Atdtda23: [45.2] The other one, 647

[robinlandseadel at comcast.net]

          Escapin' through the lily fields
          I came across an empty space
          It trembled and exploded
          Left a bus stop in its place
          The bus came by and I got on
          That's when it all began
          There was cowboy Neal
          At the wheel
          Of a bus to never-ever land

http://arts.ucsc.edu/GDead/AGDL/other1.html

The very first thing that comes up is: 
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=88nZISDF-PA

          Laura:
          TRP has two characters he likes to portray:  
          The Fool(or hedonist) and the more rational 
          Seeker.  In V, these were Profane and Stencil.

Two halfs of the author's selves. Fiction is to a certain 
extant, autobiography of one sort or another.
  
          In COL49, there was only Oedipa the Seeker. 

There was Trystero seeking Oedipa seeking Trystero. Ulitimately foolish,
but you might consider the Trystero as a metaphor/parody/anachronization
of the C.I.A., name-checked and parodied in the Presence of Jesus the
Anarchist. I'd take a closer look at MK Ultra when contemplating Oedipa's
Long Dark Night of the Soul, infused as it is, throughout, with the image of
Tristero's sigil: 

The Original Captain Trips 
by Todd Brendan Fahey 

http://www.greylodge.org/occultreview/glor_007/L00p.pdf

           GR was the most successful, IMO, because 
          he combined both these aspects in Slothrop.

There's also the whole paranoid seeker/sought thing going on too, 
now who gets to be the fool here?

          ATD works less well because there are too 
          many Seekers (Kit, Cyprian, Lew and Yashmeen)

For you maybe, Against the Day looms larger in the canon for me all the time.

          and only one Fool (Reef).  

What about Al Mar-Faud [757]?

          Frank, Dally and Merle form a sympathetic 
          sub-group (maybe Robin can figure which 
          tarot card to assign to them). 

I'd say the Hermit . . . .

http://www.acumind.com/Joe/tarot/hermit.html

. . . .with its deliberate echos of Diogines:

          . . . .He used to stroll through the Agora at full daylight 
          with a torch (or, as legend sometimes has it, a lantern). 
          When asked what he was doing, he would answer, "I am 
          just looking for an honest man." Diogenes looked for an 
          honest man and reputedly found nothing but rascals and 
          scoundrels.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diogenes_of_Sinope

"Now do the Dog!"
And remember that there's that two Stupendica problem, the Cynic
"Jesus People" v. the Pauline "Holy Roman Empire Christians", 
Freak vs. Straight down through history:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RWufdLk9k-s

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0065760/usercomments

          Of course, Reef has some Seeker aspects, 
          and Lew fits in with the sympathetic 
          Frank/Dally/Merle group in some ways.  But 
          there's a feeling of redundancy in the # of 
          Seeker-characters, with Kit and Cyprian 
          having experiences that might have been 
          better left to Yashmeen.

Standing back, and giving you all as full a blast of my present madness as 
possible, let me share with you a few recent discoveries, perhaps they can 
be of particular help in unskeining a few of CoL49's more impressivly woven 
tapestrys.

I've been looking at the history of the Pynchon Family in America, 
researching events in the lives of Our Beloved Author's ancestors and
then observing how that history ties into the novels. This mode of study
always produces meaningful results. Thing is, Thomas Ruggles Pynchon's
direct ancestors go back at least 10 generations, begot-ing about like an 
early chapter of the Bible. 

The crucial Pynchon in all the novels is William Pynchon, co-founder [or
maybe the only real founder] of Springfield Massachusetts. If you look at the
events of the life of William Pynchon the one thing that really sticks out is
how his "The Meritorious Price of Our Redemption. . . ."

http://tinyurl.com/2bbukb

Was the first book burned in what was to become the United States of America. 
Pynchon was obviously aware of the Free Speech Movement:

     It was summer, a weekday, and midafternoon; no time for any campus 
     Oedipa knew of to be jumping, yet this one was. She came downslope 
     from Wheeler Hall, through Sather Gate into a plaza teeming with 
     corduroy, denim, bare legs, blonde hair, hornrims, bicycle spokes in 
     the sun, bookbags, swaying card tables, long paper petitions dangling 
     to earth, posters for undecipherable FSM's, YAF's, VDC's, suds in the 
     fountain, students in nose-to-nose dialogue. She moved through 
     it carrying her fat book, attracted, unsure, a stranger, wanting to feel 
     relevant but knowing how much of a search among alternate universes 
     it would take. For she had undergone her own educating at a time of 
     nerves, blandness and retreat among not only her fellow students but 
     also most of the visible structure around and ahead of them, this having 
     been a national reflex to certain pathologies in high places only death 
     had had the power to cure, and this Berkeley was like no somnolent 
     Siwash out of her own past at all, but more akin to those Far Eastern 
     or Latin American universities you read about, those autonomous 
     culture media where the most beloved of folklores may be brought 
     into doubt, cataclysmic of dissents voiced, suicidal of commitments 
     chosen the sort that bring governments down. But it was English she 
     was hearing as she crossed Bancroft Way among the blonde children 
     and the muttering Hondas and Suzukis; American English. Where were 
     Secretaries James and Foster and Senator Joseph, those dear daft 
     numina who'd mothered over Oedipa's so temperate youth? In another 
     world. Along another pattern of track, another string of decisions taken, 
     switches closed, the faceless pointsmen who'd thrown them now all 
     transferred, deserted, in stir, fleeing the skip-tracers, out of their 
     skull, on horse, alcoholic, fanatic, under aliases, dead, impossible to 
     find ever again. Among them they had managed to turn the young 
     Oedipa into a rare creature indeed, unfit perhaps for marches and 
     sit-ins, but just a whiz at pursuing strange words in Jacobean texts.
     The Crying of Lot 49, pgs. 82/83 [152 page version]

