M & D Deep Duck continues.

[David Morris]

Ecclesiastes 1:9

All things are wearisome; Man is not able to tell it. The eye is not
satisfied with seeing, Nor is the ear filled with hearing.9
<http://biblehub.com/ecclesiastes/1-9.htm>That which has been is that which
will be, And that which has been done is that which will be done. So there
is nothing new under the sun. 10 <http://biblehub.com/ecclesiastes/1-10.htm>Is
there anything of which one might say, "See this, it is new "? Already it
has existed for ages Which were before us.…


On Fri, Jan 16, 2015 at 10:55 AM, Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com> wrote:

> Love the passionately argued rant...I do believe SOMETHING fundamental
> is different in past eras...othrwise
> how does time work? So to speak
> anyway Van Den bErg's book was translated into English as THE CHANGING
> NATURE OF MAN.
>
> Here is another summary of a book that quotes from it (about our time
> period) it sez:
>
> INVENTION OF THE SELF in the 18th Century
> The absence of self in Classical litera-ture and the emergence in the
> eigh-teenth century of the concept of the unique and individual self
> asserting its existence and seeking its truth in pri-vate experience
> and feeling is often touched upon in cultural histories but little
> explained. Seeking the reasons for and the effects of the change of
> attitude toward one's concept of one's self in the "new"
> eighteenth-century attitude to-ward history, biography, travel
> litera-ture, pornography, and the novel, Lyons finds, first, that the
> term self is deceptively vague. It evolved, he notes, to fill the
> vacuum created by doubt about the existence of the soul.
>
> Second, Lyons finds that without a concept of the self--that ineffable
> something in a human being that to its inventors and their followers
> was an abstract of pure and intuited natural laws--the revolution and
> romanticism of the modern age would have been very different from what
> it has been. More importantly, Lyons concludes that the concept led to
> monumental error and to bitter disappointments rooted, as his
> il-luminating history shows, in the im-possibility of defining that
> which never was.
>
> On Fri, Jan 16, 2015 at 11:19 AM, Joseph Tracy <brook7 at sover.net> wrote:
> > Bit of a rant here below, a resistance to clever intellectuals from the
> POV of an average literate mind with a modestly above average interest and
> knowledge base concerning the history of metaphysics and technology. This
> is not intended as a personal affront or criticism of Mark but a setting
> forth of reasons why I am reluctant to accept the theories of Bloom and Van
> Der Berg whose treatises I have not read. Part of my reluctance with Bloom
> is based on reading other of his work. My reaction is very mixed to him,
> some things are clarifying and powerful and some seem carried away with
> weak premises. I tried to find an online summary of Van Der Berg's thesis
> and found nothing in Wikipedia or in the English translation of a larger
> Dutch wikipedia article. From this I have to wonder how much purchase his
> ideas have actually claimed.
> >
> >
> > I simply don't accept these notions of a sudden and dramatic appearance
> of an inner self in history. Jesus taught that the Kingdom of God was
> within, told his disciples to pray in secret.This would be meaningless
> without a private, if permeable self.  Greeks believed in individual
> freedom, individual strategic insight, individual philosophic choice, the
> possibility of governance through public debate and persuasion.   Law going
> back to the Hammurabic code addresses the individual with individual
> responsibilities.  The Bible starts with a story of self awareness through
> inner choice, transgression of a taboo and the pursuit of knowledge.  The
> Egyptians had images of a soul being weighed against a feather, obviously
> not about a body. The first person pronoun goes back to the roots of
> language. Every lie represents a distinction between the inner self and
> social self, and people have lied for awhile. The Gilgamesh epic is an
> artful and self aware outward heroization and fictionalized reification of
> an inner journey and struggle. Do we really think that the writer/s thought
> this was an historically accurate account of events. Do we think people
> hearing such a story  then thought they too might literally wrestle with
> Gods? The Greek Gods and tragedies clearly reveal inner complexity.The idea
> that ancient literature and myth was understood literally by everyone is
> absurd.    I don't buy it. Face it Berg and Bloom, this shit's been around
> since even before the holy Shakespeare.  There is also perhaps less
> individuation in moderns than some claim.    I find the whole idea of
> progressive change to be suspect.  Cultural evolution does not swing around
> the individual genius or act of intellectual challenge even when these
> things have huge transformative import, it is slow and constantly reverting
> to primitive habits of group identity and personal advancement. And these
> dramas play out within social arrangements that bear little distinction
> from ancient ones.
> >    Not everyone is shaped by large civilizations with written records.
