mindful pleasures , rainbows, gravity

[Mark Kohut]

Will read again but yes to GR as the better and the fine title you riff on.

On Fri, Sep 1, 2017 at 12:04 PM, Joseph Tracy <brook7 at sover.net> wrote:

> I love this thread title and want to come back to it and  also to the
> final title of Pynchon’s  masterwork - Gravity’s Rainbow.  In my own
> approach to Pynchon’s body of work I see 4 Masterworks- GR, M&D and ATD
> and V. These all take on major aspects of American History and myth within
> the larger context of western history and myth and open up vistas into non
> western thought: Pythagoras ( one of several paths not taken), Tibetan,
> Chinese,  Shamanic, Japanese.
>
> The shorter works  all seem to take on critical  cultural turning points
> occurring within P’s life often with a detective/investigative structure:
> rise of Nixon, Reagan, police authoritarianism…transition to paper money
> and banker/oligarchy economic debt supremacy over labor/ real goods base…
> great failure  and lesser successes of 60s cultural revolution…. 9/11
> revival of authoritaian militarism.  All of these have a powerful but
> usually understated subtext of wars and war paradigms:  Vietnam and war
> with communism… Internal war against nonconformity, against the antiwar
> movement, against organized  labor,  and against actual  human freedom as
> opposed to theoretical patriotic freedom… war on terror .
>
> I want to concede to Mark K that the evidence that Mindless Pleasures was
> more than a working title seems persuasive. I have not studied P’s life as
> others have and have read less of the body of Pynchon criticism, preferring
> to rely on my own thoughts and research and interaction with the list. This
> seems to have advantages and disadvantages.
>
> BUT…… Gravity’s Rainbow is a better title. I rarely make this kind of
> absolute comparitive judgement and wonder if anyone prefers Mindless
> Pleasures? Why do I think it’s a better Title and why did Pynchon use it
> and does all this have any relation to the labor issues which I am
> persuaded by Ish, after some discussion, is a more central theme of P’s
> work than I had really focused on.
>
> Mindless Pleasures is awkwardly misleading and general.  The book is not
> about mindless pleasures  and the phrase is not that useful a phrase even
> as a satiric induction to deeper thought. It would have swallowed a lot of
> response time to the novel with little benefit.
>
> Gravity’s Rainbow is almost the opposite- poetic and unique, not obvious,
> general, or loaded with cultural baggage. It draws you in and forces you to
> deal with the specifictity and metaphoric suggestion of language. It is
> also multi-valent which is one of the consistent qualities of P’s literary
> genius; It can refer to a natural rainbow or one of many human-made
> rainbows which are thematic. Gravity is one of the great mysteries of
> science remaining a challenge after Einstein. It refers to  death but also
> implies the complementary life force and birth, the rise and fall of a
> rocket( or the rise and fall of a civilization, a life, all life, the force
> that shapes stars, planets, bends the path of light.. )
>
> One of my few original thoughts on the title is the idea of a reference to
> oil/rocket fuel/ coal tar extracts - in short  fossil fuels which are the
> accumulated remains of organic life under the pressures of time and
> gravity. For me this gave a broader scope than the traditional reference to
> the rocket's arc. In GR we are looking at the 2nd of 2 world wars driven
> by  and attempting to control fossil fuels as the energy source of modern
> civilization and culminating in the delivery of atomic weapons  via the
> mastery of fossil fuel powered flight. We see gravity’s rainbows in IG
> Farben’s dyes derived from coal tars, in color coded maps, in chemical
> candies, in rocket trails at dawn, in the actual rainbow that marks the
> restoration of nature and transcendent disapearance  of Slothrop. This
> rainbow spectrum is set a against the black and white movie tone of the war
> which dominates the book- a spectrum emphasized by White Visitation,
> Schwarzcommandos, race war references, and the black and white movies it
> refers to, perhaps even to some degree by black print on a white page.
>
>  Is it possibe that we are being asked to observe and consider a mindful
> choice between the powerful and useful role of binary thinking in human
> history and the promise and potential of something more akin to the octaval
> range of the periodic table, the light spectrum, the musical scale. Is
> evolution, or perhaps the mindful organization of the universe( must these
> 2 ways of thinking  be arranged as an opposition?) fundamentally wedded to
> an expansion of consciousness, or is that just a carbon life form  bias? It
> is my sense that humans have expanded their cosciousness into tools, into
> language, and via thes into larger dimensions of time and space, but have
> failed to transcend a primitive addiction to the war paradigm.  How long
> can we sit on the DNA fence organizing everything around an agonistic
> internal  binary war without blowing everything back  to silky black goo?-
> Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?listpynchon-l
>
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