Writer, Propogandist, Marketer, Robot
An all in one head-job! Or, Thomas Pynchon as Ideal American
Have you seen My Dinner With Andre?
In the harrowing dinner scene, Wally asks his friend Andre why he thinks the modern world is the way it is? Is it laziness? Boredom? What can you do about it?
Andre agrees with Wally, “Yes. We're all bored now. But has it every occurred to you, Wally, that the process that creates this boredom that we see in the world now may very well be a self-perpetuating, unconscious form of brainwashing created by a world totalitarian government based on money? And that all of this is much more dangerous than one thinks. And it's not just a question of individual survival, Wally, but that somebody who's bored is asleep? And somebody who's asleep will not say "no"?”
Inconceivable? Too late, because the beast slouching this way has already been born!
Andre goes on: “See, I keep meeting these people, I mean, uh, just a few days ago I met this man whom I greatly admire, he's a Swedish physicist, Gustav Björnstrand, and he told me that he no longer watches television, he doesn't read newspapers, and he doesn't read magazines. He's completely cut them out of his life because he really does feel that we're living in some kind of Orwellian nightmare now, and that everything that you hear now contributes to turning you into a robot.”
Robot? No, we’re a hundred percent human over here, Andre, thank you very much. Beep, boop.
Andre carries on: "…I think that New York is the new model for the new concentration camp, where the camp has been built by the inmates themselves, and the inmates are the guards, and they have this pride in this thing they've built. They've built their own prison. And so they exist in a state of schizophrenia where they are both guards and prisoners, and as a result, they no longer have, having been lobotomized, the capacity to leave the prison they've made or to even see it as a prison."
I know, before this begins to sound like typical Marxist coffee-house banter, where starving socialist realism is dissolved in well-fed whimsical American fantasy (the media is play and circus and nothing more, anymore, through and through), Andre senses the portents are grim:
“See, actually, for two or three years now, Chiquita (his wife) and I have had this very unpleasant feeling that we really should get out. That we really should feel like Jews in Germany in the late thirties. Get out of here. Of course, the problem is where to go, cause it seems quite obvious that the whole world is going in the same direction. See, I think it's quite possible that the 1960s represented the last burst of the human being before he was extinguished and that this is the beginning of the rest of the future now, and that, from now on there'll simply be all these robots walking around, feeling nothing, thinking nothing. And there'll be nobody left almost to remind them that there once was a species called a human being, with feelings and thoughts, and that history and memory are right now being erased, and soon nobody will really remember that life existed on the planet.”
Beep. Don’t worry, not only the robots will remember, but Pynchon knows. Class warfare was over a long time ago, before it ever began, further blown to the moon by the Third Reicht. A bit of archeology for the future perhaps: Germany lost the battle, but the Nazis Won The War. If anyone is still upset at this, don’t worry, there’s yet time for you to love Big Daddy’s Big Rocket - Apocalypse wrapped up safely in a Trojan Magnum - the ultimate creation of European Hive-Mindedness, Nazi ingenuity, and good old fashion American-Rub-Your-Genitals-In-Every-Culture’s-Business, or, “busyness.”
The medium is the message, you are the message - having been programmed to send the same messages, engage in the same waggle dances and known flights to known flowers that all drones can be expected to follow until they drop dead, as their life cycles go. But not Pynchon - his work is intentionally inconceivable! Rather, it’s conceivable, but like the pagan forest, inscrutable, not disordered, but not ordered. No sky god rules here, no man or woman knows what they will ultimately find, and there are no large masses of people to bomb in the forest (we’re pretending like Vietnam didn’t happen for our purposes here, I mean, there are seldom the sort of popular civilian, military, logistical, or industrial facilities that militaries love to bomb into total destruction, located in forests, to be specific).
