Gravity again

[Monte Davis]

> Also rather unlike any practitioner of science I know of or respect.

 

Get used to it: that’s par for the course in characterizations of science
and technology (and mischaracterizations pof Pynchon’s stance w/r/t them)
around here.

 

Good post! 

 

From: owner-pynchon-l at waste.org [mailto:owner-pynchon-l at waste.org] On Behalf
Of Rev'd Seventy-Six
Sent: Monday, April 15, 2013 10:49 AM
To: pynchon-l at waste.org
Subject: Re: Gravity again

 

"....the greater risk is science itself because it knows no limits. It
cannot sin, there are no transgressions, the sacred is not a mystery but a
profane puzzle to be solved and then exploited."

Solved, then exploited?  Jeepers, harsh.  Also rather unlike any
practitioner of science I know of or respect.

It's not science fueling the impending apocalypse we glimpse in our rearview
these days, it's overweening greed.  "I need my night's blood, my funding,
funding, ahh more, more."  Knowledge isn't dangerous, nor clarified insight
into the workings of the spheres, it's damnfool hubris that's the hazard.

Science can't sin.  Its practitioners, I'll grant you, but not science.
Like religion, science is all about limits; probing for them, determining
them, comprehending them and, occasionally, establishing new ones.  Unlike
religion, science is fairly self-aware in that respect.  There's no 'sin' in
knowledge unless your fetish is eyeballing fruit in a nervous, god-fearing
fashion.  Contrast this with the great many sins of ignorance: corporations
who pay corrupt scientific 'authorities' to deny climate change, for
example, or fundamentalists who spin specious rules of biology for women
from whole, shoddy cloth to disguise a cromag interest in the mindless,
incautious propagation of the species.  Science would see us as enlightened
& able as angels--  and where's the sin in self-improvement, I ask you, long
as it's not masturbatory   --no, it's men who would prefer to graze on all
of Eden like locusts.  I see P. drawing this line again & again throughout
GR and elsewhere.

 

If his literary philosophy is in essence gnostic & predicated on the idea
that we occupy a 'fallen' universe where the living are used for the
purposes of the dead, and I view that as a grotesque oversimplication, P
also recognizes that the deathwish dystopia we've engineered for ourselves
is as driven by bloody money as fatuous reasoning.  The edge you allege he's
lost is an erosion of the rapport you felt with earlier books & now no
longer perceive.  While 'lighter' or at least less highfalutin', esoteric
fare than GR, VL & IV are very much about would-be devils, dybbuks in human
drapery, selling the ground from beneath unborn feet.  To accuse science of
meddling in the affairs of god is a B-movie reaction.  Kekulé's dream of the
benzene ring was a moment of sacred inspiration; 'tis the abuses his work
has been put toward that're profane.

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