M&D Deep Duck Soulless?

[Dave Monroe]

http://waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l&month=0109&msg=60225



On Thu, Jan 15, 2015 at 6:06 AM, Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com> wrote:
> The Learned Dog tells of KOANS.....which drive one to insanity when
> meditated on....
> second time the word insanity is used about a mystical-like experience...
>
> Insanity is the social condition of mystical and religious belief in
> the Age of Reason?, once again
> MADNESS AND CIVILIZATION as a paradigm book.
>
> From the wiki article on MADNESS AND CIVILIZATION "in the Renaissance
> the mad were portrayed in art as possessing a kind of wisdom - a
> knowledge of the limits of our world"...
>
> which comes to my mind when I read The Learned Dog declare
> emphatically he is not supernatural, there is
> 'ever an Explanation"..
> and from that great leg-puller, ironist of irony, it is a talking dog
> doing the declaring.
>
> Samuel Johnson on a badly-walking-on-two-legs dog: "it is not that he
> does it badly but that he does it at all'
> [paraphrase actually, so check out for perfection]
>
> On Thu, Jan 15, 2015 at 6:50 AM, Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com> wrote:
>> p. 22....Mason, from the ongoing grief of the loss of his wife, after
>> suggesting to Dixon that they
>> should investigate the Learned Dog for Metempsychosis reasons, at
>> least p.19....after asking why are there still not
>> Oracles...Gate--Ways to Futurity.....
>>
>> must ask tLD if he has a soul...
>>
>> I would say, off the top, Mason is sorta-obsessed with whether Death
>> is The End or there is an After, wouldn't you? [tangential: we might
>> remember the von Braun quote in GR. More heretically tangential: we
>> might remember TRP's lifelong remembering of his great pal, Richard
>> F.?]
>>
>> The doubts of a religious man. There was a time in the West when no
>> (religious) person would even have such doubts. Dante's time did not,
>> right Monte? and TRP fave Henry Adams said about the same of the time
>> of building Mont-Saint Michel and Chartes.
>>  Becker suggests that Acquinas's massive Summa came about as his and
>> his time's edifice against doubt...
>>
>> But, doubtlessly, religious doubt at least was ushered in with the
>> Enlightenment.
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