COL 49 group read CH 6 mid section

[Michael Bailey]

Oh, I see - you’re saying that Wharfinger wrote the Tristero in, & the
Vatican suppressed it - no need for Scurvhamites.

That does fit with Bortz’s tendency to embellish. His Konrad and the
cold-conking waitress is straight outta his drama-prof mind, eg. (and yet,
Cohen has a friend who finds something rather similar later on)



On Sun, Aug 4, 2024 at 12:41 AM Michael Bailey <michael.lee.bailey at gmail.com>
wrote:

>
>
> 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
>
>
>>