BTZ42Reed: Von B's epigraph

[Steven Koteff]

I think you're right, Monte. And if Pynchon really understands the religious and even the psychoanalytic notions that find resonance in the work--if the consciousness that serves as engine of the book is for real, and isn't merely appropriating--then he would at least have given a lot of attention to the sorts of ideas Keith mentions in response to you. If not have actively and personally come to see truth in them. 

Regarding your last point ("It's a useful exercise, maybe a spiritual discipline, to take it literally.") I agree with you, and add that I think the ubiquitousness of all history (of all time, or its contents) and the illusoriness of time (as a way of understanding the world) are two sides of the same coin. And from that coin comes, yes, the imminence of all time which impels us to treat that imminence with the importance of a spiritual discipline, as you say. But also comes the temperance/restraint of the form that spiritual discipline should take as Pynchon sees it. Or the way it should be practiced. The notion of "now" is much different than we are able to perceive. I guess I'm saying I think this is related to some of the aphoristic moments elsewhere in TRP. Keep cool but care. 

> On Mar 14, 2016, at 12:23 PM, Monte Davis <montedavis49 at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> I wouldn't even limit it to "spiritual existence." Within a few pages we'll have the physical, consequential survival of bananaceous molecules in the compost on Bloat's roof, warming us up for those strata of coal and oil and iron (all made of or modulated by life) that may be calling the shots... for seances and for instants stopped in Askania cameras, suspended somewhere between 1944 and 1973. I once said of AtD that it made me think Pynchon doesn't really believe in time, any more than Nabokov or Proust does. 
> 
> People quote Faulkner's "The past isn't dead. It isn't even past" as if it were just a vivid, hyperbolic way of saying "we can't escape the effects of history." It's a useful exercise, maybe a spiritual discipline, to take it literally.  
> 
>> On Mon, Mar 14, 2016 at 2:23 AM, Ian Livingston <igrlivingston at gmail.com> wrote:
>> 
>> Regarding “…continued spiritual existence after death.”
>> 
>>  
>> 
>> “The ghost or phantasm seen by the dreamer or the visionary is in unsubstantial form, like a shadow or reflection, and thus the familiar term of the shade comes in to express the soul. Thus the Tasmanian word for shadow is also that for the spirit, the Algonquins describe a man’s soul as otahchuk, ‘his shadow’; the Quiché language uses natub for ‘shadow, soul’; the Arawak ueja means ‘shadow, soul, image’; and Abipones made the one word loákol serve for shadow, soul, echo, image. The Zulus not only use the word tunzi for “shadow, spirit, ghost,‘ but they consider that at death the shadow of a man will in some way depart from the corpse, to become an ancestral spirit. The Basutos not only call the spirit remaining after death the seriti or 'shadow', but they think that if a man walks on the river bank a crocodile may seize his shadow in the water and draw him in; while in Old Calabar there is found the same identification of spirit with the ukpon or 'shadow,' for a man to lose which is fatal. […] also what seems the fundamental thought of the stories of shadowless men still current in the folklore of Europe, and familiar to modern readers in Chamisso’s tale of Peter Schlemihl. Thus the dead in Purgatory knew that Dante was alive when they saw that, unlike theirs, his figure cast a shadow on the ground. Mircea Eliade, From Primitives to Zen: A Thematic Sourcebook of the History of Religions, 177 (1967).
>> 
>> Pynchon uses light and shadow, light and dark, light and...well, other light to great effect throughout. Eliade was considered pretty hip in the day. Whether there is any intentional allusion is unimportant to me in this context, but the great rocketeer invites us to ask what he means when he says afterlife, and so, I think does Pynchon, especially considering this first section. Chimes?
> 
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