Sunday Scribblings #206: The Book That Changed Everything

I'm reading it right now . . . again: the fifth or sixth lenten reading of Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow. I can't remember what derailed me from last year's attempt (or was it his Against the Day?), but derailed I got by something else. This year, we're on track again for completion, back from a beach run at it and five more days of Spring Break ahead.

Fall 1973, junior year at Harvard, newbie English major, switching officially from the Government major I'd all but abandoned spring semester of my freshman year, auditing Father J. Robert Barth's course, Religious Dimensions in the Modern Novel (Dostoevsky, Kafka, Faulkner, Greene), JRB sockfooted on the lecture hall table, reading from Light in August. The romance was on, though it took me another two semesters to make it official. My sophomore-year tutorial leader certainly helped the transition, fifth-year grad student-turned poet, abdicating on his own poli sci dissertation, while laying Ram Dass' Remember: Be Here Now and R. D. Laing's The Politics of Experience on his tribe of stunned Gov majors . . .

He got my attention, as I followed suit down my own dark ladder.

So, wintry grey fall Thursday afternoons in a cold seminar room over at the old rambling English Department's Victorian digs, the one-on-one junior year tutorials, independent reading classes, one undergrad with one grad student. Paul (last name now forgotten) gently guiding me into a new world - Stevens, Williams, Pound, Nathaniel West, Ralph Ellison, and lo and behold, Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49. All of it, all, way over my head, but Paul ever encouraging to the newbie. Somewhere in the midst of all the shivering sessions, Gravity's Rainbow was plunked down as some kind of Holy Grail for the future. Grail it remained, its fat gold paperback self on my bookshelf for another four years before I had gumption enough to feel like maybe I could crack it, if even an uncomprehending wee little . . .

Cambridge years behind, returned to San Antonio to work in a psych hospital as an aide to test out a counseling future, I sabbatical'd myself west of SA to live on the family's Uvalde County ranch: got a job surveying land, quickly was trained as the "instruments" man, which, practically speaking, meant I had hours on end daily to sit atop Texas hills, gorgeous vistas unfurling, waiting for the "rod" men to clamber around to shoot laser'd distances, denim overalls'd Southern boy reading Nabokov, Faulkner, Hemingway, and, finally, that first pre-Easter season, Gravity's Rainbow. Evenings with it, too, spent Coors-wizzed, reading on, buzzed just enough to occasionally feel like I knew exactly what was going on . . .

For whatever crazy reason, Lent became the season for GR: hardly a Christian text, though assuredly, a holiest of holies, a haunting text that sent quivers and shudders and un-recognitions off detonating in the heart of my reading soul. It has rested, all my other reading loves notwithstanding, atop my Desert Isle Lists for all these years, "nudged" only recently by its "companion" sister text, Pynchon's own Against the Day, both now atop the pedestal. The worlds in both novels are wide enough to encompass all our worlds and more. Never enough journeys into their radiantly dark hearts . . .

For a time, the lenten returns were the only alternative to the 17-year wait for GR's follow-up. We waited, read the rumors of works in progress, only to be greeted, finally, by the charming but hardly towering Vineland. Mason & Dixon as sister? Not for this acolyte. I like to think that Against the Day was there all along, post GR, taking its time, decades-long midwifery.

Of course, as much any other book, GR was responsible for the years it took for me to brave writing my own pages. Staring into the face of such inscrutability and finally saying, hey, these are different voices simmering in here, but they gots to be hatched.

God bless the boy . . . he sure done blessed us . . . Easter eggs for us all . . .