> Even today there are hunter-gatherer tribes which have no deities and
> accept no mythologies, are in effect happy atheists. There are peaceful and
> warlike shamanic groups,  with either abstract or personified notions of
> the metaphysical  .   Our ideas of progressive development have often
> ignored the real available data in favor of prevailing theories, just as
> our histories have favored the winning male generals, and patriarchal
> interpretations of social meaning, property lines drawn by thieves and
> murderers. Thus the recorded picture is distorted by language, emphasis,
> sources and cultural limits.
> >   I suspect that more than a little of this reluctance to accept an
> ancient history for the human inner life is related to the absence of
> evidence for such a thing in modern public discourse where most of what is
> said is a function of group identities where mistrust and Xenophobia
> prevail. What we do not want, and what our claims of an inner life provide
> an escape clause from is personal moral responsibility for contributing to
> the barbaric, warlike or stupidly greedy behavior of our particular group
> identity/nation/empire. What we do want is the ability to say I was one of
> the good guys and opposed these things, but there was just nothing I could
> do, I am just one person. Most simply say it is all the fault of the
> Indians, the Islamists, the Jews, the real estate tycoons, the commies, the
> Americans.  How real is an inner life and personal freedom that is so
> impotent in shaping the social world? How great a claim can modern man make
> on such a thing?
> >    Even our social interactions are mediated through the economic
> tactics of Skinnerian programming and overseen by the all seeing eye of the
> Empire.
> >
> > OK; rant over; will try to behave, but can only promise a peaceable
> intent.
> >
> > On Jan 16, 2015, at 7:19 AM, Mark Kohut wrote:
> >
> >> I say there are, fer sure, or there is such a variety in the
> manifestation of
> >> all of its effects, Pynchon wants to make sure we understand that, get
> >> that in some
> >> mannered but still phenomenological detail.
> >> As remarked, Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy was published again and
> again in
> >> three volumes.
> >> If finding the prosaic nomenclature for our feelings is something that
> >> happened in human history---
> >> then Pynchon is modeling that in some way in M & D?
> >>
> >> a Dutch psychiatrist, J. H Van Den Berg, in his most famous book
> >> places the start of our 'inner self'
> >> at around 1520, with Luther's challenge to the Church. Harold Bloom
> >> has famously argued that
> >> Shakespeare created (our current understanding) of the human in the
> >> humanly insightful genius
> >> of how work.
> >>
> >> We can argue that---and I'm sure some will--but I am only throwing
> >> these out as a postscript
> >> to The Anatomy of Melancholy...i.e as a perspective on the
> >> developmental understanding of
> >> many of the qualities of being "human". Grief provides us--at
> >> least--some insight?
> >>
> >>
> >>
> >>
> >>
> >>
> >> On Fri, Jan 16, 2015 at 12:32 AM, Keith Davis <kbob42 at gmail.com> wrote:
> >>> Can there be different forms of grief?
> >>>
> >>>
> >>> Www.innergroovemusic.com
> >>>
> >>>> On Jan 16, 2015, at 12:08 AM, David Ewers <dsewers at comcast.net>
> wrote:
> >>>>
> >>>> I agree (nicely said), but I disagree.
> >>>>
> >>>> Two sides of the same something, seems to me.
> >>>>
> >>>> Grief, like fear, makes one desperate to flee oneself.
> >>>> Pitch into the hour, so to speak...
> >>>>
> >>>>
> >>>>> On Jan 15, 2015, at 8:59 PM, Joseph Tracy wrote:
> >>>>>
> >>>>> Nicely said.
> >>>>>> On Jan 15, 2015, at 7:58 PM, alice malice wrote:
> >>>>>>
> >>>>>> C.S Lewis may be right, but grief is not like fear to me.
> >>>>>>
> >>>>>> I have fear of grief. To me grief is not like fear. It is the end of
> >>>>>> fear; there is nothing left to fear because what was feared is.
> Maybe
> >>>>>> Mason, like Margaret, is not afraid, but is grieving not for what he
> >>>>>> fears, or even for what may or may not be, but for what is surely to
> >>>>>> be and not to be.
> >>>>>>
> >>>>>> http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/173665
> >>>>>>
> >>>>>>
> >>>>>>
> >>>>>>
> >>>>>>
> >>>>>>> On Thu, Jan 15, 2015 at 6:21 AM, Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com>
> wrote:
> >>>>>>> p20. 'pitching into the hour, heedless"...why does Grief cause
> this?
> >>>>>>> "No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear."---C.S. Lewis.
> >>>>>>> TRP even has Dixon share, therefore understand by identifying with,
> >>>>>>> this feeling.
> >>>>>>>
> >>>>>>> a lot of anatomy of grief, melancholy, etc. going on from the
> get-go.
> >>>>>>> Dense web of feelings.
> >>>>>>> -
> >>>>>>> Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l
> >>>>>> -
> >>>>>> Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l
> >>>>>
> >>>>> -
> >>>>> Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l
> >>>>
> >>>> -
> >>>> Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l
> >
> > -
> > Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?listpynchon-l
> -
> Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?listpynchon-l
>
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