TP or NP? Trial Balloon goes up

[Mark Kohut]

Monte writes movingly:
"Yes, machines and technology are there, but “imagination enslaved by
its own plottings” was with us before the first tally-stones were
counted or Babylonian fields measured. Pynchon’s great subject is what
we do to run from the responsibilities of love, and how we might find
our way back -- and he is as merciless to those running to séances or
anarchism or Rite-of-Spring primitivism or S&M as he is to those
running to Riemann or rocketry."
 
To find common ground with the above and my recent speculations, I
think the phrase "imagination enslaved by its own plottings" is a
wonderful phrase to describe (much of) the math (and 'religion')
lampoonings TRP does in AtD.
I think I differ with the universal inclusion of 'anarchism' as
another retreat TRP is merciless towards. Not, perhaps, as a
'movement' that will change things, [fiction in general and TRP in particular] certainly
not as if 'bomb-throwing anarchists' are doing anything 'good' ---we
get that evisceration in the text when the anarchist gets  'bombed'
and in other ways, but as a word, a label, for ways in life in which
the manifestation of 'the responsibilities of love' work and could
work more--simply love as kindness, love as agape, Cyprian's growth
into selflessness as well as harder kinds of anarchic love in human
relationships. All there in AtD and elsewhere.

(for anticlimactic example, I think I have felt the change from that
homage to anarchic rulelessness in the way cars merge at the end of
Inherent Vice's time that human consideration can let happen versus
much less of that on the road today. But, I may project a world, of
course). 
I agree that the simplistic two cultures dichotomy doesn't apply to
TRP. The Courier's Tragedy, at least, embodies his awareness of
massive, sickening, hard-to-stomach, torturing evil long before the
Scientific Revolution. I might argue that his mercilessness about
(much of) math and maybe science falls under the theme of History is a
step-function, so to speak. Technology has made it easier for the
System, for a few, for They (as representatives of Us, busy,
complacent, trying to live under history as a State of Seige). What
hath modernity wrought? was one theme of AtD, we mostly agreed, I
think.

 I also think that TRP tried to come to grips with ways evil worked
before modernity in AtD. (much of  the Olde Europe sections)
He, like Shakespeare and other great writers, does have a vision of
being 'human' (or fully human as lit crits and psychologists write) in
an inhuman world and in a low-tech world. His exploration of human/sexual
relationships take place largly below technology, for example, yet 
there are values and anti-values there. Power in relationships, as the 
major focus of at least one p-lister [Hi David], is as old as history
and a way of seeing the start of Power in History (maybe).

But, differences of ultimate emphasis/meanings is what happens with
great writers and their readers and is another example
of how the either-or is BAD SHIT.
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