Warlock+rambling

[Joseph Tracy]

Finished Warlock Sunday afternoon. Very intense book. Too gloomy to not feel a bit lop-sided. Maybe I am too easily seduced by the kindness and beauty in the world, but the darkness felt just a little too mechanical or inevitable.  Hall does draw one into this world with a kind of physical compulsion.  I frequently rose and paced with nervous energy , feeling engaged at the level of blood, nerve and emotion. Robert Stone's introduction was a brilliant summary of the theme, and  I'm glad I read it. The kind of thing "leaders" should be forced to read but of course won't. Planting bean seeds and broccoli in my garden holds a place in my mind that showdown shootouts never will.  A thought that is probably irrelevant and definitely imperfectly stated. 

Was there ever a P-List reading of Warlock? Would love to read P-listers responses. If anyone has any thoughts I would like to hear them. The other phenomena I note is a kind of fast fade, both  of the emotional impact and of the intellectual  questions raised.  This makes me wonder about the quality of ambiguity in Pynchon- that part of the pleasure is the impossibility of fast digestion. There are so many questions raised by a P novel, so many things that reward review and exchange of view, that one never feels done.  Less dramatic, but more like good music or poetry in its ability to offer pleasure through several hearings. 

I'm also reading Gary Snyder's The Practice of the Wild. It covers many of the same topics as Warlock of colonialism, the myth of progress and law, the compulsion of warrior civilizations to assault the wild commons. But Snyder puts an emphasis on the resiliency of nature and the resiliency  those traditions  or practices or ways of living that root themselves in nature and treasure the wild.  As I read I find myself in dialog with everything I know about life, I find so much that constitutes a commons of experience and so much compassion that I feel more patient without losing passion.  

Is there a fundamental addiction to dramatic crescendo, war  and eucatastrophe that undermines the full potential of fiction or is that the natural essence of narrative fiction? In the last couple-three decades the fiction writers whose work I have come to deeply love  and look forward to are Pynchon, Margaret Atwood, Barbara Kingsolver, Zora Neale Hurston, Naguib Mahfouz,  with serious nods to individual works of Delillo, Ellison,  R Stone, Walter Mosley, Momaday , Hoeg, Le Guin and several others.  Every book one reads through adds something to one's picture of the world, ones ability to think and write and occasionally even to act with greater balance and  wisdom. Still, I appear destined to be a slow learner.