I've had nigh unto two years now ...

[Technopaegnion Tapinosis]

> I am genuinely terrified that some day te connection might be lost ...
>
ah! though the definite art tickle here minus the "h" is now the tea of
repose, the coffee chatterings of inchoate ambitions now tempered by
recedings economic and bodily, tis an ambiguity still, and no
connection found or discovered or made that may be lost , forsaken, undone,
or read even by the indefatigable jaboring jackson, but a great disorderly
Tangle of Lines, long and short, weak and strong, vanishing into the
Mnemonick Deep, with only their Destination in common.


I refer to what scholars have labeled the American School of Catastrophe:
the tradition of the anti-jeremiad which I traced (in Chapter 2) back to
seventeenth-century New England, but which gathered special force in the
early republic through the convergence of two quite different cyclical
views of history. One of these was the classical theory of *translatio
studii *or *translatio imperii, *the belief that civilization moves from
East to West. The other was the cyclical view embedded in civic humanism,
the theory that republican virtue guarantees social and cultural success,
but that success in turn brings luxury, corruption, decline, and fall.

Both these views, then, were fatalistic, or at least ambiguous: the
promises of greatness they brought carried within them the seeds of
mutability and collapse. The spokesmen for the republic recast fatalism and
ambiguity alike into the teleological terms of "America." What had been the
threat of historical recurrence became the anxiety of apocalyptic choice:
millennium or doom. The millennial prospect joined the Enlightenment faith
in progress to Puritan-Revivalist figuralism. The catastrophic prospect was
its precise inversion. Continuity meant an errand into oblivion, as in the
images of universal conflagration and end-time flood that conclude
(respectively George Lippard's *Quaker City *(1844) and Cooper's *The
Crater *(1849)-and to project the vision across our century, the entropic
finale predicted in *The Education of Henry Adams *and Pynchon's *Gravity's
Rainbow. Pierre *represents this outlook, accurately, as the nightmare
inversion of Bancroft's dream. The novel dramatizes the opposition between
the two as the ambiguities of Destiny and Fate through which the story of
America unfolds. Its plot devolves upon the incestuous relation between
kindred views of history, mainstream and oppositional, twin offspring of
the same cultural symbology, which together constitute the terms of action
("development," "success," "tragedy") in *Pierre.*

*from The Rites of Accent, Becovitch *
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