Bigadier Bigfoot

[Monte Davis]

Yes, I see significant influence of Norman O. Brown on GR (with
accompanying seasoning of Freud, Jung at al). Yes, Pynchon returns to how
cultures engage with death as recently as Xiomara's account of Xibalba and
how Windust fit into it (BE 442-444). Yes, as a Pynchon reader all that
engages me, and we'll be spending a lot of time soon on questions such as
"Is Rebekah haunting Mason or vice versa?".

Beyond the books, though... Are there interesting differences in how
cultures engage/avoid engagement with death? Sure: people who routinely
hunt game, slaughter livestock, and see lots of their infants, children,
and mothers in labor die -- and see ALL their old people die at home -- are
bound to be interestingly different from us with our shrink-wrapped
protein, vaccinations, and ICUs. But nearly every argument I've seen that
"Germany / Europe / America / the West / modernity is uniquely oriented to
/ in denial of death" is built on a foundation of bogus
ethnology/anthropology (one of Freud's specialties, BTW) and grinds some
variation of the same axe: that simple, natural, Edenic tribe X -- or more
often, unspecified "primitive peoples" -- had the True Mellow Understanding
which we've lost.

That's where I bail out. From the earliest Neanderthal burials we know of,
through abundant observations of apes, elephants, whales, etc., to Facebook
posts about dogs sleeping at gravestones, it seems to me that to have
consciousness is inevitably to have an uneasy, more or less ritualized
relationship with death.

On Tue, Feb 3, 2015 at 10:20 AM, Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com> wrote:

> Of course, we can all squirmingly argue a long ways down this
> deathslide...(or is it up the sloping tower?)...But, don't we
> generally think Pynchon, at least, from Brown and others, is trying to
> focus on which societies, nations, cultures,
> etc. embody more of the 'death instinct' than others?....
>
> Do we believe THAT is a viable question? No matter our own personal
> immersion in The Question?
>
> Are there not, have there ever been---yes, echoes
> intentional---societies which could not formulate, no one or, none but
> the bleeding edgers, the concept of a death instinct. Which did not
> even think about it???................
>
>
>
> On Tue, Feb 3, 2015 at 10:01 AM, Monte Davis <montedavis49 at gmail.com>
> wrote:
> > This. I've never been able to subscribe wholeheartedly to lucubrations
> on a
> > death instinct, or to anyone's (even Pynchon's) case that any one
> society or
> > culture has a specially fraught relation to death. Seems to me that for
> > sound evo-psych reasons, ALL of us spend nearly ALL the time looking away
> > from the obvious and inevitable... and then -- d'oh! -- find that there's
> > something numinous and fascinating about it.
> >
> > On Tue, Feb 3, 2015 at 9:42 AM, rich <richard.romeo at gmail.com> wrote:
> >>
> >> fwiw
> >>
> >> if you're alive, you're already a member of a death-orientated system.
> out
> >> plots are all charted and we know what they tending towards. cant
> escape it
> >> man
> >>
> >> rich
> >>
> >> On Tue, Feb 3, 2015 at 9:22 AM, Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com>
> wrote:
> >>>
> >>> Now there is Bonk, almost a truncated, acronymically compressed
> >>> rendering of Brock Vond, the Voc Bigfoot.
> >>>
> >>> Seems the sexual repressions and attempted expressions in these
> >>> current chapters which Laura has articulated might be one place to
> >>> look for such.
> >>>
> >>> On Tue, Feb 3, 2015 at 7:55 AM, Mark Wright <washoepete at gmail.com>
> wrote:
> >>> > Bigfoot and his Bananas point to GR along multiple vectors: banana
> >>> > breakfasts; phallic forms of rockets and of, well, phallii black,
> >>> > white, and
> >>> > of Official Commendation. In PTA's film of IV one catches a whiff
> also
> >>> > of
> >>> > Brigadier Pudding the coprophage. (No wonder there are crippling
> >>> > therapy
> >>> > bills!) This is Pynchonian vengeance upon and warning to those who
> most
> >>> > eagerly made themselves into the human tools of Death Oriented
> Systems
> >>> > (DOSs).
> >>> >
> >>> > Where will this theme bob to the surface in Mason & Dixon?
> >>> -
> >>> Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l
> >>
> >>
> >
>
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