AtD: subversion of ideals (Zeta functions)

[Mark Kohut]

Standing in a bookstore yesterday, I browsed in Eliade's "The Sacred & The Profane", a writer we are almost certain
TRP read and was influenced by, right Benny?, anyway, he wrote of the universal association in all known cultures
between the sky and the sacred, the heavens, not so surprising but when we think of P's use of sky stuff to start 
almost every book, and his subversion of the heavens and the sacred, most noticeably in the famous opening line
of GR and the ending of AtD.....with a happy tossed snowball in between..........
 
I might argue the profane lives everywhere in TRPs fiction and the sacred lives unknowably in mysterious places. 

From: Diane Caudillo <olunasea at sonic.net>
To: pynchon-l at waste.org; Prashant Kumar <siva.prashant.kumar at gmail.com> 
Sent: Monday, July 16, 2012 2:07 PM
Subject: AtD: subversion of ideals (Zeta functions)


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 Caudilloolunasea 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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