M&D p. 152: "the Night of the 'Black Hole,' some Zero-Point of history"

[Mark Kohut]

Well, I might push back on the zero as overly associated with "original
sin". Seems to me,
TRP is very, very cagey and quite self-hidden about THAT belief. Not about
full evil in the world,
which is certainly a GR motif but ...whence it comes when he has such a
deep vision of
its historical causes....yeah, yeah,  i know HOW did it get into history
and he might be pointing
at "original sin" at places in his work where THAT seems the better
explanation, imho
...but he also has a whole oeuvre pointing at original goodness too, I
say....

But I have read Zero-Point of History as related to the zero point of
energy seen in history...
One of the steps, in the step-function that is history, where the worst is
reached....your words:
"This event itself is put forward and suggested to have a special
spatio-temporal/historical gravity."

example
slightly moved beyond the zero point of the horizontal scale,



On Sun, Feb 11, 2018 at 7:26 PM, Smoke Teff <smoketeff at gmail.com> wrote:

> Have written about this extensively elsewhere, so withholding most of
> what I’ve already said about it.
>
>
>
> This event itself is put forward and suggested to have a special
> spatio-temporal/historical gravity. Will be interesting to track to
> what extent that is true—or if other candidates are put forth for this
> special historical gravity—over the course of the novel.
>
>
>
> Seems also to track with P’s general interest in original sin—the
> original sin of (modern) history?
>
>
>
> Norman Brown, in Life Against Death, suggests that man is defined by
> his history-making abilities/tendencies. This ability to make history
> is, for Brown, both the cause/dawn of man, and also the cause of man’s
> suffering (i.e. original sin). So what does that mean for the
> zero-point of history?
>
>
>
> Insofar as P is always probing for original sin, this reflects
> interestingly on GR’s Beyond The Zero stuff, in ways I’m not currently
> equipped to fully grapple with. Thoughts?
>
>
>
> The ZERO is associated, in P’s oeuvre-wide vision (as I understand it
> from this vantage point) with original sin (or maybe, less biblically,
> with the inherent vice of all man-made systems, all man’s endeavors,
> etc), with the dawn of man, with the beginning of history/modernity,
> and with (the innocence of?) the period before (Slothrop’s)
> conditioning…
> -
> Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?listpynchon-l
>
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