"where entire worlds may be generated from simple sets of axioms"

[Bandwraith at aol.com]

    In westerns, the good people always win. In romance novels, 
    love conquers all. In whodunits, murder, being a pretext for 
    a logical puzzle, is hardly ever an irrational act. In science 
    fiction, where entire worlds may be generated from simple 
    sets of axioms, the constraints of our own everyday world 
    are routinely transcended. In each of these cases we know 
    better. We say, "But the world isn't like that." These genres, 
    by insisting on what is contrary to fact, fail to be Serious 
    enough, and so they get redlined under the label "escapist 
    fare."

    http://www.pynchon.pomona.edu/uncollected/luddite.html

And so, "the illusion of Depth," as in the "sinister and wonderful 
Card Table," anchoring the LeSpark parlor, might be a common 
thread here- another example of "escapist fare," and surely the 
surface where Tarot and Ouija, or their proto-types, were 
demonstrated by Euphie- to the delight of Tenebrae and the 
twins- which, she might have claimed, she learned while marooned 
in some oriental harem, or other...

But it's worth remembering, without being mistaken for another 
edition of "Antiques Roadshow," that the Card Table is one of a pair 
of items singled out for description in the opening pages of M&D; the 
other being a "Mirror in an inscrib'd Frame" commemorating the 
"Mischianza". The two items should be considered together. Skirting 
a lengthy discussion of how the English officer responsible for the 
"Meschianza," John Andre, was captured as a spy while in Amercan 
uniform by three Americans dressed as English soldiers, and, how 
that historical fact- including the misspelling of Meschianza- mirrors 
and inverts, to some extent, the  pivotal events of a certain Jacobean 
Revenge Play, suffice it to say, that what at first seems simple can 
soon become quite complex, i.e., not just the illusion of depth, but the 
real thing. "A life's base lie, rewritten into truth." [Act IV, The Courier's
Tragedy]

On another tack, it’s difficult to tell if Pynchon, in the Luddite
article cited above, is embracing the notion that the apparent
complexity of the world is amenable to simple representation,
analysis and control, or, whether all such designs- scientific or
Luddite (not to mention political!)- are the stuff of which pipe 
dreams are made.

regards

STOP THE WAR!