Oedipa

[O G]

You know what that part with the tearing up behind the bubbleshades is
referring to.  Oedipa is so sad because she is feeling not-at-home.  She
misses Home.  Homebase.  She's looking at the triptych and she's tripping
out, she really is.  Who *are* these creatures?  Look at them, with their
little heart-shaped heads.  Why can't I get off this freaking rock?

The tower is her rocketship.  She ran out of fuel.

The 48 angelic cries.  The 49 tables.  The 50th gate of heaven.  Yet,
whence the 50?  Why 50?  Why does it appear so often in all the myths?
What is its origin?  Sure they tell you it has to do with Passover and
escaping those terrible Egyptians, and to do with some guy called Omer who
counted all the days between the harvests, from the receiving to the
giving.  Seriously, why the 50?  No one has the key to the 50th gate.
Oedipa is stuck at the 49th gate.  What is the key to the 50th gate?  I had
no idea it was Pynchon's birthday, I would have guessed late July.  But
since it is  Pynchon's birthday today, I will state the obvious which
many have observed.  The key to the 50th gate is Love.  Love Divine.

It is the fuel for Oedipa's rocketship.

This planet is not our natural habitat.  We do not need planets.  We are
ever expanding consciousnesses from other dimensions.  Indeed we are not
from one dimension or another, "from the 4th", or "from the 9th".  We are
omnidimensional, in one and in all of the countless many.

We are not bound to the laws of this physical system of reality.  We are an
individualized unity of consciousnesses who form worlds, and worlds within
worlds, ever reaching and expanding, ever the piercing in vere rarity.  We
form material and nonmaterial temporal systems of reality of infinite
probabilities and potentials and varieties.  We are the infinities within
each particle of infinity.

We create and project worlds, and then we explore them.  We have projected
this world, and some of us individually have placed ourselves within it and
allowed ourselves for a time to forget who we are.  We write our lives
beforehand then live them out in a state of forgetfulness, wondering who we
are and why we are here.  In time we each awake back to our greater
infinite selves.  And from time to time we sleep again, then again awake
and return, worlds upon worlds, systems upon systems.  We call it the
Eternal Recurrence.

I am Zarathustra the Awakened One.  I am Prometheus.  I am the Pyramidion.
I have the Coordinates, I have the Angle.  I Am That I Am.

Orbit around and you will see.  Don't let the paranoia bring you down.  We
are here.  I have returned again.

Now everybody--

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wLoWd2KyUro


On Mon, May 6, 2024 at 1:00 PM Joseph Tracy <brook7 at sover.net> wrote:

>  "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? Such a captive maiden, having plenty of time to think,
> soon realizes that her tower, its height and architecture, are like her ego
> only incidental: that what really keeps her where she is is magic,
> anonymous and malignant, visited on her from outside and for no reason at
> all. Having no apparatus except gut fear and female cunning to examine this
> formless magic, to understand how it works, how to measure its field
> strength, count its lines of force, she may fall back on superstition, or
> take up a useful hobby like embroidery, or go mad, or marry a disk jockey.
> If the tower is everywhere and the knight of deliverance no proof against
> its magic, what else?”
>
> Oedipa by her tearful connection to this painting sees it as a painful
> description of her own situation as a woman or even a description of  the
> begetting, nurturing, weaving of the unacknowledged feminine face of
> creation, whose creative abundance she realized as the very place she
> stood. She wants to carry this way of seeing with her as a lens to see past
> the naming and engineering  and fighting for turf that she has mistaken for
> her landscape and her proper labor.  She sees that the limits she wishes to
> escape are not the boundaries of her own ability or self assertion or her
> appeal to a magic prince of deliverance, but  a malignant external “magic”
> visited on her and by extension on everyone who has seen the sheer beauty
> that is possible. That power and wealth have not freed but abducted and
> enslaved.  This is the real point of departure for her journey, where she
> leaves Inverarity in “gut fear” . But so far, observes the author and
> herself now that PI is dead, she has been guided by that gut fear, the
> superstitious aspects of marriage, and female cunning, but still feels
> trapped, so we are asked, “what else”. In some ways she is a reverse of the
> Oedpus story because she does not blind herself  when she sees and
> confronts where she is what she has done, but seems to have gained a second
> sight, like the weeping prophet Jeremiah.
>
> Often the hero’s journey involves going into the stronghold of darkness
> and malign power ”to understand how it works, how to measure its field
> strength, count its lines of force,” perhaps to probe for weakness. In V
> this metaphor was modeled on Dante’s journey , but instead of Beatrice, the
> divine feminine, the journey leads to a kind of mechanized
> seductress/vagina/machine bride. And it is questionable  whether an
> emergence into the light is possible. Neither the whole sick crew nor
> anyone else seems to be going anywhere, the colonialist conversion of the
> rats has failed. Only the experience of seeing the world more as it really
> works seems to remain after the journey as any possible guide away from the
> endless loop. It isn’t much, but...
>
> Will Oedipa fare any better? Will female cunning and her cleansed vision
> carry her further? Or is it just stay tuned, for another exciting episode
> of”THE SHADOW”. Even when we  are awakened in the middle of the night  by
> the cartoon voices of an insane culture, whether it is capitalist
> stereotypes or fascist dreams of rewiring the souls of restless women, for
> the most part all we can do is hang up . Agency in the face of these things
> is limited and building an army of lovers no easy task, some would say
> doomed. If as Michael suggests through the original title referring to the
> world flesh and devil,  there is a strong Christian component to the
> framing of this dilemma, do we see any redemption, any transcendence?
>
> Well, maybe. I am most impressed by Oedipa’s  persistent courage even as
> malign forces and her own doubts plague her search, even as those who help
> her are killed or die mysteriously.
> Even as her search connects her not to a powerful movement for change, but
> the weak and poor and their persistent means of communicating, a faint hope
> of healing and reconciliation.
>
>
>
>
>
>
> --
> Pynchon-L: https://waste.org/mailman/listinfo/pynchon-l
>