Question concerning GR

[Mark Stevenson]

Hello all, new to the list. To wind it round to the Freedom--Determinism
bit, the Zen, in a little jumble of thoughts, I was reminded of the few
instances in *GR* regarding people playing "roles", and of this part in
particular, re Pökler:

"In those days, most of the funding and attention went to the propulsion
group. Problem was just to get something off the ground without having it
blow
up . . . Dr. Wahmke decided to mix peroxide and alcohol together before
injection into
the thrust chamber, to see what would happen. The ignition flame backed up
through the conduit into the tank. The blast demolished the test stand,
killing
Dr. Wahmke and two others. First blood, first sacrifice.
      Kurt Mondaugen took it as a sign. One of these German mystics who grew
up reading Hesse, Stefan George, and Richard Wilhelm, ready to accept Hitler
on the basis of Demian-metaphysics, he seemed to look at fuel and oxidizer
as
paired opposites, male and female principles uniting in the mystical egg of
the
combustion chamber: creation and destruction, fire and water, chemical plus
and
chemical minus— . . .
      There was also Fahringer, an aerodynamics man, who went out in the
pine
woods at Peenemünde with his Zen bow and roll of pressed straw to practice
breathing, draw and loosing, over and over. . .The Rocket for this
Fahringer was a
fat Japanese arrow. It was necessary in some way to become one with Rocket,
trajectory, and target— “not to* -will* it, but to surrender, to step out
of the role of firer.
The act is undivided. *You are both aggressor and victim, rocket and
parabolic path*
and . . .” Pökler never knew what the man was talking about. But Mondaugen
understood. Mondaugen was the bodhisattva here, returned from exile in the
Kalahari
and whatever light had found him there, returned to the world of men and
nations to
carry on in a role he’d chosen deliberately, but without ever explaining
why."


and also Shunryu Suzuki:
"In the beginner's mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert's
there are few."


On Sun, Jun 15, 2014 at 5:59 AM, Dave Monroe <against.the.dave at gmail.com>
wrote:

>
> http://www.ugapress.org/index.php/books/gravitys_rainbow_domination_and_freedom
>
>
> http://books.google.com/books/about/Gravity_s_Rainbow_Domination_and_Freedom.html?id=LJA-mwEACAAJ
>
>
> On Saturday, June 14, 2014, Andrew Field <andrewfield2002 at hotmail.co.uk>
> wrote:
> > Hey P-Lister's,
> > I'm going through my second reading of GR and it is clear that it is an
> absolute masterwork. There has been a passage that has always stuck out for
> me, and I'm undecided what rationale Pynchon gives to the following:
> > "I would see you free [talking to the rats), if I knew how. But it isn't
> free out here. All the animals, all the plants, the minerals, even other
> kinds of men, are being broken and reassembled every day, to preserve an
> elite few, who are the loudest to theorize about freedom, but the least
> free of all."
> > The character who speaks it is Weberly Snail, but it is almost an
> inclusion of the author's voice at this part.
> > - This paragraph mirrors, ostensibly, the key theme of the book,
> technology and control (or freedom and domination, if you will), but the
> question is: why are the few elite the least free?
> > To me, it seems this is an evasion on Pynchon's part - an almost
> throwaway answer - that resists the complication of the obvious reply: they
> are more free than you because they are not part of the system of control
> the same way that we are. So who can blame the master for making you a
> slave, if he becomes more free because of it.
> > From the outset, to me, it seems the elite are more free because they
> can choose your bondage, and you will always be part of the
> scientific-technological control system. It doesn't make sense to think the
> elite are less free because they have to spend their time controlling you.
> It would amount to, in the master vs. slave dialectic, that the slave is
> more free. A counter-intuitive answer.
> > So, who is more free, and why did Pynchon think they were the least free?
> > Cheers,
> > Andrew Field
> >
> >
>



-- 
*– M.*
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