AtDTDA: (14) Pgs 374-397: Tales of Power

[robinlandseadel at comcast.net]

            He kept sending letters, with different stamps and 
            postmarks each time. . . . 1067

We start this episode with the introduction of Ewball Oust---the name 
sounds like a spell against surveillance, perhaps a relative of Rick Griffin's:

http://www.olsenart.com/FILLMORE/BG%20105.gif

Ewball Oust's "Big Scene" [Aria?] in Against the Day happens to be the most 
obvious cross-reference to The Crying of Lot 49. That scene happens on pages 
978/979 and concerns the bizarre commemoration of Czolgosz's assasination 
of President McKinley in a series of postal stamps from the 1901 Pan-American 
Exposition. It's the inversion of the images on these stamps (an "inverse 
rarity") that makes them collectable and also somehow sinister. It's the 
ludicrous and internecine interfamial warfare that makes this sequence so 
very oedipal.

The slang term for a psychologist---"shrink"---appears in"The Crying of Lot 49" 
That particular use of the word "shrink" also pops up in one dictionary as a 
first example of the use of that common bit of slang in a major work of fiction. 
I'll note that Dr. Hilarius happens to use LSD in his therapy and wonder if 
this is one of the earliest uses uses of the acrycronym "LSD" in Fiction. When 
Oedipa encounters Mucho Maas [after losing her "shrink"---Dr. Hilarius---to 
the ghosts of Nazi death camps], she "knows" Mucho is lost to her, some chasm
opened up, her love taking the high side astride the chopped hog of love,
beyond repair or retrieval even as Mucho spouts about how much 
"She Loves You."

But [as those who read Vineland should have picked up] Mucho was not  lost. He 
came out of the experience with a bit of wisdom to pass on to us all [VL 
313/314], wisdom derived from "knowing he was immortal":

            "Well I still wish it was back then, when you were the Count. 
            Remember how the acid was? Remember that windowpane, 
            down, down in Laguna that time? Remember that windowpane, 
            down in Laguna that time? God, I knew then, I knew. . . ."

            They had a look. "Uh-huh, me too. That you were never going to 
            die. Ha! No wonder the State panicked. How are they supposed 
            to control a population that knows it'll never die? When that was 
            always their last big chip, when they thought they had the power 
            of life and deaqth. But acid gave us the X-ray vision to see 
            through that one, so of course they had to take it away from us."

All of this by way of introducting a favorite scene in Against the Day, perhaps 
Pynchon's best demonstration of visionary experience in magical practice. 
There's traces of Huxley and Terrance McKenna and Castaneda. The 
Tarahumares [aka Tarahumaras] are a magical people, alright, and Peyotism
is a standout feature of that tribe:

            At first Frank took them for antelope, but they were running faster 
            than he's ever seen anything run. 388

>From the Wikipedia:

            The Tarahumara are a Mexican Indigenous people of northern Mexico, 
            renowned for their long-distance running ability. Their word for 
            themselves, Raramuri, means runners on foot in their native tongue, 
            according to some early ethnographers like Norwegian Carl Lumholtz, 
            though this interpretation has not been fully agreed upon. With 
            widely dispersed settlements, these people developed a tradition of 
            long-distance running for intervillage communication and 
            transportation. The long-distance running tradition also has 
            ceremonial and competitive aspects. Often, male runners kick wooden 
            balls as they run in competitions, and females use a stick and hoop. 
            They also use their ability to run extreme long distances (sometimes 
            as far as 160km) to catch animals such as deer; the animals 
            eventually tire and slow down, and the Raramuri get close enough to 
            the animal to kill it.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tarahumara#Tarahumara_Religion

From: MODERN PEYOTISM: ITS NATIVE INFLUENCES AND 
CONDITIONS FOR ITS DIFFUSION INTO THE UNITED STATES
[no author name cited]:

            Native Uses For Peyote 

            As demonstrated by the old Native American traditions of 
            the Huichol, Tarahumara and Kiowa-Comanche Indians, 
            the peyote plant is an indispensable component of their 
            religious and daily life because its multi-purpose usage. 
            First and foremost, it allows the shaman and individuals to 
            bridge the gap between the world of spirits and that of 
            humans (Stewart 41). The visionary experience as a result 
            of its consumption allowed the formation of a direct communi-
            cation with the forces or spirits of nature. In addition, there is 
            a common belief among many tribes that sickness and death 
            are a result of spiritual activity within the human body. Peyote, 
            therefore, would serve as a powerful "medicine" because it 
            would allow either the shaman or the individual to remain in 
            tune with the spirit forces and to combat those that are evil 
            (Anderson 4). Lastly, the sympathomimetic effects of peyote 
            that were described earlier, namely the alleviation of hunger 
            and fatigue, enable the Indians to dance and sing all night 
            during the ceremonies and survive the long periods of fasting 
            during their pilgrimages. 

