and feel no obligation to be enthralled by those in thrall to this vision.
> In my experience, if anything important and liberating and insightful is offered in any writer or artist or experience, it will be found in many other places, so not to worry.
> "Your nature and the integral nature of the universe are one and the same: indescribable but eternally present.
> Simply open yourself to this."
> Hua Hu Ching
>
> On Dec 2, 2012, at 7:54 AM, alice wellintown wrote:
>
>> O'Connor is funny. Indeed, she describes her work as comic, though she
>> insists that her comedy does not distract from the seriousness of her
>> themes. We are invited to laugh at the violent misfits, at the
>> southern inanities, the gothic rags that fix the characters in a faded
>> fashion of the southern decadence. Our laughter makes us complicit,
>> for we cannot sustain indifference and the rejection of her grace,
>> especially on political or anti-religious grounds is only a
>> Calvinistic vice inherent in the reader not the author or her story.
>> There is nothing depressing about this; indeed, the grace that
>> O'Connor uses so skillfully, is a comic element, a carnivalesque
>> celebration of freedom, of the free will. So Harry swims away from
>> Paradise, in O'Connor's brilliant tale, "The River", and toward God's
>> Grace. Like Slothrop, or Oedipa, or Dorothy, Harry is running from
>> home and back to a Kansas that is, we fell, not Kansas anymore, a
>> Zone, a paralax of parallel universes moving toward Grace.
>>
>> So, Pynchon and O'Connor, two Catholics, make use of Grace. The trick
>> is to understand what Catholic Grace is, and, as Mark intimated, how
>> it is not Calvinized.
>>
>> Of course, the religion of the author, of the reader, matters not at
>> all. But not knowing what an author is up to, or rejecting it in
>> preference to some inhernet vice, some irrational disdain for all
>> things cultic, is a limited way to read demanding fictions.
>