The ideal American writer, Pynchon - I’ve heard of him of course, but never read his work, but I’ve heard people talk about him, and I almost never hear anyone talk about books, literature, reading, writers, or anything too intelligent or far from the mass-manufactured corporate positions for the millions and billions. I haven’t read him, but I know enough to recognize genius, and perhaps I can say the only reason I haven’t read him is 1) time, and 2) genius is the rarest and most valuable thing in the world, it is rare, and therefor the most precious commodity in a world of plentiful and borderline valueless commodities, so it is a rare bit of perfection to look forward to. In terms of commodities, Pynchon has to be worth at least a few hundred, thousand, perhaps even million(s) “regular Americans.” Lastly, who doesn’t love to be overpowered by genius? I pretend he doesn’t exist until then, and funny enough, so does Pynchon, it seems. An American, a rare intelligent one, and one that doesn’t have a public persona? It’s suspicious, insofar as many people can look and sound good for an audience, but the world regrets it the moment this beautiful idiot opens their mouth. No, not with Pynchon though. Thankfully, he doesn’t open his mouth, not for cowardice, or not stating his piece, as any author puts themselves into their work, confession voluntary or otherwise. Rather, I think Pynchon understands all too well, the forces at work here, and they are no thing to be trifled with. In comparison, the average American, to not-so-average media star or personality (mainstream, internet, social media, whatever), who dabble in politics, are naive idiots, and take for granted not just technology’s gravity well of history, but the decimation wreaked by monotheism and its new god Mammon as enforced by the Corporation-State. In short, the average media personality is a food source, and as American identity goes, a general embarrassment to anyone with a modicum of self respect and lay of the land. The media may be endless bread and circus on offer, but neither the front or back end masks the dark nature and affects of this Christian carnival, what it costs: everything, including the future, a species in service to technological nihilism by monotheistic debt-keeping (modern society is a late medieval model of hollowed-out monotheistic business hierarchy, which is increasingly ejecting its own occupants and the identities/roles/jobs manufactured in only the last 100 years).
What a treadmill, a headjob, no wonder you need Flixipam, Cronizol, or Cortosoft. Never before have a totally "fabricated” people had to be fabricated and refabricated numerous times within and in between generations, by Nazi scientists, marketers, propogandists, and business magnates. Such a meddling with identity is a guarantee of bewilderment, violence, alienation, and paranoia (Nietzsche understood all this over a hundred years in advance - more on this later). Yes, some aspects to Orwell are quaint, but he understood what the real totalitarian forces were at work when it comes to psyche. That manufacturing consent is as easy as manufacturing consent, or coercing others by using their ignorance against them, or slipping the Spanish Fly (Cosby’s “joke”) or, robbing people of…volition? No, anything and everything that is monetizable, until that “is” becomes a “was.” Your wife, your life, your strife, there’s a medication for all of it, a middle-man you can call with their middlesome answers - and the vanity of a century of small and petty people attempting to rule the world, the numerous shop-keepers, grave-robbers, and gold-diggers has been foisted unto the beast here born, where Christianity and its various golems shudder under the weight and freight of their own world-wide, all-encompassing mania: America means “the world” - a unifying, leveling, homogenizing process, where Christianity is a minority in the world, yet the world cannot bear the weight and rapacity of the average Christian ego, where the smallest people are taught that they’re more important than life, mankind, existence, and the future itself. That’s the programming, reigned in, shackled, kept in check by contrivances of institutional authority and power, but that has been going the way of Thucydides civil war for the last few decades, so its no mystery to those who can tolerate the weight of the perishing thought: this can only eternally recur. Yes, even the weight and freight of the frustrated masses who will be left with nothing by the millions and billions - that is their lot.1 Favoring attention here or there, excludes others, and increasingly more so the higher up the rocket’s ladder you climb.
That Pynchon, an American, has no public persona, image, channel, is almost unbelievable, though, he was born into a print and broadcast world that created different sorts of beings than the ones present today. Whole classes of people in history go obsolete like this, but it occurred to me now, we might not even know if Pynchon is alive, or maybe he intelligently fled America, and is in hiding, for his own well-being and protection. Even if it’s not him publishing his works, it would be great if his legacy continued publishing even after his death. Writers don’t live in those same worlds that could be more readily inhabited by writers, not that genius is common or “possible” to who its not, anyhow. History hasn’t been robbed of artists or genius, that they’re so rare, and rare that they’re not destroyed by their own people and environment, that they appear so rarely, and in so few numbers in any age and time, is what’s most telling. For every Goethe, a million outdated books of information and bad “art.” For every Nietzsche, a hundred new schools of dumb thought, as if one is observing a primitive race sacrificing its own heart to tomorrow the sun will rise one more day: life, spirit cutting into itself. Do you love the rocket yet? It can’t love you back if you have fear in your heart. Let go, and let Big Daddy in.
