M & D Read: otherness

Thu Feb 12 21:44:19 CST 2015

Yes but their lives are in the historic sense, decided, on the record. The question P is probing  from my POV is whether they might have done differently and why they might have if they indeed have any choice, as you and P are  asking. Since I am unable psychologically to imagine a human minute without choices, let alone a human life, I am inclined to interpret things that way .  

In  regard  to exploring this question of  choices his interpretation of M&D is loose and playful enough to give him room  but  fundamentally plausible on an emotional level.  I think having moral and personal agency is different from having control, and taking  a decisive action or stance necessarily means a loss of control in some areas.  

On Feb 12, 2015, at 6:18 PM, alice malice wrote:

> The boys are confronted with one of Pynchon's favorite questions: how
> do they reconcile Free Will with Cause and Effect?
> 
> After they fail to negotiate better and safer working conditions, they
> talk about determinism and fate.
> 
> They speculate about freedom: If they are merely characters in a book,
> actors on a stage, men who must do as they are commanded, if they are
> not Free, can they be held responsible for their actions?
> 
> They resist by imagining a world in which they can control others.
> 
> But even their imaginings, their fantasies, their dreams, are not
> under their control.
> 
> In fact, they can't even be sure if their dreams are their own, kinda
> like Pirate Prentice.
> 
> A tangle of lines, they are, in what they sense in real, living in
> another's dream.
> 
> And the other's dreams are merging with their own.
> 
> Aristotle won't help. Berkeley might be more useful.
> 
> 
> 
> On Thu, Feb 12, 2015 at 5:05 PM, Joseph Tracy <brook7 at sover.net> wrote:
>> So if you think of that Aristotelian question in terms of the cultural split implicit between coreNew Testament values- a corporate entity that is inclusive forgiving, healing  liberating and egalitarian vs this new   predatory corporate entity designed for theft, greed and subjugation do you have 2 futures trying to occupy the same body.  Did Mason refuse to see the face of his dream adversary in fear that it was his own?
>>  It seems to me that Pychon is showing these 2 men a future they must not choose to serve if they want to stay whole. The same question live on unresolved.  Do we claim agency and the risks that come with resistance or do we opt for security, perhaps a separation between public and private life. The friendship is essential and new, in my thinking, to P's work there is back and forth, ambiguity, all playing out over a conversation they are part of whether they like tit or not, whether they can explain their circumstances  or even their own souls or not.
>> 
>> 
>> On Feb 12, 2015, at 4:15 PM, alice malice wrote:
>> 
>>> The passage in Aristotle's logical works which has received perhaps
>>> the most intense discussion in recent decades is On Interpretation 9,
>>> where Aristotle discusses the question whether every proposition about
>>> the future must be either true or false. Though something of a side
>>> issue in its context, the passage raises a problem of great importance
>>> to Aristotle's near contemporaries (and perhaps contemporaries).
>>> A contradiction is a pair of propositions one of which asserts what
>>> the other denies. A major goal of On Interpretation is to discuss the
>>> thesis that, of every such contradiction, one member must be true and
>>> the other false (this is called the “law of the excluded middle”).
>>> 
>>> http://www2.drury.edu/cpanza/aristotleseabattle.html
>>> 
>>> See also
>>> 
>>> In Borges' The Garden of Forking Paths, both alternatives happen, thus
>>> leading to what Deleuze calls "incompossible worlds"
>>> 
>>> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Problem_of_future_contingents
>>> 
>>> 3. Agent-Causal Theories
>>> 
>>> http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/incompatibilism-theories/
>>> 
>>> On Thu, Feb 12, 2015 at 1:21 PM, alice malice <alicewmalice at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>> The boys are part of a project that, along with lots of other things,
>>>> seeks to draw lines, to divide, to erect boundaries, but the story
>>>> keeps collapsing these. What is real? How do we know? So, the book is
>>>> plumbing some traditional philosophical depths, ontological questions
>>>> are compounded by epistemology questions.
>>>> 
>>>> The battle at sea might be an allusion to Aristotle's famous problem
>>>> of future contingency. Even if it isn't, Free Will is certainly
>>>> plumbed here as well.  But, even if we don't trace the sea battles
>>>> argument through, first to our boys and Leibniz and Berkeley, then to
>>>> Wittgenstein and Deleuze, to Borges's story, "The Garden of Forking
>>>> Paths", we might want to dig into the sensory and Berkeley, necessity
>>>> and probability.
>>>> 
>>>> 
>>>> 
>>>> On Thu, Feb 12, 2015 at 11:54 AM, Joseph Tracy <brook7 at sover.net> wrote:
>>>>> Pynchon seems to move regularly in this chapter from the sensory, practical, social reality of M&D's circumstances  in Southern Africa toward the  realm of dream and ghosts, magic and erotic fascination. We are in a strange world, both new in it's separation from dutch calvinism and English pragmatism and almost exotically ancient in the division of class into master and slave, european colonists and a wild mix of southeast asians and africans.
>>>>> 
>>>>> They wonder whether they died in the fight at sea and are ghosts in the wrong story. They live with a family of dutch calvinists with slave girls who lick spilled pomegranate  juices from skin of the mistress of the house who also encourages her daughters to arouse sexual interest in a visitor for business reason. Mason finds himself seeking a magic potion to foster indifference as his will weakens. Dixon finds help from a tribal man for whom dreams are as real as waking reality. Mason dreams he is in a colony of hell, contending with a dark figure who, who after a dream battle involving shin kicking expertise yields a wavy malay knife which when Mason wakes is real. Perhaps shit kicking should be the phrase since Mason vocalizes the forbidden lower class term shit  as the perfect substance to describe what he wants to rid himself of.
>>>>> 
>>>>> Dixon brings them back from this dreamy state( both Freudian and Jungian) and they talk about their own relationship and the question of how and why the RS brought them together, and whether it's about Maskelyne trying to set up success for the lunar table approach to longitude which he favors.
>>>>> 
>>>>> One metaphor of this juxtaposition that I found telling was the girls oiling Joanna's skin so that it won't be as the dry pages of the Bible. Again we are reminded of theDutch otherness from the NT vision of healing and sharing with the least and the call to treat all as brothers and sisters, versus the erotic pull of power over the bodies of others. Thus P satirizes the speed with which christian mission and resolve liquifies and is recast into the solid colonial 'erection' of a dreamworld of endless self indulgence.
>>>>> 
>>>>> 
>>>>> -
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