M&D new question

Tue Jan 13 11:09:30 CST 2015

"The map is not the territory."

Isn't this statement more meaningless than the map?  No one ever tried to
build a house on a map.

David Morris

On Tue, Jan 13, 2015 at 11:03 AM, Steven Koteff <steviekoteff at gmail.com>
wrote:

> I read the book like a year and a half ago and haven't yet picked it up
> for this group read (in fact may not) but to call it meaningless seems to
> me a totally believably human response, from Cherrycoke in particular.
> Exercising a little empathy, if great lengths were gone to in the name of
> drawing a boundary on the earth (especially if I am, in title and
> inclination, a man of a more, how you say, cosmic scope), it might strike
> me as being inherently meaningless. TRP is always trafficking in the
> relationship between the seen and un-, the real and un- and sur-, if I read
> him right. What's that old line about the relationship between reality and
> perception?
>
> "The map is not the territory." Doesn't this show up in *Inherent Vice*?
> Or there's at least a nod to it and: "The word is not the thing."
>
> It seems to me the conventional way to interpret and *feel *this concept
> is meaning that the systems we use to categorize and perceive and
> understand the physical world are just that and/but are not themselves the
> world. It seems to me that, to occupy the world in real time as a boundary
> is being drawn would only magnify the disparity between the map and the
> territory.
>
> And that map/territory inequality works in two directions. A) The map is
> insufficient to render/evoke/explain the territory because the territory is
> of course exponentially vaster and more complicated and more real,
> containing things the map could not possibly capture. B) The map is
> actually not just insufficient but in some ways excessive, containing
> things that the territory does not (and not just vice versa), boundaries
> among them.
>
> Also, I don't remember every nuance of Cherrycoke's character and
> temperament and inclination, but in technical designation at least he does
> have some relationship to an extraterrestrial/trans-human realm (excuse the
> imprecision here; typing kind of fast). So I would maybe suggest there is
> some caution to be exercised in not confusing *influence/impact *with
> *import*. Yes the line is enormously impactful in the scope of human
> affairs, but that, maybe to someone like the Rev espesh, does not
> necessarily mean it *means*, if that makes sense.
>
> And actually if I can try to sort of imagine myself occupying his mind and
> experience a bit, I believe that 'meaningless' reaction even more. Like,
> Cherrycoke saw firsthand the consequences of the drawing of the line, the
> impact of that whole enterprise. I would say that, for some people with a
> more cosmic or long-range bent, certain seemingly seminal moments in human
> history (especially since those moments tend disproportionately to the
> bloody) exhibit an inversely proportional relationship between human impact
> and trans-human meaning. That is, the more lives lost as the result of
> something, the more meaningless it then seems or feels (not saying this is
> true, but I understand this response). (I couldn't point you anywhere too
> specific but Tolstoy for one (TRP for two? I probably shouldn't say that)
> seems to endorse the idea that what we understand as the most important
> moments of human history are rarely that; history exists not in grand
> events but tiny alterations of human consciousness.)
>
> Also, think about yourself living in one country, watching
> extra-terrestrial boundaries be drawn on it, watching it go through a war
> for independence, some might call it a civil war, then watching life
> basically go back to normal with normal everyday problems continuing
> unabated or at least not greatly altered (to say nothing of them being
> solved) by that war (an event that would seem to be indisputably
> meaningful)--doesn't it make sense to think that that imaginary line you
> witnessed the drawing of so many years before does not actually contain any
> innate meaning? Or at least to feel that way?
>
> I dunno. Forgive if me if I've got some history or some details of the
> book wrong--I probably shouldn't comment without reading it alongside you
> people.
>
> On Tue, Jan 13, 2015 at 11:29 AM, Mark Wright <washoepete at gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
>> A line that situates the "speaker" Rev'd Cherrycoke in his moment. The
>> un-named boundary they inscribed upon the earth was "meaningless," but the
>> _named_ boundary, the Mason-Dixon Line, bears a tottering superstructure of
>> meaning in history.
>>
>> Maybe M&D is the story of all the snarled lines, the tarry fixed lines
>> and yellow manilla running lines of rigging that entangled Mason and Dixon
>>
>>
>> On Tuesday, January 13, 2015, Joseph Tracy <brook7 at sover.net> wrote:
>>
>>> No thoughts? dumb question?
>>> On Jan 12, 2015, at 12:36 PM, Joseph Tracy wrote:
>>>
>>> > All the questions have been provocative, so I hope this won't be a
>>> complete dud.
>>> >
>>> > One question/observation that jumped out at me in the introduction is
>>> the word meaningless to describe the completed M&D line in Cherrycokes
>>> introduction to the Mason Dixon story. It did not strike me on the first
>>> read how boldly the writer seems to be characterizing the endeavor at the
>>> very opening of the work. He seems himself to be drawing a line or at the
>>> very least posing a deep question about everything implied by that line.
>>> Was anyone else surprised at how early this question is set forth, or am I
>>> treading into the obvious?
>>> >
>>> > Even the word meaningless is provocative- both historically and
>>> metaphorically an odd choice to characterize something with such import.
>>> But it fits with Cherrycoke's probable attitude at this time. I don't know
>>> if I can defend that; I just feel it.-
>>> > Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list
>>>
>>> -
>>> Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?listpynchon-l
>>>
>>
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://waste.org/pipermail/pynchon-l/attachments/20150113/6027bd17/attachment.html>