Bigadier Bigfoot

[Mark Kohut]

And I think that some cultures, some Western ones I think I know a
little,and parts of the West at various times, had the Powerful so
full of WHATEVER we call it, that
they reigned/rained more Death than Life....

on all of us.

On Tue, Feb 3, 2015 at 11:12 AM, Monte Davis <montedavis49 at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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
>> >>
>> >>
>> >
>
>
-
Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l