mdmd(4) - last call--a few more things.

[Eric Alan Weinstein]

Firstly----

There does seem to be quite a lot of pairing between Maskelyne and 
Mason, even when Mason is trying to distance himself from Maskelyne
( "a dangerously insane person" he tells himself) in his own mind. 
Mason thinks of him as "a walking cautionary tale," becuase he gives
creedance to the weird, extra-terrestrial and Mysterious---and  has a 
strange, complex (well, pretty mix-up, in fact) idea of the island as 
a sentient Gaia-Devil, who is also the built  product of the BEIC and a 
spy for it. 

Yet it is Mason who has "lain and listened to
the Sky-Temptress," and of course it is Mason who encounters and 
believes in the actual manifestation of Ghosts. Perhaps that is why 
he perfers to attribute oddity to the "Weatherr," because he lives in a 
universe which encourages only a fragile or occasional sanity--
no laws seem purely "Newtonian."  

A few more notes:

 At the bottom of p135 ("Invito Patre Sidera Verso"), Pynchon seems
to offer the birth of Reason in the mid 1700's as a counter-point 
to the birth of Rock-and-Roll in the mid-1900's, which I like. 
A music of what seemed logic, which for a time the 
young only could hear.
_______

At the top of page 140, an inkling of the start of trans-national 
capitalism, the BEIC (and, in parallel the DEIC) playing another centuary's
 register on the themes of G.R.---

"Something richer than many a Nation, yet with no boundaries,--which,
tho' never part of any Coalition, yet maintains its own great Army and Navy,--
able to pay for the last War, as the next, with no more bother than finding
a key 
to a certain iron box,--yet which allows the Britannick Governance
that gave it Charter, to sink beneath oceanic Waves of Ink incarnadine."

Also an echo of Macbeth in there, I think.
_________

At the bottom of p141, I think we hear a echo of CL49 this time,
thinking of Randolph Driblette in 

"Others were more passionate as to the worth of their Inventions
(upon finding the Longitude) though employing Arts more of the Actor-Projector 
than of the Geometer."



Eric Alan Weinstein
University of London
E.A.Weinstein at qmw.ac.uk