My Fair Ladies

[Mark Kohut]

jerome writes:
"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."

Pretty terrif riff on Pynchon's view, I agree. I think this vision is
most overtly visible
in Against the Day, where Nature is either God's mystery, or pantheistic or
panentheistic right there in the overarching ambiguities.

Wonderful stuff

On Sun, May 10, 2015 at 7:18 AM, Jerome Park <jeromepark3141 at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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.
> -
> Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l
-
Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l