Chap 17, "the eponymous organ...", read past Spoiler

[Eric Alan Weinstein]

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Having just finished, last Friday, a first read of Mason and Dixon,
I decided not to read the whole book again right away.  I've decided
instead to come back to a dozen moments in the book which
I found moving, powerful, strange, enchanting. 

 I'd like to know if anyone else had a strong personal reaction 
to the episode of  Jenkin's Ear?


I read into the dark of Jenkin's Ear, into its rich silence, 
the necessary, un-returnable truth that we speak best 
to ourselves and to the world when sent on its way
into what appears to be the void---and which may be.

A peculiar human weakness, our need to transgress into 
meaninglessness when meaning, limit, the known,
fail us; passing into a faith in what is almost certainly
merely absence and darkness and entrusting to it  
that which is most essential to our human dignity---
Or what may be even worse, failing that last, 
pathetic (im)possible faith---failing our essential 
speech acts of welcome and questioning--- 

But in that moment when, let us say, we do speak
into the absurd, uneasy void, the visibly unconnected
ear which resonates, but into what?----
a contra-diction.

Letting speech go into mystery, which might seem supernatural, 
but is likely a cheap and Truly Brutal parlour trick
perpetrated by  a coz's  cousiner, a goulish fair-ground huxter
 playing on human weakness and need--- for Mason 
(and for most of us, at one time or another)
need around love and love lost, bereavement and grief, for
the quickly got and quicker spent  profit, and, gloriously,
a request on behalf of  a living friend.  

The ear is of course, to my reading, one of Pynchon's great jokes.
It is terribly funny. It is also one of his most
rewarding metaphysical and ethical conceits, and 
one of his saddest moments.

Seemingly, we have the huxter, taking advantage
at the point of greatest pain, vulnerability ( like his
mate, Florinda, the respectable Whore of some 
Stage training.)  


But also---what? That point of vulnerability is 
also a point of openness into the unknown and unknowable;
a licence to act beyond the boundaries of the ordinary,
to speak truth into the timeless emptiness of our Beyond.
---Here is a model of prayer in parable, and also of failed
courtship; return to sender, not just a few tawdry sentiments,
but the whole excruciating ball of need unrealised, and all immortal
and quite unrealisable desire, the whole ball of unsustainable
metaphysical and emotional wax---Absurd. Absurd. Absurd, and 
true. Because we lose what we care most for. 
Because the heart wants what it wants.
Because, as stupid as it seems, we do what we do,
and if it is meaningful, it is rarely rational.
We have all been speaking, and often at times of greatest need,
into Jenkin's Ear.

That image Pynchon rendered became for me 
a parable of ultimacy and possibly solipsistic reduction
for our common all-too-vulnerable speaking,
our most un-common faculty.
The religious moment and the moment of spiritual 
and material debasement, being two sides of the same
experience. You enter the Museum of the Severed
ear. "You pays your money and you takes your pick".

For all real communication is a terrible risk
that the Other will not fail us--yet how
the Other often fails,
and how often do we fail to hear the Other,
whose speech is often silence.
And what lies beyond that silence?
Are our cries heard beyond the empty
ringing of a minute drum in the severed ear
in the Huxter's tawdry palace?

These are our tales, tales of Questionable
Altitude told and intimated by voices, Our Voices,
clamoring not to be lost.



Eric Alan Weinstein
Centre For English Studies
University Of London
E.A.Weinstein at qmw.ac.uk