ATDDTA (3) Purely Secular, 61-64

[Monte Davis]

Bottom of p. 60: "Merle by then
" has a business relationship with working
girls Madge and Mia Culpepper. For the latter, try hearing "mea culpa"
(although she doesn't offer any refund). Pynchon being Pynchon, I'll bet
that he has some amateur historian's memoir of old Cleveland, 200 copies
vanity-published in 1937, 2 copies surviving, attesting to a brothel run by
Nelly Lowry. 

"Flashily," "Blinky," "surveillance," "invisibility" -- are we beginning to
see the light? 

Merle progresses quickly from "monkey in the middle," trying to help out the
most extreme Aetherists, to his own flavor of Weird Science:

"...that the Michelson-Morley experiment and the Blinky Morgan manhunt were
connected. That if Blinky were ever caught, there would also turn out to be
no Æther. Not that one would cause the other, exactly, but that both would
be different utterances of the same principle."

Savor Roswell's response as a flash of heartland common sense, or at least
what we like to think is h.c.s. For more, screen The Music Man
 http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0056262/

It's hokey and quite irresistible, set in a very similar half-nostalgized
Midwestern milieu. Listen to the locals trying to resist Robert Preston's
manic enthusiasm. Guess who wins. 

Blinky's two eyes, as we should expect by now, offer thematic parallax. One
eye has a criminal medical history, the other a heroic one. "A walking
interferometer
 a double-refractor." And an instrument that wouldn't be
widely used by astronomers for a couple of decades, the blink comparator:
http://www.discoveryofpluto.com/blink.html 

which maps a change over space as a change over time and vice versa --
perfect logical parallel to what an interferometer does. While Merle spins
off into the wilder reaches of pseudo-pattern recognition, the author has
his "asymmetr[ies] with respect to light" under dazzling control.

Blinky's capture, Merle asserts, decides the Michelson-Morley outcome and
dooms the aether. Maybe this is a moment, as much as August 1914, that
steers the world toward Hell?

Or maybe it's just more payback for the primal sins of usurpation and
slavery: Blinky is captured near an Indian graveyard, after all. Wounded
Knee is coming up in 1890, and a naïve Kit Traverse will be enlightened on
p. 777 about previous go-rounds with Hell such as the Indian wars: " “That
was about land,' " he protests; " 'The Civil War? That was economics.
Politics.'

“ 'That was the gods you tried to destroy, waiting their hour, taking their
revenge. You people really just believe everything you’re taught, don’t
you?' ”

Roswell nails the Aether cultists' disillusionment: "What do we do now?" Dr.
O.D. Chandrasekhar offers a dose of Asian thought: "this null result may as
easily be read as proving the existence of the Æther," which is <blink>
Vedic wisdom anticipating modern field theory, or <blink> doubletalk of
purest ray serene.

As is customary in Pynchon when the death of God is starkly at issue, a bar
brawl ensues.

If you're directionless, drifting, "void of course," you're probably as
tired as I am of astrological calendars that "do not note the so-called
'minor' aspects such as semisquares (45 degrees), sesquisquares (135
degrees), or quincunxes (150 degrees), yet these are very potent aspects
that most definitely show turning points, crises, agitations and adjustments
in our lives." Fortunately, some experts may or may not be mad as hell and
may or may not be going to take it any more:
 http://www.aquariuspapers.com/astrology/2006/12/the_void_of_cou.html  

The Newburgh asylum fire of 1887, like that of 1872, is, of course,
historical fact. 
http://www.rootsweb.com/~asylums/cleveland_oh/index.html

It also must have been candy to the author who gave us the Great Aspinwall
Hotel Fire in GR. Compare the description here to p. 29 there: 

"the sky was gusting red, warm orange, the sirens howling in the valleys
from Pittsfield, Lenox, and Lee — neighbors stood out on their porches to
stare up at the shower of sparks falling down on the mountainside . . ." (GR
29) 

Ask me, that was very good but this is even better. More Massachusetts, just
shifted west, is all.

Roswell initiates Merle into the mysteries of photography. More
specifically, to the darkroom, developing and fixing, photochemistry. The
distinction matters for two reasons:

1) Darkroom work was a much larger part of photography before George
Eastman, Kodak, and commercial processing. It has its own special alchemy.
Trust me: I spent a good part of 1962-1966 mixing fresh Dektol, moving
prints through the trays, inhaling acetic-acid fumes, and listening to
all-night radio (the ideal training for Pynchon).

2) In "taking" the photograph, once light comes through the lens you have no
choice: it *will* kick up electrons in the halide crystals of the plate or
film, laws of optics at work in black-box mystery, nothing you can do about
it. But in the darkroom there's leisure, access and agency to dodge and
burn, mask and solarize, play all kinds of tricks.

It's another chance, bringing second thoughts to what had seemed
irreversible. Just the kind of magic Merle Rideout could be expected to
like.

Or Thomas Pynchon, for that matter.