M& D Group Read (cont)

[Mark Kohut]

All probably true in Pynchon's many-layered lasagna.

I think first of what I see as a steady baseline theme: a vision of a whole
life, so to speak, fully, fully human--when we think how
much the anti-human in history grips him--at times in the past. In "an
organic community" mostly lost to modernity, to the encroachment
of industrialization, which hit communities at different historic times and
ways. That 'organic community' is mostly limned in some of the European
sections of Against the Day, but........

Here I see the presentation of this 'feeling' around Stonehenge as a
symbolic representation. I think Oedipa had a similar every attenuated
'feeling'
early in Lot 49.

To have her think *it knows me *is to limn a consciousness--as you
say--that refutes an identity that the Age of Reason--name-checked in M
&D--created.


On Mon, Feb 5, 2018 at 11:15 AM, Smoke Teff <smoketeff at gmail.com> wrote:

> I think it has mostly to do with P exploring kinds and paces of
> consciousness that transcend (but obviously include) the human.
>
> Maybe there is some astronomickal-ancestral-genetick affinity with Dixon,
> his people, and Stonehenge.
>
> I will say that rereading this passage shortly after participating in an
> ayahuasca ceremony was very striking to me—this powerful feeling (knowing,
> being known, by a place, one you’re sure you’ve never been in any way that
> makes sense to the history-making, forward-time keeping ego as we use and
> understand it)...As I felt my ego slip away, in its last breaths it was
> starting to understand it’s own insufficient timekeeping, how much vaster
> an awareness there was to all (timeless) being, even to all life—and
> companion to this feeling was a powerful sense of knowing the place I was
> in and being known by it, but over a timeline far bigger than my mind was
> really capable of grasping in any more than a glimpsing way. It was
> like...deja vu, combined with a paranoia that’s actually more  ambivalent
> than sinister, and the ambivalence stretched out over a timeline I was only
> just beginning to glimpse started to demonstrate some kind of compassion to
> the very structure of being.
>
> On Feb 5, 2018, at 5:53 AM, Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> "it's too familiar.I've this feeling...I know the place, and *it knows
> me."*
>
> Why is this said with Stonehenge the prompt?
>
>
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