COL 49 group read CH 6 mid section

[Michael Bailey]

Joseph Tracy wrote:

> ….

The Vatican would by all logic favor the Thurn and Taxis postal control and
> their dependence on the Holy Roman Empire. They might simply be motivated
> to keep a copy of the original Wharfinger play both for their secret
> records and their porn collection, and change the words to place all the
> guilt in the story on the incestuous, priest-torturing Duke Angelo and
> would also obscure the very existence of a competing postal system.  This
> seems a far more logical ( Occam’s razor)explanation.
>

However, the Scurvhamite edition did contain the Trystero reference:

[Oed] “But the line about Trystero isn’t dirty.”

[Bortz] scratched his head. “It fits, surely? The ‘hallowed skein of stars’
is God’s will. But even that can’t ward, or guard, somebody who has an
appointment with Trystero. I mean, say you only talked about crossing the
lusts of Angelo, hell, there’d be any number of ways to get out of that.
Leave the country. Angelo’s only a man. But the brute Other, that kept the
nonScurvhamite universe running like clockwork, that was something else
again. Evidently they felt Trystero would symbolize the Other quite well.”


 I’m in full accord with the rest:


> The advantage of the Scurvhamites  is to have fun with the bizarre
> extremes of Calvinism,  and to shift focus to the universality of personal
> ambition and scheming within both religion  and secular aspirations to
> rule. Pynchon is pointing out that the same interdependence of church and
> state that passed from the Gods and Ceasars and then moved  to  the
> interdependence  of the Vatican  and the emperor Charlemagne ( beginning of
> Holy Roman Empire), had then passed  in the reformation to the
> interdependence of nationalism and various Protestant sects. There is no
> return  in this progression to the nonviolent healing and sharing of the
> Galilean except in non-state affiliated  religious communities  and
> independent thinkers( the anabaptists, Franciscans, Quakers, ). There is
> also a challenging  secular version of this pursuit in people like Tom
> Paine, Galileo, Copernicus, enlightenment figures etc.)
>
> To look at this history from within the good guys v. bad guys culture wars
> of the 60s or now is startling in the arbitrariness and the  sheer violence
> of dueling doctrines, movements of people,  technological changes,
> intermarriage, language wars etc. How do we frame  our cultural and
> personal  struggles within this confused history and what is the role of
> communication systems, or what we now call media in that  conflicted
> landscape? Who should decide?
>
> To be continued


>