M&D: Apprehending God, Pynchon and Rilke

[Smoke Teff]

“tho’ now it can feel something undeniably on the way, something it
cannot conceive of, perhaps as Humans apprehend God,--as a Force they
are ever just about to become acquainted with….”

M&D p. 88


THIS is an important moment, I believe. God has been invoked from many
different perspectives. We’ve also had a kind of entangling of several
different but vaguely coherent concepts—the unknown, as a thing to be
yearned for, as a thing to desire deliverance into; the wish for
death; the wish for sin, even, or for judgment. We’ve seed many
different manifestations of that compulsive longing. Here, we see
Pynchon suggesting that one manifestation of that compulsion—and one
way of understanding God—might involve the sense of God being the
thing just over the mountains (stands in stark contrast to suggesting
you believe in the God that is here). It’s like the rational
distinction of deism’s distant/detached God, but with yearning, with
the promise of (unfilfillable) deliverance.



This is essentially identical to the advice Rilke gives the Young Poet
in his famous Letters to. P, of course, has an affinity for Rilke’s
spiritual work, which I think comes across most in Gravity’s Rainbow.



This Rilkean and now Pynchonian—or at least Cherrycokean—suggestion of
how Humans might—or ought—relate to God as something to be
anticipated, or yearned for…is there a word for this, or more lineage
I’m failing to trace here?
-
Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l