A jealous and bad writer would say Pynchon “is fortunate /lucky/had it easy,” to which I’d say, “having anything at all, be it a pot-for-porridge, raw talent, or payoff from it, to lose, is a privilege.” (inspired by my friend, thanks Q!). So it is, Pynchon has a bit of a reputation of having no reputation, quintessentially anti-American, since, it’s natural for the American to slap everyone they see with their dick or relevant reproductive organs (social media, for instance, is filled with Americans slapping everyone with their genitals, generally meddling in everything). Americans were the grave-robbers and looters of history and all that was sacred to the point of turning “15 minutes” as a modern industrial nation-state into a way of life for even its most unappealing and unintelligent denizens who would be incapable of being sane and functional members of any society at any place in time (I’m quoting Frank Zappa here, so if you don’t like it, talk to him, which will be hard, because he’s dead).
For decades, Pynchon keeps to himself. He works. Shuts up. Great. The ideal American, the ideal writer. I don’t hold it against hungry, newer, and any writer, who must sell themselves. It would be a luxury for an American artists to not have to debase themselves so - “look at me, look at me, make me as relevant as possible, as long as possible.” The subtext is “don’t make me begs,” but actions taken and media garnered paint a clearer picture. If anything, what all artists could stand to learn from the extrovert-dominant American world-model, is that, it benefits you to be loud, stupid, charming, endearing - like all salesmen and middlemen, the kind who have been robbing artists blind in all art and mediums since they were created and industrialized, is, it behooves you and your own survival, pocketbook, endurance, and art and its creation, to smack people with your penis, metaphorical or otherwise. Yes, it helps if you’re tall, handsome, gorgeous, well-spoken, the ideal model for the tooth-paste commercial or the senate floor, with almost no distance between them and their “meaning” - better yet, since appearance is everything here, best be perfect in every way, and there are cosmetics and medications and surgeries and so much else to fix what’s clearly wrong with you (and you, isolated, vulnerable, alone). Wash your hair at least once a week. The Rocket is all-forgiving, you know?
Though, unlike most of those present in modern mass-media, and all the quieter artists who often lose their minds, or generally, leave the world to regret the moment they open their mouths, I for one don’t receive the feeling, the transmission, the hint, the inkling, the vibe, that Pynchon would be one of them. I know my words here might be taken as slight or vague jabs at Pynchon, but it was more against “the artist/writer in general” - those lovely and dissemblingly simplistic birds who, if I know well, and I do, want foremost their bread and their craft. I think Pynchon only represents the American writer’s fantasy of building an ivory tower apart from others with one’s own work, a statement of distance, difference, of which the non-writerly world would never grasp or even approach (namely, because they couldn’t imagine the work, or doing the work, or the sheer egoism channeled in such a direction). Deeper and further still, what I mean to say is, Pynchon bears witness to what others can only refuse, that is, accept, and scavenge in their acceptance, in his absence. As it’s a privilege to have anything to lose or squander in the first place, so it is a privilege to not to have to compete on the meat-markets of competition for attention that suck in all human capital, energy, and spirit.
Pynchon is well aware that outside his gates, madness roams the land, and an imaginary yet wicked god rules. It’s not his god, but a god is a god. Everywhere war reigns as nations and peoples drift apart, crash together, and burst into flames! The apocalypse has already happened — and there is no speaking to the dead. Writer as time-capsule, fool, truth-teller on delayed release or otherwise.
I’d show you the future now, but nobody has ever had the stomach for that flight’s violent lurching, but it has always been imminent, and a bridge to the future. From this, the eyes, that is, the ears of the sprit. If you can’t hear, or read to hear, you’re also blind. To quote a great Philosopher and psychologist I know, a man of taste and style:
The opposite of an idealist is a ‘psychologist’ - one who can hear, a good listener, a good reader.
When the joke is that, an omni-present atomic penis dominates the sky, you know you’re dealing with a man of class and taste. A man of good humor. Cheers to you Pynchon. There will never be enough good humored men to brighten the world, and perhaps not enough brightness to ever prevent others from souring, but that they ever existed at all must be good enough. Why? Because there isn’t anything else. And then history was no more.
ZM
4/2/25
Zarathustra poses all the questions that moderns conveniently and intentionally ignore:
If THEY had—bread for nothing, alas! for what would THEY cry! Their maintainment—that is their true entertainment; and they shall have it hard!
Beasts of prey, are they: in their “working”—there is even plundering, in their “earning”—there is even overreaching! Therefore shall they have it hard!
All the animals hath man already robbed of their virtues: that is why of all animals it hath been hardest for man.
Only the birds are still beyond him. And if man should yet learn to fly, alas! TO WHAT HEIGHT—would his rapacity fly!