THEM

[Terrance]

Doomsday? I don't take it seriously and I don't think Pynchon does
either. Well, of course he does and I do, but I think P is more apt to
make fun of the dooms day boys than go out there and move the hands of
the clock. Those repulsed by technology and those exhilarated by it are
the extremes and Pynchon mocks extremes. In his Luddite essay (we've
argued this before) he waxes ironically about the Duck. You heard it
here first... and all good Luddites. One could take P seriously, I
guess. But why? One could close ones eyes and not see the men behind the
curtain and actually believe that a big blue beat a man in chess and not
that the men behind the curtain beat a chess champion with the aid of a
calculating machine. This novel is about Time. Clock works and doom,
but, as Eliot says, 

"to apprehend
The point of intersection of the timeless
With time, is an occupation for the Saint."

Dixon and Mason go to a massacre museum
and there they are like Slothrop in the playland under the earth in GR. 
The stains of blood, not unlike the white stain of Enzian's bleached
ejaculation. 
Something far more wicked than anything Dixon has seen at the Cape is in
America. It is in the wilderness, he suspects, and it has infected the
souls of the people. He wants adventure. Wants to see blood. Goes to the
museum, has even got his own tour guide. His guide is out of the bible,
the prayer theme again. The allegorical scene is a farce. The landlord
on high telling the tour guide that he can't increase his coast, his
land, last time was the last time, but it's a joke. Of course they will
all expand, puff themselves up. Dixon springs into friendly Quaker
Business mode and sounds like any of the peddlers and preachers  of bees
and wares and snake oils on the streets of Philadelphia. Welcome to
America. Where there is time yet to prepare a face, a disguise, to make
a deal, to bring into confidence, to prop up a circus tent and sell the
greatest show on earth.  Philadelphia time is more precious than country
time and everyone knows that a new york minute is not a measure of time,
but of change so big you can't blink or you'll miss towers of babel
being built or razed. Time is not only the change that we perceive or
fail to or hear about on the radio or see on TV. How silly, really,
scientists moving a doomsday hand like some invisible gods or the fates.
They should get another clock, a big yellow one with a happy face, move
the hands in the opposite direction, two minutes. Why two minutes? Mrs.
Lopez across the hall had twins. We wait for life to come forth. For
birth. And Not for the dead to rise up when the doomsday trumpet blows.
We wait for the baby to be born, and we see not the  future but the
present slowly  fade into the past as the child grows. We never revisit
the past. We can't shrink the child and put her back into the mother,
events move in one direction, toward death and toward other births
without end, neither quicker nor slower no matter what the men in the
white coats with their doom and their day and their hands in their
pockets say. 



http://www.educause.edu/pub/er/review/reviewArticles/33126.html



Poem: Time After Time 

An Australian sound engineer has developed a unique way of clearing the
hiss and clatter out of
vintage jazz recordings. - Associated Press 

Time: it does things
out there among the galaxies.
Clatter and hiss? Perhaps.
That's one metaphor for distance 

which is time. And our remembering?
There's less and less,
the dissonance of now and then
no longer audible when 
mechanics cancels difference. 

So out with the scritch of decades,
the sizzle and scar of error,
remembrance's waver, susurrus
of mortality, dust-riff, and blues-ether. 

We will turn them into us,
our sound loud as a spotlight,
bright as an electronic toy,
cleansed of those troublesome sixty years
and that old distortion: joy. 

by Betty Adcock
(This poem first appeared in the Georgia Review.)