MDMD George III

[Kato du Bois]

My second time through and, once again, I'm thrilled by the celestial 
clock-work imagery. I see the Orerry, not only as an example of P's nifty 
ability to explode and compress the scale of Systems for the reader, but as 
a metaphor, if not for his fiction specifically, then for fiction in 
general,

"the [...] Planets wait, all but humming, taut with their spidery Linkages 
back to the Crank-Shaft and Crank, held in the didactic Grasp of the Rev'd 
Cherrycoke"

... like characters, or sub-stories, "forever a-spin", tracing orbits, 
forming new combinations and alignments, cranked with didactisism we might 
assume, even when patterns don't immediately emerge.

And, but, I think, M&D is also very much about that Line and linearness, and 
the need (or lack there of) to stay on that line, the desire to become 
tangential for awhile, loop around, you'll coil back to the story. Even 
dialogue does this in M&D, more than in any other Pynchon text, all the "as 
if"s and "he might have said"s and coming up a whole conversation between 
Mason and Florinda, if it happened that Mason had been witty enough to come 
up with the response he conjures later. If these tangents do not loop back, 
then they become orbits, or at the very least rotations, around the globe 
perhaps, and some of them will intersect and smack into this here book, a 
Golem maybe, or a Glowing Indian, perhaps they'll just leave a giant 
footprint in the mud in their path through the text.

But I digress, and do apologize, but my real point is the outer planets. P  
tantalizes us with the new discovery of the "Georgian" planet, then swiftly, 
with gloomy depictions of St. Helena, seems not only to submerge the dank 
island under the Sea [Neptune], but reveals that on St. Helena,

"... the Sun must be reckoned of less importance than Darkness incorporated 
as some integral, anti-luminary object, with it's own motions, positions, 
and aspects, - Black Sheep of the family of Planets, neither to be 
sacrificed to Hades nor spoken of by Name." [Pluto]

... forces to be felt by the Astronomers though not yet formally dicovered?

... and, might I say, Pluto does have quite an eccentric orbit, one that 
might prove difficult for Dr. Nessel to construct.

All the best,
K d B


John Bailey wrote:
Some thoughts:
M&D is very much about Space. It is equally about Time.
Specifically, it is very much about how we measure time, the different ways,
as well as the ways we experience time. Some of these ways are related to
the sun, to light, and to darkness, and to the spinning of the planet, the
dance of the cosmos, in short, some ways we measure and experience Time are
inseparable from Space, and not in an abstract mathematical Einsteinian way,
but just as a simple phenomenological thing.

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