Riemann space

[robinlandseadel at comcast.net]

"As it has been, and apparently ever shall be, gods, superseded, 
become the devils in the system which supplants their reign, 
and stay on to make trouble for their successors, available, 
as they are, to a few for whom magic has not despaired, and 
been superseded by religion."

William Gaddis: The Recognitions, pg 102

I'm pretty sure that Pynchon has not yet despaired of magic,
much of the action in Against the Day reminds me of Steppenwolf's 
"Magic Theater". A lot of what is going on here is being done with 
smoke and mirrors, but the mirrors have been very carefully 
positioned and he smoke he's blowing is the finest Colombian.

T.W.I.T.'s not the only magical game in town. 
Remember there are more than a few free-range operatives
roamin' 'round these parts, like Geli Tripping in GR and Yasmeen in AtD.
There's a passage that begins on page 391 of AtD that strikes me as 
some of Pynchon's best writing on Magic.


That quote: "At a slight angle to the universe", is very
nearly a dictionary definition of the word "Traverse".



 -------------- Original message ----------------------
From: "Monte Davis" <monte.davis at verizon.net>
 It's old, old magic that another world with different rules is just a step
away -- under Elf Hill or at the bottom of the garden, perceptible or even
accessible if one stands (as Forster said of Cavafy) "at a slight angle to
he universe."
 
The vein Pynchon works so well is the tension built into the nature of
science, the science of nature. On the one hand it keeps turning up weird
and wonderful new stuff that might as well be magic at first blush...
 
And on the other, it works relentlessly to *assimilate* the new stuff into
an expanding, rigorously consistent scheme, insisting that there is *one*
world with *one* set of rules. And it's  precisely that stone deterministic
rigor that allows it to keep the magic coming -- to predict invisible waves
or time dilation or genes or black holes or bizarre quantum phenomena before
they're observed.
 
Notice how T.W.I.T., just like The White Visitation, presents a gallery with
the whole range -- from the crackpots and fringers who cherry-pick just
enough Weird Science to pump up the magic they want to believe anyway, to
the mournful Roger Mexico types who've worked through all the equations and
lost the magic along the way.