Well, Pynchon seems to have

[alice wellintown]

Heidegger, whose hammer I alluded to in prior posts, and whose idea of
extension is helpful here, also talks of enframing and releasement. Always
tricky in translation, but fortunately Heidegger provides his own
etymological investigations. Essentially, it argues for accepting and
rejecting a scientific and technological existence, acknowledging that
science is a fact of human experience and that we can not separate our
scientific nature from our experience of nature, but we can allow nature to
reveal itself through us.  It's no accident that this view is advanced with
the atomic energy alternative. The atom, as Adams shows us in The
Education, will be harnessed and supply an infinite source of energy to
meet our infinite demands for it. The golden age of engineering will work
with this assumption: we will have infinite needs. So,
Heidegger uses poetry, words, to play with the context before we engineer
it. Once introduced as science it will evolve with the culture,
ecologically, and a new culture will emerge, altering the meanings
of concepts and ideas, even those held sacred. Science has forced its
own mountain of ethos, piled high with its values, efficiency, speed,
hubris, the little man's insecurities...but these, as Monte so eloquently
argued, are stronger, or so they seem, for they make the little
man powerful, more so  than the lazy mysteries of poets. Releasement is a
mysterious idea. Perhaps it must remain so.  Who knows? The poets and big
men of letters look to the past. Nostalgia can be a dangerous and distorted
view, a golden age that fascists claim to return us to with the little
man's tools. But it also cause us to wonder. Extension of our capacity to
wonder need not manifest itself in voyeuristic virtual trips to Mars. It
may take our breath away. It may amaze us. This is Grace too.

"Most of the big shore places were closed now and there were hardly any
lights except the shadowy, moving glow of a ferryboat across the Sound. And
as the moon rose higher the inessential houses began to melt away until
gradually I became aware of the old island here that flowered once for
Dutch sailors' eyes-a fresh, green breast of the new world. Its vanished
trees, the trees that had made way for Gatsby's house, had once pandered in
whispers to the last and greatest of all human dreams; for a transitory
enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence of this
continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood
nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something
commensurate to his capacity for wonder."
- F. Scott Fitzgerald, *The Great Gatsby*, Ch. 9
 MUCH have I travell’d in the realms of gold,    And many goodly states and
kingdoms seen;    Round many western islands have I been  Which bards in
fealty to Apollo hold.  Oft of one wide expanse had I been told*
 5*    That
deep-brow’d Homer ruled as his demesne;    Yet did I never breathe its pure
serene  Till I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold:  Then felt I like
some watcher of the skies    When a new planet swims into his ken;*
        10*  Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes    He star’d at the
Pacific—and all his men  Look’d at each other with a wild surmise—    Silent,
upon a peak in Darien.


On Mon, Jun 3, 2013 at 11:15 PM, Joseph Tracy <brook7 at sover.net> wrote:

