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

[Mike Jing]

Thanks, Prashant and everyone who responded.  You've been very helpful.


On Mon, Mar 11, 2013 at 9:41 PM, Prashant Kumar <
siva.prashant.kumar at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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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