GR translation: dialectics, matrices, archetypes all need to connect

[Prashant Kumar]

Agree with Monte.

You have this cafe, a nexus for pedestrians, and their attendant humanity.
In the air you have the abstractions of a few luminaries (Lenin and
Trotsky's dialectics via Marx via Hegel, people read archetypes into Joyce,
matrices [and here I think it's meant in the sense you understand, Mike] in
Einstein's relativities).

If we take the invitation and abstract out, Pynchon to me seems to be
suggesting the need (vital or otherworldly, we are not told) for these
abstractions to connect; the occurrence of "blood" and "connect" and matrix
is also suggestive, since matrix is Latin for "womb".

Oh and "senseless screaming across tables" while scaring undergrads in
cafes is a common pastime of many an academic scientists in the thrall of
caffeine withdrawal.

P.

On 11 March 2013 21:53, Monte Davis <montedavis at verizon.net> wrote:

> Dialectics, matrices, archetypes: organizing schemes, systems, principles
> abstracted from the world, elaborated by those sitting over their notebooks
> at the Odeon. I read “matrices” as  tables with rows and columns, into
> which everything must fit.****
>
> ** **
>
> Fr*om:* owner-pynchon-l at waste.org [mailto:owner-pynchon-l at waste.org] *On
> Behalf Of *Mike Jing
> *Sent:* Monday, March 11, 2013 1:11 AM
> *To:* Pynchon Mailing List
> *Subject:* GR translation: dialectics, matrices, archetypes all need to
> connect****
>
> ** **
>
> P266.17-27   He finds that he has drifted as far as the Odeon, one of the
> great world cafes, whose specialty is not listed anywhere—indeed has never
> been pinned down. Lenin, Trotsky, James Joyce, Dr. Einstein all sat out at
> these tables. Whatever it was they all had in common: whatever they’d come
> to this vantage to score . . . perhaps it had to do with the people
> somehow, with pedestrian mortality, restless crisscrossing of needs or
> desperations in one fateful piece of street. . . dialectics, matrices,
> archetypes all need to connect, once in a while, back to some of that
> proletarian blood, to body odors and senseless screaming across a table, to
> cheating and last hopes, or else all is dusty Dracularity, the West’s
> ancient curse. . . .****
>
> What does "matrices" mean here?  I am only familiar with the word in the
> mathematical sense.****
>
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