Lacey: old and new questions.

[Mark Kohut]

Such a long thoughtful post....must keep reflecting as I have more time...
 
BUT, as most regular readers of the plist must see, the answer to your question about 
whether P's work has 'worked on my mind' is, of course, yes, yes, YES. Almost every day I find something
relevant in my so-called life (inclu other reading). 
 
And, I have also argued he has a vision we can see, feel, explore. Meaning matters. It is NOT self-cancelling pace Wood
and others. 
 
I think often of how my Pynchon-coated mind is like the interest-coated mind of a young one, like my grandson,
who moves, mentally, thru seeing via new notions, experiences.....
 

________________________________
 From: Joseph Tracy <brook7 at sover.net>
To: P-list List <pynchon-l at waste.org> 
Sent: Tuesday, February 5, 2013 12:39 PM
Subject: Lacey: old and new questions.
  
The problem of choosing among hypotheses comes up in the dialogue between Pointsman and Mexico over the predictability of the rockets.  Beside these 2 main competing hypotheses, there are further complications- what to do with information from ghosts of the White visitation, and what about the long term ethical implications of rocket delivered weapons. But in the argument between Pointsman and Mexico both are partly right , the rockets  go where you Point.. them  but the exact point of impact and  general distribution  is a function of probability and randomness.   How and why bombs in rocket are used gets dicier. and in the novel are  a function of planetary hard-ons, blowback,  religious fantasies, capital investments. These factors, taken together with all the other millions of factors  make predictability, guidance, and probability  seem inadequate to the dangers we talking monkeys are facing with our current array of thermonuclear devices,
 space based weapons, drones, rockets, and flouridated water and the novel clearly addresses the danger. 

Help us Obi Wan  

Why do we read? What are we looking for?  
Does imagination have an important role in evolution and are we reaching a point where our political and economic  and spiritual models are being revealed on a global scale as self destructive and unsustainable?   In P novels there is little sign that the V(ibes)that run the show are capable of entertaining new models. Vibe's personal position is less secure than he thinks  and his second kills him but the imagination of a world divided between the havens of the saved and the  underground hell of the lost  prevails and can still be heard in every political speech by both parties.  Are other models coexisting as alternate evolutionary pathways which are sustainable?  To the degree to which these alternatives play out in P's books are they forgone losers  as possibilities for change? 

Are  patterns of the imagination best understood as spiritual forces (the Chums, the Vormance monster, Slothop as escapee from the mechanisms of control moving toward free roaming disappearing animal rainbow, Takeshi, Vauconson's Duck)? 

Are patterns  of the imagination evolutionary options( V, Vibe, The Traverses, Doc, Blicero, the secret postal system, The Mexican Indians in ATD,)?

Are patterns of the imagination simply tools that employ physics and psychology to  leverage force( Rocket Guidance, TV, Secret Police, Tesla's  free electricity, non-violent vegetarianism, anarchist golf, alchemy, photography, trains, drills) tools that inevitably will be used by  those inclined to enable mass killing and slavery  and  which make some form of colonialism an unstoppable addiction?  Will these addictions destroy the balance of the earth's biosphere?  

I think Tom Pynchon doesn't have any more of an answer to these questions than the rest of us but he refuses to give easy answers or to close the preterite options. This aligns him with the outsiders. He tries to get the balance such that it reflects the complexity of the felt world, of lived, dreamed and historic experience.  He revises the past to include the embarrassing , the strange and misplaced.

The real persuasiveness of Lacey's essay is the degree to which it corresponds to the larger political predicament of our times. He invokes Hannah Arendt because she is one of the few western Post WW2 thinkers who like Orwell, addresses the problem of totalitarianism in a neutral way, not excluding/excusing/ or precluding the US or Europeans.  

To the degree that Lacey gets P's political sensibilities right, do Pynchon's writings provide a particularly informed and wholistic basis for a worthwhile political conversation? Apart from P's literary creativity Is friend Tom simply one more humane voice who has seen the darkness at the end of the historic tunnel and who ends up offering a classic group of options: end, resist, expose colonialism in all forms and treat others ( including other animals) the way you want to be treated( karmic adjustment), enjoy and explore sex, love, friendship, music, play, and non-violent forms of transcendent spiritual practice as rejuvenating forces of creativity, meaning and pleasure.  Don't fill the world with violence and shit since what goes around comes around.  His biggest break with happy-ever-after Jack tales is his  implication that  bags of gold are all suspect and  that real freedom involves stepping  away from the system as much as possible and
 being willing to disappear so that the soul is never owned and  only one's spirit speaks or acts.

I can hear the argument that P is not prescriptive but descriptive and even subversive of all attempts at meaning, but  I find that argument to be fatally flawed In that the more you accept it the more it becomes the very thing it argues against.   What I am interested in is how the writing changes the way other people think since I feel it has seriously worked over the way I think.  

   S
The big difference with Pynchon is the acceptance of entropy as the greatest argument the empirical world offers. I can't think of another writer who constantly digresses into lists of detritus. This  is a little like Cormac McCarthy"s visceral evocation of landscape wildness and physical sruggle that pulls a reader into his tales. The litter becomes a felt part of  our experience and the great challenge is whether a kind of mechanistic devolution is the ultimate nature of our universe.  

When all your power comes from a gun  (Lenin, Truman, Jon Wayne, Armageddon sales-reps) you are likely to see the most delightful and innocent  creatures in your universe as opportunities to shoot interesting targets. Alienated from the life power in the places you go, you align yourself with the power of death.  Is Pynchon/human history talking about birds and guns or life and conceptual physics, life is an inscrutable mystery that even  the most sophisticated science cannot reproduce, but a sociopathic society armed with physics can theoretically, with enough concentrated effort, blow it away in a few days?, hours?, seconds?.  Newtonian Physics views life and consciousness as arbitrary emergent properties that will dissipate according to the entropic direction of all systems of energy. But can consciousness separate itself as an observer in this way? What is  a conscious being seeing if it looks at the universe as  unconscious and 
 fundamentally  a apart from itself? How can there be nothing missing in the resulting model? 
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