BtZ42Read

[Keith Davis]

I was thinking of it as beyond this life, as well. The behaviorism angle is
also very insightful. Why not both, and possibly more?

On Tue, Mar 15, 2016 at 11:55 AM, Joseph Tracy <brook7 at sover.net> wrote:

> I think so. Behaviorism is such a central theme. The screaming also has an
> echo later in the screaming children in the secret behaviorist experiments,
> which reinforces this thinking.  There is also a sense in which Beyond the
> Zero refers to crossing the boundary between life and death. Von Braun
> describes ’the continuity of “our spiritual existence”after death'. Pynchon
> seems to me to be asking what kind of spiritual existence comes out of Von
> Braun’s choices. Is there a sense in which this kind of thinking leads to a
> lust for self annihilation as a mad alchemical experiment. Bliss Zero.
>
> It is going to be very hard not to leap around here in the text.
> > On Mar 15, 2016, at 5:46 AM, Kai Frederik Lorentzen <
> lorentzen at hotmail.de> wrote:
> >
> >
> > On 15.03.2016 09:39, Ian Livingston wrote:
> >
> >> Then there is this pe-orgasmic pause:
> >>
> >> “There is no way out. Lie and wait, lie still and be quiet. Screaming
> holds across the sky. When it comes, will it come in darkness, or will it
> bring its own light? Will the light come before ar after?
> >>
> >> But it is already light," GR 5.
> >>
> >
> >>
> >> Are we beyond the zero at this point? What, exactly, is the zero?
> >>
> >
> >
> > Could it be that the zero refers to behaviorism? Pavlovian thought is
> via Pointsman very present in this first part of the novel. In this
> context, - please correct me if I'm wrong! - the one (1) refers to the
> successful conditioning, manifest in a concrete behavior. The zero (0)
> refers to the state where the conditioning is extinguished and the behavior
> is not shown by the test subject anymore.  The formulation "beyond the
> zero" then, perhaps, indicates a new phase in human history where the
> thanatoid forces of society start, metaphorically speaking, to go beneath
> our skin. Where science becomes "big science" (and data "big data"), and
> even political mass murder, so very common to history, enters a
> qualitatively new level with the Holocaust, as well as with Hiroshima.
> Sentences like "It is too late", or "It has happened before, but there is
> nothing to compare it to now", would fit such a reading. What do you think?
> >
> >
> >
> >>
> >> “Astrologically the beginning of the next aeon, according to the
> starting-point you select, falls between A.D. 2000 and  2200. Starting from
> the star “0“ and assuming a Platonic month of 2,145 years, one would arrive
> at A.D. 2154 for the beginning of the Aquarian Age, and at A.D. 1997 if you
> start from star “a 113.“ The latter date agrees with the longitude of the
> stars in Ptolemy’s Almagest“ CGJ, Aion, 1959, 94n.
> >>
> >
>
> -
> Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?listpynchon-l
>



-- 
www.innergroovemusic.com
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://waste.org/pipermail/pynchon-l/attachments/20160315/771c29aa/attachment.html>