M & D Read. Chap 25, p 253

[Mark Kohut]

Yeah, real good stuff to think on.

I know a fraction of what Joseph must about Quakerism so I keep learning.
That TRP
gets to places JT suggests with Dixon's Quakerism is a text-based linkage.

 and all I want to add is one other way
I raise TRP in my reading to the metaphysical/ sorta
religious/universal.....

Protestantism, that/those religions at the founding of America, also, as do
most
Western religions at least, holds in a personal Conscience before one's
God.
(They felt the formerly universal Western Catholicism lost that, having
fallen into
technique shortcuts--the confessional; material penances; idolatry, etc. )

Yet, Dante's Catholicism (and Adams' Middle Ages Catholicism) also posited
self-awareness
in sin vis a vis God). A conscience deeper than memory, one might say.

Which is just to remind that, say, the Universal Declaration of Human
Rights, a doc which outlawed slavery
(among other things) is said to be universal because it embodied all
peoples' consciences, so to speak.



On Wed, Apr 25, 2018 at 10:25 AM, Joseph Tracy <brook7 at sover.net> wrote:

> Recall that the context for talking about the “soul journey” of death is a
> discussion and respectful argument about their journeys and work for the
> Royal Society and how that Society favors science conducted in “Chartered
> Companies” . Dixon finds the confines of this arrangement suspicious, and
> Mason argues they are safe and  the way of things:
>
> “In any case,” says Mason to Dixon, “both Pennsylvania and Maryland are
> Charter’d Companies as well, if it comes to that. Charter’d Companies may
> indeed be the form the World has now increasingly begun to take.”
> “And I thought ’twas a Spheroid . . . ?”   (p. 252).
>
> Contained in this probing joke  about the shape of the earth we find that
> Dixon is profoundly suspicious of the alliances of power against the
> wildness and intrinsic freedoms of humans and places, seeing a kind of
> conspiracy against the wholeness or circularity of nature, even against the
> largest and most profound realities science has revealed.
>
> Despite his defense of Chartered Companies and their safety, Mason did not
> want to return to Capetown. Dixon turns Mason's reluctance to go on this
> journey to a deeper concern that troubles Mason- the jouney of death -  how
> there will be no foresight  on that trip…
>
> “unless tha’ve brought along a Remembrancer, as some would say a
> Conscience . . . ? something stash’d in thy Boot-Strap to get thee going
> upon a cold Day,— and cold shall it be,— a part of thy Soul that doesn’t
> depend on Memories, that lies further than Memories . . . ?”” (p. 254).
>
> Conscience is a topic of deep and central concern among Quakers.  Not
> where we came from or hope to go but how. Dixon seems to feel that that “
> Remembrancer” is our essential weight and meaning.
> 'Remebrance' has the word ‘member’ at the core. The implication not so
> much one of recall of a story, but rejoining of a living body.
>
> Like no other book, in M&D Pynchon slowly develops conversations and
> observations that go to the roots in time and mind of the current forms of
> civilization and spiritual discourse. Mason and Dixon, the often reluctand
> surveyors of these emergent forms and territories give us a conversational,
> non-combative view into the frontiers  of that terrain.  I begin to feel
> that this should be required american reading  like Moby Dick and
> Huckleberry Finn.
>
> > On Apr 25, 2018, at 5:55 AM, Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > Starting with a riff/joak? about reincarnation, TRP pushes to answer the
> > question of what
> > could survive after drinking from Lethe:
> > ---" a part of thy Soul that doesn't depend on Memories, that lies
> further
> > than Memories...?"
> >
> > Emerson's Oversoul? Jung's 'Collective Unconscious'? A different Eastern
> > [Hindoo joke coming] notion?
> >
> > Comment period begins.
> > --
> > Pynchon-L: https://waste.org/mailman/listinfo/pynchon-l
>
> --
> Pynchon-L: https://waste.org/mailman/listinfo/pynchon-l
>