MDMD(5) Chap 16----Questions, Angular

[Mark Smith]

Re-reading what Steven Maas (CUTR) wrote on 8.4.97, trying for some
closure:
> 
> 171.30-35 Mason seems to at times suspect that Rebekah's ghost is actually
> a creature of evil, out of hell if you will, what with those "black Fumes"
> and that "Voice thickening to the timbres of the Beasts" and those
> "serpents of Hell. . .lying just the other side of her Shadow."  At these
> times he feels "pleasurably helpless," maybe because he thinks that if
> this thing (which may or may not be Rebekah, though he tries to reassure
> himself that "'tis sure, 'tis his own Rebekah") drags him after her (to
> where?) it won't be his fault.  After all, he was helpless, right?

I really hear "Hamlet" here.  "What if it tempt you to where the cliff
beetles o'er the edge," or whatever it is Horatio tells Hamlet, by way
of warning of his father's ghost.  But I think Mason is "pleasurably
helpless" in a slightly different way.  He is in the same kind of blue
funk as Hamlet, unable to get beyond his grief for Rebekah, unable to
simply go on with life.  He tries to test if it is really her, "teasing
her with his earth-bound Despair."  He says to her, "Measuring Angles
among illuminated Points, there must be more to it, 'Beckah, you see
them as they are, you must."  In other words, he is asking her for some
perspective on the meaning of life.  It's the whole "who would fardels
bear" thing, this time applied to his own profession - measuring Angles
of stars - for what?  I think the dire promise which he is drawn to is
suicide.  

> 
> 171.35 to 172.4  "She occupies now an entirely new angular relation to
> Mercy. . .as if, the instant of her passing over having acted as a Lens,
> the rays of her Soul have undergone moral Refraction." Well it says the
> Living show Mercy by refusing to act on behalf of Death 

I sense the guilt of a husband beating himself up of his failure in life
to "do right" by Rebekah.  Notice, it says "refusing to act on behalf of
"Death", not "the dead".  I think that's important in helping to frame
Mason's dilemma.  He wants to act on behalf of life, and is not sure he
is on the right path.  Again, I hear "Hamlet" loud and clear, especially
when you look at the phrase "Death, or its ev'ryday Coercions, - Wages
too low to live upon, Laws written by Owners, Infantry, Bailiffs,
Prison, Death's thousand Metaphors in the World."  It's Hamlet:
insolence of office, the law's delay, the oppresor's wrong, etc.  These
are death's thousand metaphors in the world: the shitty awful minutiae
which take up 90% of our waking hours. Either he has in the past ignored
Rebekah by concentrating too much on his work, or he is now wondering
who he is working for, and why.  "She occupies now an entirely new
angular relation to Mercy, to those refusals, among the Living, to act
on behalf of Death, or its ev'ryday Coercions -...."etc.  Help me here,
but I think Pynchon is talking about the cleansing action of Rebekah's
death on Mason's sense of purpose.    
-- 
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"Go bind thou up yon dangling apricocks,/Which, like unruly children,
make their sire/Stoop with oppression of their prodigal weight."