MAD3PAD 55-57

[Mark Smith]

I think the point here about the chess playing is simply that it helps to
allay boredom for "perhaps an extra week" and then it's devil take the
hindmost, so to speak.  After that it's Penis in the Jewel Block time,
especially since no reading is allowed.

Wicks explains that the elaborate equator-crossing rituals are somehow more
than an empty ritual.  Our shadows actually do disappear at that precise
point when we cross over, therefore the Ritual of Crossing Over is
acknowledging something real.  Insofar as the profession of surveyor is
about drawing sometimes arbitrary lines on maps, this equator business
serves to make a distinction between the ideal and the real.  It's the
longitude lines that are a manmade construct, not latitude.  The loxodrome
is also a human construct.

I somehow link this all to the "excluded middle" notion, and I think that
later (p.62) when Greet, the middle sister of the Vrooms, is described as
the "Eternal Mediatrix", we have another reference to such notions.
Perhaps.

On 1/22/06, Toby G Levy <tobylevy at juno.com> wrote:
>
> vw#19: kedging - A method of pulling a boat out of shallow water when it
> has run aground.
>
>         Boatswain Higgs is concerned that if the rigging is not properly
> tied to the ship that they may lose sails and wind up "warping and
> kedging into a foreign port.
>
>         Seaman Bodine is spending his time in obscene amusement and the
> rest of the crew are slowly flipping out from boredom.  What does
> Pynchon mean by the following?
>
> "One or two chess players hold out for perhaps an extra week -- then
> 'tis Sal Si Puedes..."
>
> with the Spanish phrase, which literally means "escape if you can" in
> italics.
>
>         The crew devise elaborate rituals to be performed when they
> cross the equator.
>
>         The scene switches back to the room where Wicks is telling the
> story and the listeners discuss with Wicks reasons why there should be a
> fuss about crossing the equator. Wicks says that the equator is the one
> place where "our shadows lay perfectly beneath us."
>
> vw#20: barcarole - the style of music sung by the gondoliers in Venice
>
>         Eventually the Seahorse picks up a trade wind and heads toward
> land. Pynchon closes chapter 6 with a scene of Mason and Dixon
> fantasizing with each other what it would have been like on Sumatra had
> they gotten to go there.
>
> Toby
>



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