> I don't get you AW, or who is the real you, but this post, to my mind,  is
> full of a very old and poetically stated truth.
> On Jun 3, 2013, at 9:57 PM, alice wellintown wrote:
>
> > Grace is amazement and wonder, not at our transformation of the world,
> but at what we can't explain, understand, or "transform" to our purposes.
> We want to transform the world, to make it ours, to give it names, to make
> it an extension of us. This appeals especially to the little man because
> science makes him physically more powerful; he can build with it; he can
> see with sharper focus, he can think and calculate faster. But it can't
> help him make better moral decisions. This is the lesson that Grover Snodd,
> Pynchon's boy genius who applies mathematics to integration of the races,
> struggles to learn.  A harsher lesson is taught to Kurt Mondaugan who is,
> at the end of his story, listening to a language, a native language, he
> can't comprehend. Mason leans this too when he dreams in native languages
> he neither speaks not has, perhaps, ever heard, if they exist. Science
> improves human life. We believe this. We want to. We need to believe this
> because science is an extension of our purposes and we want our purposes to
> be great. But science can't help us love the earth and our fellow creature,
> our brothers and sisters. Or can it? If it can focus the eye, make it
> sharper, slow things down so that we can get a better view, perhaps we can
> solve or prevent a crime or make a decision based on improved data, a
> decision that is more just, better. Film can be manipulated. The data
> skewed. More data, more film, more science only shakes our confidence in
> common sense and judgment. But what about the liver transplant? Yeah , I
> want one. Who gets one? Who decides?  New science, new moral and ethical
> problems to solve. And science is not much help with this. It often
> compounds, confuses, undermines our instincts, our confidence.
> >
> >
> > On Mon, Jun 3, 2013 at 9:11 PM, alice wellintown <
> alicewellintown at gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > What the novels argue is that humans are scientific beings,
> technological beings, engineers by nature. Our scientific nature, like our
> spiritual nature, like our aesthetic nature .... is part of everything we
> do. Science  flows from us in all we do, defining the world, transforming
> it. Pynchon was born into what has been called the golden age of engineer,
> a dynamic period that advanced a dynamic view of nature. Nature knows
> transformation, not extinction, and nature is our experience, science, our
> application. We can not, to quote one of those big men of letters,
> distinguish the science from our application of it. A tool, such as a
> hammer, to quote another big man of letters, has our human purpose in it.
>  A dynamic world, not a fixed world, is malleable, is not absolute, is our
> experience of it, thus all mystery retreats. Unless we experience what we
> can't explain, cannot analyze. Unless we experience Grace.
> >
> > On Monday, June 3, 2013, Markekohut wrote:
> > We don't disagree, I think.....complex he is fer sure....one reason I do
> read and reread...
> >
> > But I did write " some anti-technology and anti-science stuff".......key
> qualifier for me here
> > Is " some"......part of that complexity.
> >
> > Once again, few of his contemporary writers of fiction, near peers,
> alluded to Ludditism
> > Favorably in a non-fiction piece, his own opinion,and I have pointed to
> some perspectives
> > On math and science in Against the Day this last still-unfinished
> read.....
> >
> > You're one of the best defenders of science on this list and really
> illumine Parts where P
> > Shows his aware-love......
> >
> > But the other side exists too, I aver.
> >
> >
> >
> > Sent from my iPad
> >
> > On Jun 3, 2013, at 5:54 PM, "Monte Davis" <montedavis at verizon.net>
> wrote:
> >
> >> He writes better than anyone else about the intersections of science
> and technology with our lowest *and* highest inclinations. If you missed
> the inspiration and glimpses of transcendence that astronomy and geo-metry
> hold for Chas & Jeremiah, or photochemistry for Merle – or even
> aerodynamics for Pokler before the Reich took over rocketry – you really
> should read the books again.
> >>
> >>
> >>
> >> Lazy, trite anti-science and anti-technology attitudes are widely
> absorbed by default over coffee at the student center and in the faculty
> lounge. They’re as thoroughly woven into the liberal (and liberal-arts)
> intellectual sensibility of my lifetime as an eager faith in Newtonian
> enlightenment was in one earlier epoch, or an embrace of social/technical
> progress in harness with liberal reform in another. And they’re typically
> founded in all the rich knowledge and understanding of science displayed by
> the editors of Social Text in 1996.
> >>
> >>
> >>
> >> But there’s so much more complexity, nuance and contradiction in
> Pynchon’s treatment of science and technology than the lazy view takes in.
> It’s patent that he has read and thought about them, wrestled with his own
> feelings about them, far more deeply than someone simply gathering sticks
> to beat them with. To me, saying “Pynchon is anti-science and
> anti-technology” [because hey, all thoughtful and sensitive souls engaged
> with literary fiction inevitably are, amirite?] is like saying “Vineland is
> about how groovy the sixties were and how sad it is that the Man crushed
> all our bright hopes.”
> >>
> >>
> >>
> >> From: owner-pynchon-l at waste.org [mailto:owner-pynchon-l at waste.org] On
> Behalf Of Mark Kohut
> >> Sent: Monday, June 03, 2013 4:32 PM
> >> To: pynchon -l
> >> Subject: Well, Pynchon seems to have
> >>
> >>
> >>
> >> some anti-technology and/or anti-science stuff of some kind going on in
> his mind
> >>
> >> which I dangle as a pendant to the recent thread.
> >>
> >>
> >>
> >> I offer the Luddite N-F piece...and some stuff in AtD as circumstantial
> evidence.
> >>
> >>
> >>
> >
>
>
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