BEg2 ch 28 fuzzy logic

[Mark Kohut]

I have always read this non-sequitur this way: Horst nostalgizes [sic]
totalistically about when he could do that.
But he hasn't done it for awhile because it was "withdrawn" from him.

And, of course, the linking of grace with The Protestant Ethic, that
concept (worked out book-length) of P's early influencer,
Max Weber, genius sociologist. Summarized: if you were successful in
life---successful meaning you got rich (enough), that showed
you were saved (in the religious sense), in a state of grace.

So, if Horst could no longer know which way to bet on Eurodollars then it
may be some kind of observation by Pynchon that the world--its economy--
is now unpredictable, yes?

On Thu, Apr 21, 2022 at 5:30 AM Michael Bailey <michael.lee.bailey at gmail.com>
wrote:

> “Back in the pits, I used to know this Christer coffee trader who told me
> it was like  grace, something you don’t ask for. Just comes. Of course it
> can also be withdrawn at any time. Like when I always knew which way to bet
> on Eurodollars.
>
> - non sequitur? Knowing which way to bet on Eurodollars doesn’t follow from
> “it can be withdrawn at any time.”
>
> That “it can be withdrawn” is not the lead-in to his next words, then, but
> the culmination and capping-off of the previous lines, of what the
> “Christer coffee trader told him,” I guess - he stops pursuing that
> explanation, partly because the Christian formulation includes that
> possible withdrawing by an external locus of control, and partly because in
> advancing to trader from farmer he’s trying to get beyond the “faith of his
> fathers” ?
>
>
>
> The times we shorted Amazon, got out of Lucent when it went to $70 a share,
> remember? It wasn’t me that ever ‘knew’ anything. But something did. Sudden
> couple extra lines of brain code, who knows. I just followed along.”
>
> - Here he draws the explanation on-board and conflates his brain with a
> computer, mixing the metaphor. Pulling out of religious explanation in
> favor of (pseudo)science.
>
>
>
>          “But then . . . if it was that same weird talent that kept you
> safe . . .”
>
>          “How could it be? How could predicting market behavior be the same
> as predicting a terrible disaster?”
>
> “If the two were different forms of the same thing.”
>
>          “Way too anticapitalist for me, babe.”
>
>
> Why is that anti capitalist? The whole point of futures trading is to
> supposedly “stabilize the market” and avoid supply chain disasters - within
> the framework of “capitalism being a Good Thing.” Why wouldn’t “that talent
> extending to saving him from personal disaster” be a natural extension?
>
> I can only think that Horst isn’t buying totally into the whole “divine
> right of captains of industry, elect v preterite predestination and I am of
> the Elect,” just as he hadn’t bought into the “Christer” gratuitous Grace
> explanation.
>
> Which indicates a healthy lack of hubris? That idea makes it easier to like
> him.
>
> Plotwise, if he’d not had the “il ne sait quoi” to oversleep, bye-bye
> Horst.
> Natural for him to wonder.
> Pretty reasonable not to have a solid explanation.
> --
> Pynchon-L: https://waste.org/mailman/listinfo/pynchon-l
>