Let It Bleed

[alice wellintown]

What's different this time? From Pynchon, and from elsewhere of
course, we read that mother Nature is a scatter-brain. Although this
idea suggests that our desire for cause and effect will mislead us,
this doesn't mean that we must necessarily toss out cause and effect;
that is, we needn't hold that because there are arbitrary Forces of
Nature, we must abandon causality.

Students of Pynchon, Philosophy and Physics, Tao, Catholicism ...etc.
...  learn that an uncaused cause, needn't be conceived as something
that has no antecedent and is therefore arbitrary.

The uncaused cause, if it has always existed, needs no antecedent cause.

In fact, as cause leads to effect, or to what is the case, and this
then causes, in the great chain of cause and effect, there is, some
say, something that has always existed that remains constant, that is
the cause that persists through all changes.


So, the new wars are merely variations, indeed, so are the old ones,
and all are manifestations of a cause that has always existed and does
not change.

A Paradox that Pynchon loves: the more things change, the more they
remain the same.

Of course, this is the central idea, the gravity and laws of Newtonian Physics.

Newton, however, could not abide this and so, he believed in something
above and below the rainbow.

That something is a creator, God.

Newton could find no support for his religious conviction, though he
wasted most of his mind in the effort.


Laplace, a Catholic, tossed out Newton's obsession with God the
Creator and adjuster, the tinkerer, the Enlightenment Deistic Creator
and Tinkerer.

It is said that Laplace was an atheist or a Deist with serious doubts
or some such, but this isn't correct. Nor is this true of Hume.

So where wuz I going with all this....oh, yes...the Gnostic Pynchon.

The hierarchy. You divorce this tainted and decadent aristocracy, this
THEY and THEM, from us poor and ordinary, from the rest who are, as P
notes in his SL essay, left poor and powerless by a group of inane and
insane powerful ideologues. But the political hierarchy is only a
Marxist turn and turn again. To everything turn....but not the Turner
of turns. So Frenesi turned. So her parents turned on one another and
on their brother and sister workers.

This is the human factor; we can't divorce it from war or turnings. It
happens at the top and at the bottom of the hierarchy. Of course, the
top turners can do more damage in a way, but they too must turn.

And the co-opting, the turnings of poor battered men and women, into
advertisements, into exchanges for money and lives in the
balance....is, so it seems, more and more on the leading edge, more
and more a game of Enders, adepts, Slothrops with freak-power that
power must have even if it means bleeding it out of them.