Is It OK to Be a Lardass?

[jporter]

Finally, face pressed up against the holiday- outside lookin' in- left for
a change with a little time to spare, I offer this as a way of saying "aye"
to the silent calling of the roll....


In the midst of This particular Fall- with the rate of change of daylength
already gone way past critical- I may as well ask: What difference is there
between Levine's Lardass and the event horizon of a Black Hole?

Now, on the eastern coast, with all the bad karma of Hurricane Floyd- no
small rain that- and memories of the dead, encephalitis-laden black birds
of summer, receding, I'm wondering: are there any entities in this universe
actually capable of feeding on disorder, of sucking some bare essence out
of existence itself, and using it to GROW? If an entity feeds on disorder,
what's left over? Options for excretion, as Ludwig Boltzmann might have
opined, are limited. If an entity seems to excrete order, what use for
chamber pots?

Black Holes, apparently, come close to being such entities. Shit to a black
hole is as good as shinola. They grow no matter what they ingest, including
entropy.  The action of a Black Hole is akin to that of a voracious cartoon
character that begins by eating everything within its two dimensional
universe, until there is nothing left but space and time- the paper it's
drawn on- which it eats, leaving a hole in the paper. Other 'toons on the
paper that's left cannot see the hole- their lines of sight bending around
it- their reality, as it is, being constrained by the paper. Higher order
beings, however, can see by looking through the hole that there is reality
beyond paperworld. What about that Nathan Levine?

When first we meet Nathan, in THE SMALL RAIN, he's in his preferred state
at Camp Roach, La., ingesting a trashy "whore book" that will eventually
find its way to the "GI can," and his Lardass has been expanding for some
time. Not that Nathan's behind doesn't require actual meals, now and again,
in order to keep expanding, but somehow, it seems to me, his particular
Lardass is just a stand in- a material substitute- for something far more
ephemeral.

Later, Levine fills up on the death & destruction left in the wake of a
hurricane which has blown by offstage. Coy Pynchon does not directly tell
us the effects of the storm's indiscrimminate fury on Levine's psyche (if
he has one), but like some proto-Slothropian, the devastation seems to
create a state of arousal in Nathan, which he later dissipates in his own
smaller way.

Love, as Tina rhetorically suggested, has little to do with it. But what
about those Holes of Darkness?

A most interesting aspect (for me at least) about the physics of Black
Holes, is that their existence was predicted well before they were
discovered. History states that one, Karl Schwarzchild (S-child), was
toying with Einstein's freshly minted equations of General Relativity
during breaks from his military assignment: calculating the parabolic arcs
of artillery shells for the German Army on the Russian Front, in 1916.
During a lull, Karl discovered that General Relativity predicts, under
special circumstances, the catastrophic gravitiational collapse of energy,
matter and spacetime from which nothing can escape, i.e., a Black Hole. He
sent his work back to a surprised Einstein, who presented the findings to
the Prussian Academy. Tragically, Schwarzchild died a few months later of a
skin disease contracted at the front. But only years later, in 1939, after
the application of Schwarzchild's work to the study of collapsing stars, by
Robert Oppenheimer, did the predictions begin to gain widespread play, and
the reality of Black Holes generally become accepted as a real possibility.
[All this from Brian Greene's: THE ELEGANT UNIVERSE]

This miraculous century, as noted by Hawking, in A BRIEF HISTORY OF TIME,
is remarkable for this phenomenon of the mind (with a small m) predicting
material reality before its actual observation, and continues apace to this
day. Dirac's prediction of the positron (antimatter) before anyone had
dreamed of its existence, on purely mathematical grounds, is another
example of theory preceding, if not causing, our reality.  The discovery of
the Top Quark and its rest mass being a more recent example.

The interplay of consciousness (with a small c) and the unique properties
of mathematics, seems (strictly my opinion here) to have paradoxically
freed consciousness from its purely subjective context, and even allowed
INFORMATION a kind of mindless existence, if not VALUE, of its own. Value,
as any lardass knows, being a term too often confused with the ability to
perform useful work.

But Black Holes are intrinsically fascinating creations of the mind (again
with a small m) which have now almost been shown to exist (with a big E).
In fact, Black Holes are the organizing forces behind the formation of
many, if not all, galaxies- ours, e.g. Galaxies! Check them out! Then take
note of the weather map the next time one of those hurricanes comes along.
Black Holes are like the eye of the storm, and Galaxies are just
gravitational hurricanes in space.  Our solar system is a tiny speck in the
swirling arm of one of these gravitational maelstroms, at the center of
which is a huge (and patient) Black Hole, our Black Hole, the equivalent of
two and a half million suns packed together into a tiny space. Alas, our
sun is just a vassal of our true master, The Dark Lord.

In the context of this space it may seem that I'm leaning toward making a
case for the literary equivalent of a Black Hole- a voracious gravitational
omnivore- as the central organizing principle reining in the entwining
tentacles of GR, converting shit to shinola, entropy to order, and
expanding all our horizons. A nice trope- and perhaps I am, but as much,
it's the second order metaphorical apple for which I've saved my hopeful
arrow. But now, as I approach my goal, it seems my arrow is making like one
of those Dali watches. Everything, in fact, is getting soft and bendy. But
what better than a curved arrow to shoot the apple sitting on my own head?

Black Holes are the coldest known entities in the universe. Massive Black
Holes are a tiny fraction of a degree above absolute zero, colder even than
the 2.7 degrees kelvin of the Cosmic Background Radiation left over from
the Big Bang, which, therefore, they will in effect eat, if there is
nothing else available. At first, they were thought to radiate no heat
whatsoever, which would have put them in violation of at least The Second
Law of Thermodynamics, and possibly The Third. But Hawking has shown that
Black Holes actually do radiate a tiny amount of even more useless energy
than they ingest, and so, total entropy of the universe continues to
increase, inspite of their non-discriminating gluttony- the antithesis of
Maxwell's picky Demon. Any entropy ingested by a Black Hole increases the
surface area of its event horizon, from inside of which nothing can escape.
What and how, then, does a Black Hole excrete, as it continues to grow?

The precise boundary of the event horizon can never be demarcated beyond
the limits set by Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle: the planck length.
The hem of a Black Hole in the fabric of spacetime is like that of
Tenebrae's Needlework: a Topick of Discussion in the House, upon which the
Embroidress herself is keeping silent. However, the gravitational force of
a Black Hole is so stupendous that it is occassionally able to pull  apart
virtual particle-antiparticle pairs. These are constantly popping out of
and back into the void of non-existence, before The Mind notices. Because
of its uncertainty, some pairs will straddle (and randomly define) the
event horizon.

What once was virtual then becomes real. One particle is lost for all time
to the abyss. The other, like Whitman's de-mated Mockingbird, is left to
wander endlessly through spacetime alone, featureless radiation, useless,
except perhaps to spur the imagination of a poet, or some other lardass,
and be counted as the Black Hole's contribution to the growing Universal
Waste. What about Levine's donation?

In THE SMALL RAIN, if buttercup is a "never a totally violated Pasiphae",
then Nathan is not quite the Sacred White Bull of Western Myth. Their
coupling seems meaningingless.When last we see Nathan, he is returning to a
place he's never really left. For all his experiences, other than the
possible expansion of his lardass, he seems even less developed than the
two dimesional paper he's printed on. He falls asleep. The story ends.

The reader is left to ponder Minotaurs, Labyrinthine Self-Reflexive Novels,
and what, if anything meaningful there is to bagged by reading them,
not to mention the oftimes futile dance of Western Civilization.

I'm hungry, and procrustean,

jody


"Free you mind and your ass will follow."  George Clinton