Home from Whiteland

[WildForest at aol.com]

I have just returned from my White Visitation, a chilling excursion through
the desert landscape of the Radical Right, who, in places like Tonopah,
Nevada and Hayden Lake, Idaho, spin forth convoluted conspiracy theories
about black helicopters, master plans, mudpeople, and Jewish cartels.  Yes,
the real world breeds much more virulent strains of paranoia than you'll ever
find in Thomas Ruggles's literary neighborhoods.  For details stay tuned to
forthcoming editions of the Village Voice.

The trip across the heather-colored basin and range terrain of Nevada
demanded some literary diversions-reading and driving being less of an
artform on these lonely blue highways than it is on, say, the suburban
interstices of the I-5 corridor.  But instead of Mailer's new book on Oswald
(which proffers quite a few illuminations on the nature of conspiracy theory)
or Marquez's Love and Other Demons (TRP's only contemporary rival as a
word-magician), I packed a black volume of lit crit., The Vineland Papers,
sent to me in brown wrapping paper by my distant comrade Mat Jacobsen (nee
Buck Young, the etymology of which should be detectable--and very amusing--
to anyone with censorious aspirations) many lunar cycles ago with, natch, all
the best intentions, I am quite sure.  Mat (if yer out there), even now I am
thinking of innumerable ways to repay this kindness, heh, heh.

Since the exquisite tortures of grad school a decade or more ago (where I
learned in the most precise terms what the Marquis de Sod was getting at), I
have become a reluctant and obdurate reader of such texts, approaching them
with all the suspiciousness of a radical vegetarian toward a gardenburger:
 Is it really not real?

Cruise-controlling from Tonopah to Rachel (on Nevada Hwy. 357, recently named
the Alien Extraterrestrial Hiway, for its proximity to the mysterious Area 51
on the Nellis Airforce Base--a description of which can be found in the
latest issue of Covert Action), I turned to the essay by the venerable
Hayles, who appears to be a virtual Illuminati of Pynchon Lit Crit and is so
often beatified in supplicant posts to this very mailing list.  The first
paragraphs were rough going, much worse than reading technical manuals
describing in excruciating detail the inner workings of some fucking MS-DOS
confined accounting program.  Then came this:

"The vector of Prairie's journey points from the present into the past,
whereas the narrator's concern moves from the past into the present.  Along
these vectors, two antagonistic force fields interact to organize the novel's
response to the double searches..."

And I wondered:  How can anyone who writes with such abject turgidity, with
such inanimate, hard-plastic prose, be any kind of critic of Mr. P, eh?  This
kind of stuff ventures far beyond the strictures of Weberian routinization;
it reeks of a plant, and not one of an ecological genus.  Here is a deadening
of language.  And language, like gravity, is what really binds us together.
 Pynchon's real gift, afterall, is his ability to make words breathe,
language live, even for those hard to reach glozing neuters--for whom it
might take an occasional limerick or an adenoid with a master plan or a pie
fight at 10,000 feet.  

Beyond that it really is less than zero.  Kill the language and you are left
with a dead text, to be infinitely dissected by mathematical equations,
explicated by charts, mapped out through kinship relations and fractal
theories.

Thus, upon my return to the Net, it came as no surprise to find that the most
ardent disciples of Hayles, the techno-fetishists, are now speaking of
Wernher von Braun in loving terms, describing his epigraph to GR as
"beautifully transcendent."

Oddly enough, up in Hayden Lake, Idaho there is a man named Louis Beam, who
heads a particularly vicious sect of the Aryan Nations.  Indeed, it may yet
soon be revealed that Mr. Beam was an inspirational figure for the cell of
Aryan pyrotechnicians who so recently made their intentions manifest in
Oklahoma City.  On the wall behind Beam's steel desk hang two photos:  One of
Adolf, the other of the Rocketmeister, himself.  

In their political cosmology, Hitler is merely a useful hierophant, Himmler
and Eichmann, as the great Hannah Arendt correctly noted, banal bureaucrats.
 Von Braun is their charismatic hero, their White Avenger.  He is the author
of the true final solution, who escaped unscathed into the Firm, was elevated
into the higher orders of the Establishment, adopted by the forces behind
both the war and the horrifying descent of history in the 20th Century.  

Von Braun survived in order to become the smiling architect of all our
children's nuclear nightmares, the man who the mad mathematician Tom Leher
captured so succinctly in song:  "Vunce zee rockets are up, who karz ver zhey
cum down...zatz not my department, sez Verner Von Braun."  

The Rocket hanging above the Orpheus Theater is no Schwarzgerat, but von
Braun latest incarnation, a white rocket, where, in GR, of course, white is
always the color of death. A death star.

Hence the spooky double entendre of GR's closing words:  "Now everybody"-at
once an invocation to song, to chorus, to community, and a testament to
global annihilation.  Now the bombs, von Braun's demonic offspring, loom not
only over single buildings, cities, or isolated points on a map, but over a
much larger Theater of Operations, a theater whose walls are described as
"hard and glossy as coal," the Earth itself. 

The bomb poised at this last Delta-T brings with it a destructive power
capable of extinguishing both history and the future in the same instant.   A
finality that Jonathon Schell, in the Fate of the Earth, later called the
"second death":  extinction of the genetic chain of life.  The end of the
Earth as we or any other species might know it, an epistemological (if not
geophysical) apocalypse.  

And what transcendent thought does von Braun offer us?  A lie, of course.  A
lie that goes far beyond his pathetic need to assuage his own immeasurable
guilt.  No, it is the old lie of religion, now retold through the lens of
science:  a contempus mundi, that the moments of love and pain in this life
are without consequence, that how ever badly we are treated or treat each
other or debase the planet has no meaning, that life will go on, we will be
reborn, the Pope's staff will finally flower, if not in this life, the
next...so, offer no resistance when you get fucked up the ass, nothing you
powerless slobs do can alter the course of events.

Meanwhile, our pockets are being picked, our air clotted with poisons, our
children manipulated and experimented upon, our forests pulped, fellow
species extinguished before our eyes (if only we were looking), our minds
programmed with useful illusions, never letting us near the control room,
leaving us shackled firmly in our preterition, watching a damn movie, while
the real shit is about to come down...

Von Braun's quote is also an elaborate seduction, a call to worship death, to
become tumescent and orgasmic at a mere glimpse or sense of its gleaming
technologies, its vast and complex schematics, to become, as it were,
premature thanatoids, wondering in a chaotic maze of false texts and shadow
theories, the trail of breadcrumbs back to our polymorphously perverse
childhood (when everything really was connected and did make tactile
sense)--or, as it were, our virginal encounter with the text of GR--now
devoured or sinisterly rearranged, left in a graying landscape, alone.  

And so now we wait, Eurydice-like, wrapped in a sorrowful dispensation, eyes
fixated on a flickering fiction, longing for any Orpheus to come, playing an
old song, a tune hummed by Ned Ludd and Joe Hill alike, and give us a reason
to fight back or at the very least show us the way home.

Come on Desmond, let's go for a walk.

JSC

"One more try, one more chance, one more deal, one more transfer to a hopeful
line."