M&D12: The Insanity of Clock-Time and Maskelyne

[Joseph Tracy]

Just responding to ST’s fine review of quotes and  thoughts
> On Feb 1, 2018, at 4:50 PM, Smoke Teff <smoketeff at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> CHAPTER 12
> 
> 
> 
> “’too many idle Minutes to be fill’d, soon pile up, topple, and
> overwhelm the healthiest Mind,--‘”
> 
> 
> 
> Idleness is increasingly positioned as the enemy in the Age of Reason.
> It is in opposition to utility/exploitation/profit. But are moments of
> idleness not the precursor to our celebration of being, or the
> opportunity to apprehend the coming God? Here’s GR’s narrator (in
> maybe my favorite passage of P):  “If the rockets don’t get her
> there’s still her lieutenant. Damned Beaver/Jeremy is the War, he is
> every assertion the fucking War has ever made—that we are meant for
> work and government, for austerity: and these shall take priority over
> love, dreams, the spirit, the senses and the other second-class trivia
> that are found among the idle and mindless hours of the day. . . .
> Damn them, they are wrong. They are insane.”

Good selection of  a thematic echo.  Here( in the passage from GR)  we have the assertion of the values that grow from love, dreams…  Maskelyne seems unable to see how the loneliness that torments him comes directly from his pursuit of individual glory, his turning himself into an agent of technological and cultural dominance and of a dehumanized utilitarianism. Instead he cultivates a demonic paranoia from an isolation that he has chosen. He is at war, and like most wars it originates in a bifurcation of the mind. 
> 
> 
> We see now, in 2018, the increased perversion, commodification, and
> pop-commercial focus on youth/adolescence/the years of one’s maximal
> liberty (apparently) and reproductive prime. Does this begin in the
> Age of Reason, with its perverse emphasis on utility, with the
> commodification of human generation all around?
> 
The passage below seems to bring the clock-time meditation to a glorious impasse between the mechanics of mathematical division and the chaotic motions generated by  heat and cold, winds and waters on a spinning planet. The clocks have an inherent momentum( the entropic bias of no-living materials) by which they must utimately yield to forces watery and lunar, which must in turn work  with forces telluric and solar.
> 
> “And indeed, what they wanted to talk about all along, was the Ocean.
> Neither Clock really knows what it is,-beyond an undeniably rhythmick
> Being of some sort[…]What they feel is an Attraction, more and less
> resistible, to beat in Synchrony with it, regardless of their
> Pendulum-lengths, or even the divisions of the Day.”
> 
> 
> 
> Clock : ocean :: humans : the divine?
> 
> 
> 
> We sense the presence of it around us, though we do not encounter it
> directly. We feel compelled to apprehend and harmonize with it, though
> we don’t always yield to that compulsion. Our training, purpose,
> pendulum-lengths (our body-ego presence in the material world) offer
> us more and less ability to resist the compulsion to beat
> synchronously with it. At the very least, more exploration of the
> susceptibility of the body to the not-fully-knowable forces, energies,
> rhythms in the atmosphere around it.

                                         personal interpretation 
                                                
I will go out on a limb here and accept the premise that the peculiar qualities of the universe,  the surprising chaotic beauties and toothy monstrosities of it, spring not from a perfect symmetry like a vast equation but from a wobble of imperfection at play within  various symmetries. What mind would have predicted water to emerge from oxygen and hydrogen? Why is the physical world full of irrational numbers and improbable forms?  I personally feel that the greatest writers and scentists and humanists and ecologists are asking us to be  more humble before this mystery and not be seduced by one side or the other of this balancing imbalance. 

I feel increasingly convinced that the technology of a whole mind, a non-dualistic way of thinking that is at home in the given universe rather than imposing an all-ecompassing narrative  holds  the greatest potential for humans  to endure , thrive and be in harmony with the creative evolutionary enterprise of life. Civilization has favored an unhealthy  left brain bias since the introduction of the phonemic alphabet, a bias that was profoundly reinforced by the enlightenment. The usefulness of this bias is inextricably linked to its tragic madness, and must be deeply re-considered. The only salvation on offer from the universe is not a new techno-toy, a new religion, or unified theory, but self restraint and a cosmic review of where we are as part of life on earth.  Can we preserve the good and learn to limit the appetites of those driven insane by the power of violent self-righteousness?  I think many have learned this lesson and if individuals can, then larger communities also can. 


   


> 
> 
> 
> p. 124
> 
> “’I am resolv’d upon no further criticism of any Brother Lens[…]Even
> one to whom Right Ascension may require a Wrong or two’”
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> 
> 
> Dixon’s diagnosis on Maskelyne. Some skepticism about the soundness of
> Maskelyne’s judgment, perhaps the inclination that Maskelyne will need
> some kind of suffering to course-correct. But not a condemnation of
> his redeemability, especially as filtered through the common lens of
> their vocations/callings/orientations.
> -
> Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list

-
Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l