AtD: subversion of ideals (Zeta functions)

[Diane Caudillo]

nice. Prashant, i like what you say about the subversion of ideals in  
TRP's writing ... "reality is a syncretism of the sublime and the  
profane." this reminds me of a lecture by William Farris Thompson at  
the Berkeley Art Museum many years ago, on the occasion of the exhibit  
"Faces of the Gods: Art and Altars of Africa and the African  
Americas." he talked about how the people of the Kongo civilizations  
imagine altars as a crossroads between heaven and earth, sacred and  
profane. this also brings to mind Blake's concept of Innocence and  
Experience.

pure ideals can only stay pure in human life if we cut ourselves off  
from the process of actually living. we've got to *suffer* the  
intersection of that crossroads (there's Christ too, demonstrating  
this) while we try to navigate by our ideals and embody them as well  
as we can. if we try to employ the spiritual bypass of purity without  
action - ideals without suffering the mess that is living our humanity  
- then we become wraiths who do nothing. it's rough work, attempting  
to bring heavenly ideals down from the aether, into the noiser, more  
crowded atmosphere of the mundane world where livings need to be made  
and flesh makes its demands.

In AtD, i find it beautiful ... how Pynchon shows us these struggles  
and the suffering that results, in Webb, Kit, and all the others who  
do suffer in the crossroads of responsibility, of choice - each in  
their particular way. and how human frailty can be pushed only so  
far ... how our limitations - in the face of even heroic attempts to  
do the right thing - can create such estrangement and sorrow in the  
people we love.



Diane Caudillo
olunasea at sonic.net




On Jul 16, 2012, at 9:39 AM, Prashant Kumar wrote:

Mark writes:

Bandwraith's lovely final sentence: "But beyond all the bogosity in  
ATD there are some hints of mathematical beauty, real or imagined."
Here's what I want to ask any who know math well on this list, based  
on this sentence.   Are the hints of mathematical beauty in AtD
like the 'beauty' of the rocket in GR? Containing terror, per Rilke's  
aphorism?  Showing the subversion of a beautiful thing, a true thing?


For me, this cuts to the heart of a lot of TRP's writing. The  
subversion of an ideal, of a "pure" thing, seems almost necessary,  
just as necessary as as the beauty it creates. Reality is a syncretism  
of the sublime and the profane. This is how I read much of the math in  
GR; the title hints at this. The rainbow was god's promise not to  
destroy man, but contained within the parabola (gravity's rainbow) is  
man's capacity to destroy man, not indemnified by any such promise. I  
see AtD looking at how this subversion occurs; think Kit and the Vibes  
and the way this duality is exploited by Certain Interests. Who do you  
think funds most science?

On Monday, 16 July 2012, Mark Kohut wrote:

Bandwraith writes:
\
"I think you're making too much of a demon out of math- maybe setting  
up too much of a dichotomy.".....
--I may be, of course, but what's a reading for?  Your very  
intelligent comments below (and elsewhere) help clarify BUT

1) i'm talking a vision embodied in a text.......all the real world  
truths about math (and science) might not apply if the author
is accenting different aspects for his vision. It is, oversimplified,  
like saying an author's vision of human beings/nature [say Swift,
Celine, The Recognitions] is not that misanthropic because there are  
genuinely good people, folks who die to save others, mothers
and fathers who give up most gratification to help their kids, etc.  
All those real 'truths' don't mean savage satiric truths about human
beings aren't also--even more---true. How, why, how deep, how  
expressed are also part of an artist's truth--or sentimental untruths.

I think TRP scores/satirizes most math and much science in his works.  
I think that quote---came from you, didn't it? ---about the anti- 
science thread within anarchism DOES largely apply to our writer. I  
think he thematically and aesthetically presents what
  you say might have been better framed. Okay, I agree, but I wasn't  
asking the overall question, I had assumed that TRP was, at base,
questioning that neutral 'truth' existed (in maths and science  
particulary) and is inevitably subverted is one of his overarching  
themes.

Bandwraith continues:
"Numbers don't kill... I think that such a dichotomy is a natural  
reaction to the power of mathematics as it has helped create the world  
we inhabit, for better or worse."
2) my expressed dichotomy, and there are some,I think,  despite the  
excluded middle general truth, is between real and imaginary
numbers, which came into prominence right before the time of Against  
the Day, wikipedia tells me, citing our boy Hamilton and others.
I think even more after this reading that a key strand in this book's  
understanding of 'imaginary' -in numbers, in our hot-air-filled  
beliefs, in society's 'day-lit fictions', in our whitewashing of all  
the shadows in History, is that it keeps us from the 'reality' of  
workers', regular folk, being exploited and suffering
under history's State of Seige--AtD

Bandwraith continues smartly:
"But "imaginary" or complex numbers weren't discovered (or created by  
us- take your pick) until the early 16th century- plenty of killing,  
empire, slavery, etc., before that. Making the argument that sectarian  
differences or economics, or that our Darwinian nature are the roots  
of our social problems, I think, would be comprable over- 
simplifications. In fact, it would not be impossible to make the  
opposite argument, that logic, mathematics and science have done more  
than anything to ameliorate whatever inherent vices we carry that lead  
us to atrocity. An argument I am not making, but which could be made."

