M&D and Genesissssss

[Mark Kohut]

Maskelyne, fully of the Establishment, seventh in his class, trying to
figure it all out....P'raps in P's vision where
science meets 'the mystical'? ....Where the Age of Enlightenment is still
'sabotaged' by the Age of Magic, so to speak per
that classic book?

I just love it when the conversing clocks consider Maskelyne
'insane'..!!....Clocks, the Western world's rational ordering of
Time, for challenging the self-organizing day, for
"straightening-out-those-lines [of moments]"; for creating the punctuation
against the day that enables
work off the land...( we know where that leads) ....THEY say Maskelyne is
crazy!!! LOL..........reminds me of Bertie  "Mad Dog' Russell in AtD,
that great rational mathematical mind crossed with emotional storms as
strong as lightning....Crazy, man, crazy.

Like that.

On Tue, Jan 16, 2018 at 12:36 AM, Smoke Teff <smoketeff at gmail.com> wrote:

> I read that book Longitude, about the clockmaker who eventually got credit
> for solving the longitude problem, John Harrison. It suggests Maskelyne is
> an ambitious-first-ideological-close-second lunatic who went way out of
> his way to sabotage the poor tinkerman Harrison’s base solution to a lofty
> problem.
>
> I have only reread up to the pages you’re writing about here so can’t
> remember if that sense of him comes through in M&D
>
> > On Jan 15, 2018, at 4:34 PM, Joseph Tracy <brook7 at sover.net> wrote:
> >
> > Maskelyne is the perfect mouthpiece for Pyncon’s love of wacky theories.
> On pgs. 133-4  HM is discussing St. Helena as a plantation of the
> metropolitan “Home Planet”,  here alien but possibly also Corporate. Some
> inhabitants of the island claim to have traveled to this mysterious home
> planet.
> >
> > “What if ’twere so?” declares Maskelyne. “Ev’ry People have a story of
> how they were created. If one were heretickal enough, which I certainly am
> not, one might begin to entertain some notion of the Garden in Genesis, as
> an instance of extra-terrestrial Plantation.”
> >
> > The idea of the garden of Eden as a plantation of an alien species is
> detailed in the fairly wacked out theories of Zecharia Sitchin. His books,
> starting with The 12th Planet ,1976, were very popular and his theories the
> obvious source of this passage.   Nevertheless  lack of linguistic or
> astronomic credibility aside, the idea of  Eden, with its talking reptiles,
> trees of knowledge,  or trees of life and early biological classification
> system( man gave names to all the animals)as a genetic research plantation
> is not without creative merit and could explain all kinds of things I
> suppose.
> >
> > Maskelyne picks up the Genesis reference on 135
> > ….
> > “The Serpent, being the obvious Answer.”
> > “What Serpent?”
> > “The one dwelling within the Volcanoe, Mason, surely you are not
> ignorant upon the Topick?” “Regretfully, Sir— ”
> > “Serpent, Worm, or Dragon, ’tis all the same to It, for It speaketh no
> Tongue but its own. It Rules this Island, whose ancient Curse and secret
> Name, is Disobedience. In thoughtless Greed, within a few pitiably brief
> Generations, have these People devastated a Garden in which, once, anything
> might grow.
> >
> > HM may be mad, but there is something in this bit that can be seen as a
> poetic wail for human  eco-devastation of our lush planet.
> >
> > P returns often throughout his work to the western correlation between
> evil and the reptilian. But in M&D he seems to suggest that negative
> association can be inverted by bringing in the positive association Zhang
> brings of the dragon forces in nature. And because the serpent/evil
> references are frequently the product of unstable and paranoid characters,
> it is tricky to tell how and why he is using this language.
> >
> >
> >
> > -
> > Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l
> -
> Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?listpynchon-l
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://waste.org/pipermail/pynchon-l/attachments/20180116/bf900f41/attachment.html>