Crying of Lot 49 Group Read 2024

[Joseph Tracy]

> On Jun 12, 2024, at 6:34 AM, Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> with the Word as text I agree with this:
> 
> I have even
>> suggested in earlier writings that Pynchon is ambitious enough to have
>> supplied an alternate text to the Biblical one that shapes so much western
>> culture..
> 
> I see them as the same, evolutionarily so. The Trystero is the anarchic
> force in history.

I guess for me that would depend on the way anarchy is defined, whether a chaotic and uncontrolled expression of will or a political philosophy favoring an absense of hierarchical power structures where decisions are either shared or individual choices. People use the word both ways and I don’t know how you are intending it.

The thing about the Trystero as presented in the  CR Play and later in Bortz’s research is that it can be an instrument to protect hierarchic power and privilege whereas  Waste looks to be more about the subterranean communication of people cut off from power but retaining their own connections to each other, so I see Waste as more easily fitting into anarchism as self organizing resistance to rulers. 

Trystero in my thinking is more like the clandestine aspect of both the powerful and those resisting the powerful, from the Great Game or the Cold War to resistance movements in WW2, union organizers, dark web,  and the general resistance to being bossed around exercised by poets, children, feminists, activists  trysting lovers etc.  I see Pynchon using it here to suggest the  more hidden aspects of what people call the deep state, the kind of things uncovered by the the Church Committee or the Nixon Watergate hearings.