TRP does try to say something about the roots of our social problems,  
most particularly about modernity,  we might agree,
  and that he is not an oversimplifier we also all might agree on. I  
have surely oversimplified sometimes, try not to and change, but,  
although I may easily be
speculatively wrong in my gloss on yashmeen's words, I do not think my  
annotation itself oversimplifies in context.

My constant question as I try to read TRP as Shakespeare, Chaucer,  
Eliot [either] or others are read: why did he choose those words, that  
metaphor?
Why did Yashmeen respond as she did about that map? And what does that  
mean about the map?

Bandwraith zeros in:
"The exponential aspect of mathematical and scientific knowledge and  
its multiplicative effect on killing efficiency, however, can't be  
denied."
THIS FRAMING,  I SUGGEST is a terrif statement, perhaps, of a major  
part of TRPs vision of modernity.

And I speculated that TRPs higher level math metaphors, with imaginary  
numbers, hamilton, Riemann, Beta functions, is his major embedded
set of metaphors within AtD  for 'the exponential aspect' and its  
killing efficiency.
Maybe in M & D (and as part of the vastly ambitious ATD) do we see a  
perspective on the human-scaled use of math and science. More  
speculation.

And, of course, man has been worse than wolf to man since the 16th  
century and way before, but TRP seems obsessed with its scale, the
overwhelming modern way of suffereing and death, wouldn't you say?

Bandwraith's lovely final sentence: "But beyond all the bogosity in  
ATD there are some hints of mathematical beauty, real or imagined."
Here's what I want to ask any who know math well on this list, based  
on this sentence.   Are the hints of mathematical beauty in AtD
like the 'beauty' of the rocket in GR? Containing terror, per Rilke's  
aphorism?  Showing the subversion of a beautiful thing, a true thing?

Thanks.

The question might be better framed by asking: are mathematics and  
science neutral? Is anything we do neutral?  Plato would probabIy say  
that the truth lies somewhere beyond our ability to corrupt it. I  
think what Pynchon might be getting at is how supposedly neutral  
"truth" is inevitably subverted. The process is supposed to prevent  
that, but the unvarnished truth doesn't quite make it to the light of  
day, or not for long. But beyond all the bogosity in ATD there are  
some hints of mathematical beauty, real or imagined.

,


-----Original Message-----
From: Mark Kohut <markekohut at yahoo.com>
To: Prashant Kumar <siva.prashant.kumar at gmail.com>
Cc: pynchon -l <pynchon-l at waste.org>.
Sent: Sun, Jul 15, 2012 11:47 am
Subject: Re: Back to AtD Zeta functions



Very helpful, Prashant and it leads me to my textual speculation based  
on
TRP using it here, as he does almost everything, as a metaphor.....

One level (specualtive): the imaginary is the future that is being  
more than hinted at here.

More speculative second level: imaginary numbers are, by definition,  
not real.....it is
unreality---unnatural nation-states, nations BEYOND natural  
formations, math beyond
what we need to get the world---that will kill.




From: Prashant Kumar <siva.prashant.kumar at gmail.com>
To: Mark Kohut <markekohut at yahoo.com>
Cc: pynchon -l <pynchon-l at waste.org>
Sent: Sunday, July 15, 2012 9:25 AM
Subject: Re: Back to AtD Zeta functions



First we're gonna need complex numbers, made of a real part (normal  
numbers) plus an imaginary part. Imaginary numbers are defined by  
multiples of i=squareroot(-1). Imagine a 2D graph, the vertical axis  
marked with multiples of i and the horizontal axis with real numbers.  
So on this 2D graph we can define a complex number as a point. Call  
such a point s = \sigma + \rho, \sigma and \rho being real and  
imaginary numbers resp.


Since it takes real and imaginary inputs, and we plot the output in  
the third dimension, the Riemann Zeta function can be visualised as a  
surface sitting above the complex number graph; that's what you saw,  
Mark (see here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Riemann_zeta_function for  
the same thing with magnitude represented as colour).  If I have a RZ  
function, writing R as a function of s as R(s), the zeroes are the  
values of s for which R(s)=0.  The Riemann Hypothesis (unproven)  
states that the zeroes of the RZ function have real part 1/2.  
Formally, R(1/2 + \rho) = 0. This gives you a line on the surface of  
the RZ function (known as the critical line) along which the zeroes  
are hypothesised to lie. That wasn't too bad, right?


Verifying this hypothesis is notoriously hard.


On 15 July 2012 21:27, Mark Kohut <markekohut at yahoo.com> wrote:

"Except that this one's horizontal and drawn on a grid of latitude and  
longitude,
instead of rel vs imaginary values---where Riemann said that all the  
zeroes of the
Beta function will be found."

p. 937 Don't know enough math to have a feel for Zeta functions but  
Wolfram's
maths guide online shows Beta functions kinda graphed in three  
dimensions,
with raised sections, waves, folds etc....

And all I can associate at the moment are the raised maps, showing  
land formations,
and the phrase

History is a step-function.

Anyone, anyone? Bueller?











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