http://sulcus.berkeley.edu/mcb/165_001/papers/manuscripts/_859.html

Now, for whatever it's worth [and let's say it is], Ewball turns out to be the 
daring young sharpshooter here, quite the romantic anarchist hero of yore. 
So it's Ewball who saves the lives of these archetypal shamans. But it's Frank 
who gets to journey a bit with these astral travellers, deep into the mystic.

A few notes from Neddie's fine discussion over at "Chumps of Choice":

            El Espinero, as close to a Carlos Castaneda brujo as you're likely 
            to find outside the pages of Tales of Power, leads Frank up a 
            mountain to an abandoned silver working, and shows him an utterly 
            flawless piece of calcite spa, a "twin crystal, pure, colorless, 
            without a flaw." El Espinero directs him to look into it. He sees -- 
            or thinks he sees -- the image of Sloat Fresno, Deuce Kindred's 
            sidekick. In a flash-forward, he tells Ewball that the Indian had 
            said that it wasn't a real piece of spar, but the "idea of two 
            halves, of balancing out lives and deaths."

http://tinyurl.com/2vpzsc

This way of "of balancing out lives and deaths"---and this does balance out 
very soon after, is a proper demonstration of what Charles Hollander would 
call Pynchon's sense of justice. I'd call it karma, the world-as-it-is balancing 
itself in the wake of the world-as-it-is-becoming.

And then there's the peyote, with some of Pynchon's best writing on the subject
of visionary experience:

            It didn't kick in for a while, but when it did, Frank was taken out 
            of himself, not just out of his body by way of some spectacular 
            vomiting but out of whatever else he thought he was, out of his 
            mind, his country and family, out of his soul. 

            At some point he found himself in the air, hand in hand with young 
            Estrella, flying quite swiftly, at low altitude, over the starlit 
            country. Her hair streaming straight out behind her. Frank, who 
            had never flown before, kept wanting to turn right or left and go 
            explore arroyos filled with a liquid, quivering darkness, and tall 
            cactuses and dramas of predatory persuit and so forth that now 
            and then seemed also to be glowing in these peculiar colors, but 
            the girl, who had flown often, knew where they had to go. and he 
            understood after a while that she was guiding him, so relaxed 
            and flew along with her.

            Later, on the ground, in fact, strangely, under it, he found himself 
            wandering a stone labyrinth from one cave to another, oppressed 
            by a growing sense of danger---each time he chose a branch, 
            thinking it would lead him out to open air, it only took him deeper, 
            and soon he was at the edge of panic. "Do not," said the girl, 
            carefully, calming him somehow with an inexplicable clarity of 
            touch, "do not be afraid. They want you to be afraid, but you do 
            not have to give them what they want. You have the power not to 
            be afraid. Find it, and when you do, try to remember where it is." 
            While continuing to be the Tarahumare girl Estrella, she had also 
            at the same time become Estrella Briggs. 392/393

This notion of power---the power not to be afraid---echos Mucho Maas' notion
that the power of life and death "The Man" holds over us can be dissolved
in these sorts of visionary [one might say "Gnostic'] experiences. I really
think Our Beloved Author celebrates the psychedelic experience in this section.

On a final note of high weirdness, we traverse from Sloat Fresno's death into 
the next Chums of Chance Adventure:

            In New York for a few weeks of ground-leave, the boys had set up 
            camp in Central Park. From time to time, messages arrived from 
            Hierarchy via the usual pigeons and spiritualists, rocks through 
            windows, blindfolded couriers reciting from memory, undersea 
            cable, overland telegraph wire, lately the syntonic wireless, and 
            signed, when at all, only with a carefully cryptic number*---that 
            being nigh as any of them had ever approached, or ever would, 
            to whatever pyramid of offices might be towering in the mists 
            above. 397

Oedipa [pretty much stuck in her tower] searched for a ["The"] singular 
Tristero, whereas weird modes of communication founded on anarchist 
strangeness abound in this land where a thousand parallel Tristeros 
could co-exist.