MDDM Ch. 67 Various

[jbor]

on 2/8/02 1:47 PM, Terrance at lycidas2 at earthlink.net wrote:

> let's say for arguments
> sake (since we are at the crossroads here) that he intends us to think
> about this passage in Walden.

OK, but only if we can also say that he intends us to think about Native
American animism, which is the actual context of the reference in the text.

I know who Thoreau was, and I'm familiar with 'Walden'.

Interpretively-speaking, I don't see that the discussion around
"Sky-fishing" in Pynchon's text (651-2) is privileging Thoreauvian
Transcendentalism (i.e. a species of Christian faith) over Native American
spiritualism (i.e. a species of paganism), or even over Dixon's "Amazing
Bread Lure" and Geordie fishing skills (i.e. an example of worldly human
knowhow and prowess). And it is the latter two which are the direct
references here. There is Christian symbolism (fish, bread) but there is
pagan symbolism and ritual (the Bear, "the precise Six-Nations Gesture for
Peace") as well.

> that is an
> Eastern/Western and Above Below, a Christian Indian and Indian tangle,
> Thoreau is logical allusion.

I don't understand the chain of connections here.

> Suppose that Revd WC and/or Pynchon is still looking at christianity and
> its many splits and movements as they tangle up and untangle.

Jemmy, whose spiritual "Protector" is a bear, is not a Christian.

I'm still not convinced that anyone other than Pynchon has named those
"Indians!" Pynchon hasn't "named" Charles Mason, or Jeremiah Dixon, or Hugh
Crawfford, or any other of the characters from history who inhabit his
fiction. It seems odd that he would create fictional (and seemingly jokey or
incongruous) names instead of using actual names for the men and women from
the Six Nations delegation who really did meet with Mason and Dixon on 14
June 1767, with Hugh Crawfford (or Crawford) acting as interpreter.

http://www.ls.net/~newriver/md/masondixon.htm

If the actual names of the "Indians!" weren't or aren't recorded, which
seems likely, then I wonder why Pynchon decided to give them fictitious
names at all, and why he made up these names in particular.

Those "swift passenger conveyances that go streaking by over the Fields"
(652.5) are a part of the "Ley-borne Life" (651.9), and refer back to the
way that both Dixon and the Native Americans have the capacity to "fly" over
the earth's Ley Lines, a phenomenon or ability which frightens Wicks
(649.31). The vision in the text of airborne coachloads of passengers is the
projection of a future time when these sorts of supernatural experiences
have been co-opted  by commercialism and wily entrepreneurs in the name of
"progress". It's a sort of Baedekerisation of the spiritual realm, and it
picks up on an ongoing theme in Pynchon's work to do with tourism and
superficiality and the mediation of human experience. I think it relates to
scenes such as the ones in GR with the tourists and Chu Piang, the farting
and drooling opera audiences Gustav rants about, Jabez in M&D at Lancaster
Town and "Oily Micro" in GR at Dora leading tour groups through places of
massacre and torture, Foppl's Siege Party in V., the fractured tv voices in
'The Secret Integration' etc etc.

best

> On the names, I spell yours Jbore, Jbor, Jay Bore, JBaw, whatever.

That's right. You've been writing my email ID as Jbore and Jay Bore for
several months now in a juvenile attempt to cause insult. Please desist.