BEg2 ch 28 fuzzy logic

[Mark Kohut]

Or that Horst is now damned, so to speak?

On Thu, Apr 21, 2022 at 6:36 AM Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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 But he hasn't done it for awhile because it was "withdrawn" from him.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 can also be withdrawn at any time.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 “it can be withdrawn at any time.”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 That “it can be withdrawn” is not the lead-in to his next words, then, but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
>>
>