Now, first off there's "FSM'---Free Speech Movement, Mario Savio's perfectly
Luddite sppech and all, buried in a busy passage allong with those dear daft
numina Secretaries James and Foster and Senator Joseph, a coulpe of folks
Charles Hollander is Kind enough to point out:

     Also in Lot 49, Pynchon half-names "Secretaries James and Foster 
     and Senator Joseph," and similarly means for us to decrypt them 
     as Secretary of Defense James V. Forrestal, Secretary of State 
     John Foster Dulles, and Senator Joseph R. McCarthy. 

http://www.howardm.net/tsmonk/pynchon.php
http://www.ottosell.de/pynchon/inferno.htm

The name 'Dulles' conjures up the C.I.A., Joseph McCarthy conjures up
America's second wave of Witchtrials, the McCarthy hearings. There are
quite a few historical interconnections of Heresy, Trials for Witchcraft,
Exile with the very large number of Jacobean texts associated with
Williams Pynchon's history, making his legacy a crucial but usually
hidden element of American History and a crucial but hidden element in
the Crying of Lot 49. 

Some of those strange words in Jacobean texts will point to the stories of
John Dee and Giordano Bruno. John Dee came up with the notion of
"The British Empire", as a skilled mathmatician he developed navigational 
systems and maps that aided in England's first voyages to the then "New 
World" and developed a magical system of Angelic invocation. He was
exiled by a very suspicious King James, and is the most likely model for
Prospero in the Tempest, a play that shared more than a few tropes with 
the Courier's Tragedy. Of course, there's also the Faust tragedies that are
being referenced here with a sense of Politics and Black Magic intertwining.
Giordano Bruno, another Scientist involved in Dee's Hermetic circles, was 
famously burned at the stake. 

If you go to: http://tinyurl.com/3bmafo on page 320, you will find "Giordano
Bruno in Prison, a monologue" by Charlotte Stearns Eliot. On page 564
we will find Giordano Bruno in Prison, Scene II by Charlotte Stearns Eliot.
Please note that Charlotte Stearns Eliot. is the Mother of T. S. Eliot, author
of 'The Waste Land', a work referenced in a number of Pynchon's writings,
but central to The Crying of Lot 49.

Ultimately, what the Courier's Tragedy is really pointing to:

          Meanwhile, back in the torture room, the cardinal is now being 
          forced to bleed into a chalice and consecrate his own blood, 
          not to God, but to Satan. They also cut off his big toe, and he is 
          made to hold it up like a Host and say, "This is my body," the 
          keenwitted Angelo observing that it's the first time he's told 
          anything like the truth in fifty years of systematic lying. 
          Altogether, a most anti-clerical scene, perhaps intended as 
          a sop to the Puritans of the time (a useless gesture since 
          none of them ever went to plays, regarding them for some 
          reason as immoral). 
          52/53 [op. cit]

Remember me calling the symbol of the Trystero---the image of the 
muted posthorn?---a Sigil? Here we have a scene of Black Magic [the 
deliberate inversion of Christian Ritual] coupled with discriptions of 
torture that come straight out of the Malleus Maleficarum:

          Malleus Maleficarum (Latin for "The Hammer of Witches", or 
          "Hexenhammer" in German) is one of the most famous medieval 
          treatises on witches. It was written in 1486 by Heinrich Kramer and 
          Jacob Sprenger, and was first published in Germany in 1487. Its 
          main purpose was to challenge all arguments against the existence 
          of witchcraft and to instruct magistrates on how to identify, 
          interrogate and convict witches.

http://www.malleusmaleficarum.org/

So right now it looks like I'm on the Road with Oedipa Maas.
O-voutey, o-scooti, o-rooty. Betcha "Arnold Snarb" slipped it in her drink,
note that the CIA was considering LSD as a "Truth Agent", like
Sodium Pentathol only freaky. Don't forget that the road leads back
to Dr. Hilarius/Stanislav Grof and that "Psycedelic Therapy" was an
MK Ultra inroad for additional Beta Testing all along. With 

          cowboy Neal
          At the wheel
          Of a bus to never-ever land