MDDM Ch. 70 Scalping Lord Lepton

[Terrance]

Bandwraith at aol.com wrote:
> 
> So the question for me is: Is Mason's obsessively superstitious
> reaction to the sterloop just his own- remember Wicks tried
> to reason with him about this same topic back at Lepton
> castle- or, is Pynchon using another klutzy trope to once
> again undercut any of those possible "invisible connections,"
> while at the same time tempting any of us inclined toward
> high magic to step across the threshold?
> 
> regards

linear system is called inconsistent or overdetermined if it does not
have a solution. In other words, the set of solutions is empty.

It's certainly not his alone.  Dixon and Mason are changed at the Cape
by what they see. 
They see Slaves and Cape girls at the end of the world. They see the
Sterloop. 
They see the Transit of Venus. Well, a bit cloudy, but when Dixon sees
the Goddess Venus (Queen of Heaven-- Schekina)  above, he is as "a
sinner converted." Mason, the Cape women assume, has traveled all the
way to the end of the world to see Love, but as he and Dixon try to
observe the Transit, Mason is interested in the "Pythagorean"
calculations and not much else. The sight of Venus does not get Mason
thinking, as it does Mr. Dixon, about God's glorious work or the
Heretical works (Galileo before the Cardinals, a fable told him by his
teacher Emerson) of Mason's predecessors. And it is not only Dixon who
is "converted." The entire colony experiences metanoia.   

The Sterloop, Venus, the Morning Star, the Devil, the White Horses of
the Apocalypse, etc. & etc....the star spins round and round, encircles,
is encircled, is pentagramed, is inverted and converted. It is there at
the Cape, at the Massacre, at the Club, on a gun. In America, every
farmer has a gun. 

"There's always some killin'
You got to do around the farm...."

"She's seven years old today? Why I bet you can get you a gun for your
young Daisy with a daisy on it, for, for less than that Britney doll
she's ogling."

"Now Daisy, you quit that ogling!" How many times I done....."

Dixon meets Police Agent Bonk at page 154. Bonk is giving up the safety
of the castle. He's gonna head out into the wild, wild, wild North with
his family and oxen. Problem is, he can't quite figure out how to shoot
a gun on horseback. Dixon wopn't be much help, he can't even write while
riding a horse. Bonk is gonna re-tool his gun. Will he put a Sterloop on
it? Will it turn? Like Fortune's Wheel? Convert good to evil, health to
sickness, good luck to bad? 


Such foppery? Mason a fool? Overdetermined? Oveflowed and Emptied out? 

ACT 1, SCENE 2: The Earl of Gloucester's castle.

     Enter EDMUND, with a letter.

EDMUND: This is the excellent foppery of the world,
     that, when we are sick in fortune,--often the surfeit
     of our own behavior,--we make guilty of our disasters
     the sun, the moon, and the stars: as if we were villains by
     necessity; fools by heavenly compulsion;
knaves,                             [125]
     thieves, and treachers, by spherical predominance;
     drunkards, liars, and adulterers, by an enforced obedi-
     ence of planetary influence; and all that we are evil in,
     by a divine thrusting on: an admirable evasion of
     whoremaster man, to lay his goatish disposition
to                          [130]
     the charge of a star! My father compounded with my
     mother under the dragon's tail; and my nativity
     was under Ursa major; so that it follows, I am rough
     and lecherous. Tut, I should have been that I am,
     had the maidenliest star in the firmament
twinkled                        [135]
     on my bastardizing. Edgar--

Dixon and Mason and the Tavern (342). Both men seem to be taken by the
foppery of signs. 
Or is it foppery? Lear is mad. Mason seems to be. Dixon is manic. Others
pretend to be mad or sane as the politics or the law or those that
enforce both demand. Ah, but he Devil?  D___l. Sorry. 

In Milton's PL, Jesus kicks Satan's ass. How? With a big gun. No
kidding! 

LeSpark is an arms dealer. He just happens to be sleeping on the couch
when D&M see another rifle with the star in it. He taes over the tale
(428), being an expert in the field....and between snoozing or whatever
he was up to in his youthful days, he tells D&M and Co. about the gun
business. He says, guns don't kill people. Guns are not forged in the
devil's factory. 

Lepton is no White Devil. Lepton is white by nature. He may be evil by
nature too, although a psychologist favoring nurture's cultivation could
argue that his nature was forged in  hellish crucible. 

		  Very superstitious, writing's on the wall,
                  Very superstitious, ladders bout' to fall,
                  Thirteen month old baby, broke the lookin' glass
                  Seven years of bad luck, the good things in your past.

                  When you believe in things that you don't understand,
                  Then you suffer,
                  Superstition ain't the way