Who ya gonna call...

[Jeffrey L. Meikle]

I've been lurking here for weeks, but this is my first post, so please be
kind...  I've always been fascinated by Pynchon's interest in the occult,
in spiritualism, psychical research, magic, etc.  There was indeed an ESP
circle (the Shackleton group, or maybe the Soal group--I don't at the
moment recall the details on this) of Oxbridge types experimenting in the
twilight with Zener cards during the Second World War.  A memoir written by
one of the participants talks of holding seances as bombs fell during the
Blitz.  I've always assumed Pynchon was extrapolating from a knowledge of
this group, which had the SPR crowd in an uproar.  But perhaps just as
significant is the fact that in 1943 the famous (infamous?)
parapsychologist J. B. Rhine of Duke University published his first report
on what he called "the psychokinetic effect," maintaining that human mental
power alone could directly influence the movement of material objects in
the future.  As an Englishman writing in the Proceedings of the Psychical
Research Society picturesquely phrased it at the time, "a bombshell fell
upon the psychic world."  (Tyrone, where are you?)

But far more fascinating to me is a German physicist with the uncanny name
of Helmut Schmidt, who was conducting ESP experiments at Boeing, possibly
at the time Pynchon was there.  First publication of his work didn't come
until 1969 in Rhine's Journal of Parapsychology, too late unfortunately to
influence Lot 49--unless, of course, Pynchon knew the man and his work or
was in contact with others who did (or unless we accept precognition,
psychokinesis, etc!).  Anyway, Schmidt was interested in ESP at the quantum
level.  He had a random number generator in a box with four lights on the
top.  The sensitive or medium focused on one of those lights, willing it to
go on, then pushed a button that activated the random number generator,
thus "randomly" turning on one of the four lights.  The point was to make
the target light appear far more often than possible by chance alone.  By
the time I got to play with one of these boxes in 1975, they had reduced it
to two lights for simplicity's sake.  But even with four lights, what
Boeing defense scientist Helmut Schmidt had devised was virtually identical
to Yoyodyne defense scientist John Nefastis's Maxwell's Demon.  (And
Oedipa, trying to connect with the spiritual essence of deceased "founding
father" Inverarity, otherwise mute in the many remains of his estate, is
also a spiritualist medium or sensitive on a much larger scale.)  By 1975
Schmidt had left Boeing and was running some sort of Institute of Mind
Science (not the exact title) in San Antonio.  They had shifted from random
number generators to getting sensitives to control electric train layouts
(pure coincidence this time, but shades of Pointsman!).  Despite possible
problems with dates and causation, there's a good chance that Pynchon based
Nefastis on Schmidt.

Not sure where all this is leading, except to a mundane conclusion about
Pynchon's uniquely supple ability to incorporate, to extrapolate from, and
thereby to give meaning to just about everything--to redeem all the
preterite dreck of our culture that would otherwise go to waste.

Jeff Meikle