Doors of perception COL49

[Joseph Tracy]

Well we seem to have a bit of a slowdown in engagement with this Pynchon read. Not sure how I intend to carry on if that continues. Not even sure why I have given so much time to reading and re-reading his work. I think at core it is because it is closer than any literary attempt I have encountered to imitate or enact the array of experience and information from the senses , from patterns of behavior , from the larger social forces of myth, power struggles, desires, technologies. People live in narratives, live in breath, live on a planet, live in sounds and symbols, in large and small social patterns, repetition and novelty. We look for meaning, for foundations, for the rules of success, and causes of failure. We look for the aesthetics that give us pleasure and a way to harmonize, to soar, to return to zero. The origin of language is obscured like bones in an unreachable ocean, memories from ancient forests,  my intuition suggest a celebration of the voice itself, of the rhythms of wind and birds and insects, the howls and shrieks of predator and prey, the moonlit music of the earth. At first the many and the one are hard to distinguish but everything must eat, drink water, reproduce, sleep safely, and survival skills become word skills, story skills. Looking for durable technologies writing starts mostly as an accounting system, but becomes narrative, and becomes escape from narrative, word jazz, endlessness.

prisoners in the top room of a circular tower, embroidering a kind of tapestry which spilled out the slit windows and into a void, seeking hopelessly to fill the void: for all the other buildings and creatures, all the waves, ships and forests of the earth were contained in this tapestry, and the tapestry was the world.   Pynchon, Thomas. The Crying of Lot 49 


If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, Infinite. For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thro' narrow chinks of his cavern.  William Blake

Oedipa, perverse, had stood in front of the painting and cried. No one had noticed; she wore dark green bubble shades. For a moment she’d wondered if the seal around her sockets were tight enough to allow the tears simply to go on and fill up the entire lens space and never dry. She could carry the sadness of the moment with her that way forever, see the world refracted through those tears, those specific tears, as if indices as yet unfound varied in important ways from cry to cry. She had looked down at her feet and known, then, because of a painting, that what she stood on had only been woven together a couple thousand miles away in her own tower, was only by accident known as Mexico, and so Pierce had taken her away from nothing, there’d been no escape. What did she so desire escape from?
Pynchon, Thomas. 

She couldn’t stop watching his eyes. They were bright black, surrounded by an incredible network of lines, like a laboratory maze for studying intelligence in tears. They seemed to know what she wanted, even if she didn’t.
Pynchon, Thomas. The Crying of Lot 49

Love is a concept by which we measure our pain.   John Lennon

Who loves not, knows not God; for God is love.  1 John 4:8

Some see time as a great circle, when it comes to circles I prefer the wedding dance to the Mexican standoff.    Mojo Werkin 2024

On to chapter 4? Shall I project a world?