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Sitaram · Site Admin Joined: 14 Sep 2005 Posts: 1079

Agape: Thank you so much for your post, '100% Certainty' (digest
1057) ...

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Sitaram/message/1542

which came to me at just the right time, as I was asked by
my 20-yr old niece what I thought about her intention to get a
tattoo. Thanks again Sitaram Ji .

Sitaram: Yes. Hello! Glad you liked the article. Thanks!

Agape: How have you been?

Sitaram: O.K. Just trudging along, surviving.

Agape: I feel terrible when I hear you say that! I'm sorry.

Sitaram: But, that is the condition of most of us in the world, is
it not?

Agape: How many actually 'live' then?

Sitaram: Good question! That would make a good title for an essay:
"How many truly live?"

Sitaram: I am reading a novel right now called "The Crying of Lot
49" by Thomas Pynchon, which touches upon this question, in a
curious manner. In Chapter I, Pynchon mentions a painting by
Remedios Varo, entitled "Bordando el Manto Terrestre" (Embroidering
Earth's Mantle.)

(Begining of quote):

In the central painting of a triptych, were a number of frail girls
with heart-shaped faces, huge eyes, sun-gold hair, prisoners in a
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 other buildings and creatures, all the waves,
ships and forests of the earth were contained in this tapestry, and
the tapestry was the world. She 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 of thousand miles away in her
own tower, which was only by accident known as Mexico. There had
been no escape. What did she so desire to 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?

(End of quote and end of Chapter I)

Agape: What does it mean to say "fall back on superstition?"

Sitaram: Well, perhaps, superstition is any thought regarding
reason or causality which is merely our own conjecture, fear, hope,
and has no real foundation of proof or factuality. We seek to impose
order and find reasons and causes for what we experience. What we
weave from that activity is our "Mantle of the Earth", the fabric or
tapestry of reality and self and life such as we conjecture it to be.

My thought is that, perhaps, to really live can only be understood in
terms of what is depicted on that tapestry of our own creation. We are like
Glykos and Diomedes in Book VI of Homer's Iliad, in their battlefield dialogue,
who, as fallen leaves of a bygone season, shall only live in the ballads sung by
those yet unborn.

Agape: I remember watching a movie sometime back on some
women making a quilt.

Sitaram: We "live" only in retrospect, in reflection, remembrance of
what we believe we have done and undergone.

Sitaram: Here is that painting:

http://www.turingmachine.org/remedios/picture11.html

The tower is our education. The more we educate ourselves, the
higher the tower becomes, and the more heavily guarded we are in
our imprisonment. But, the greatest irony of all lies in the fact that escape,
freedom, is escape into the void, into nothingness, for the actual world which
we so ardently desire, exists only in the patterns and designs of that tapestry
which is the product of our prison labor. Our life truly begins only after we
die, if others begin to live vicariously through our words and creations. But,
all living is vicarious. Life is a story that we leave behind us in livings
wake. Religions are collections of marvelous stories: the Mahabharat, the
Sutras, the Gospels. We live our life through stories, and any tower is
constructed of stories. We are imprisoned in the topmost storey.

We may see something of the building of such a tower in

http://toosmallforsupernova.org/page009.htm

“Isaac Newton’s Homework”

"When we undertake a transformational learning experience, we become isolated in
the sense that what we come to understand cannot easily be shared with others
who have not accompanied us on our journey of learning. When we stand upon the
shoulders of giants, there is little room for an observation deck or elevator or
souvenir stand with postcard panoramas."

Also see, “Tell Me A Story”

http://toosmallforsupernova.org/page021.htm

It is most important to carefully consider what is discussed in “The Universal
Form”

http://toosmallforsupernova.org/page019.htm

and the above quoted excerpt from Pynchon’s novel should be added to the list of
Universal Forms.

As Thomas Wolfe says on the first page of “Look Homeward, Angel:”

“Which of us has not remained forever prison-pent?”

“Each of us is all the sums he has not counted: subtract us into nakedness and
night again, and you shall see begin in Crete four thousand years ago the love
that ended yesterday in Texas.”

Here is some biographical information on Thomas Pynchon:

http://www.pynchon.pomona.edu/bio/

Agape: Hmm ... which storey do we get off then? I mean ..... when
does it stop?

Sitaram: That's just it! We never get off. There is no escape. We
carry it all about with use, wherever we go, in whatever we attempt.

Agape: Interesting.

Sitaram: When we die, perhaps, it stops for us personally, in some
sense, but in a different sense, it goes on and on forever, like any
story or play, where only the names of the actors change on the
marquis.

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