My Fair Ladies

[Jerome Park]

We can contrast the Christian view of Nature/God or the Creation with
the Greek; In the Christian view, as beautifully described in the poem
by GMH, we are poor judges of God/Nature and often misread Her or even
find fault in Her apparent deformities and horrors, for we fail to see
or forget that nothing is contrary to Nature, All things come from
Her/God, our part is to praise Her or Him, Father/Mother of All. This
is the foundation of Pynchon's view of God/Nature, his Orphic Song to
Mary, the central Female force of his childhood religion. Of course,
Pynchon is a heretic, so his god/ Mary, Nature, has no plan, so we
sing praise for All we are Graced with, and All remains a beautiful
mystery.

For the Greeks, for example, in Aristotle's "Scientific" view, All
things aim at some good, a telos, an end. And, as with all other
plans, those of Nature and of Man, sometimes their is failure. Nature
like Man may produce imperfections (contrast this view with the GMH
poem). For the Greeks, like the Jews, Man is the Perfect form. And
Nature seeks to produce, like a Machine, a duplicate of the Father
when a child is born. But Nature can produce children that do not look
like the father, or that look more on the Mother's side, or, in a
greater error, a female. The female infant is an imperfection born of
the agon between Man, life in perfection, and Matter, the female, and
when a female is produced, Nature has aimed but missed the bull's eye.
But for Aristotle, the female, while an imperfect product of Man's
failure to dominate matter, for the male to assert dominion over the
female, is not a monster, nor anything to take religious or sacred
lesson or omen from. Even infants with gross deformity are not
monsters. In this, Aristole and the Christian agree.
 David Morris wrote:
> Agreed. Creation is evolutionary, relentlessly so. Entropy isn't bigger
> than Life. The balance of all of Creation's forces is always, in the long
> run, toward evolution into higher, stranger, new forms. Monsters of nature
> are wonderful.
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Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l