ATDTDA (3) A window in Albert Lea, 69-72

Tue Feb 20 18:13:16 CST 2007

I would cheerfully spend a semester as student or teacher on this American
Odyssey in miniature. If I could keep only four pages of AtD, it would be
these. Please: take a few minutes to read it over, from "After the
closing..." to "...palm out for a tip." 

Please remember it, because a hundred things about Dally will hinge back on
it. This is how a genius tells us all about a character without telling us
he's telling us. 

*** 

Dally is five or six when she is exiled from the fair, her own Eden, "out of
Chicago and into the land." At first all the people she sees, and some she
doesn't, are assimilated to the sights of the White City. The "bright
humidity of its webwork of canals"  will still be part of her when she gets
to Venice, with its Canaletto light and gallery of fogs.

http://www.johncolemanburroughs.com/doc/mw27h8.jpg

Many children -- ugly ducklings, pauper princes, babies in bulrushes --
dream of being royalty in hiding. Not so many have such a head-start: "this
capital of dream she had once lived in, maybe was even numbered among the
rightful nobility of."

(I liked the Strange Horizons review, but anybody who has a problem with
*this* sentence-ending preposition can't tell when P is very deliberately
hobbling his own rhythms.)

***

"Planted rows went turning past like giant spokes one by one as they ranged
the roads..." Hey, foax, that's what they *do* if you'll just drive a
country road and open your damn eyes. The rows converge as if to a distant
hub.
http://www.stpaulcareers.umn.edu/img/assets/16141/Agriculture%20food%20and%2
0environmental%20education145x100.jpg

That "parallel" jive? All in your mind, in the Chum's-eye view, from up in
those "clouds with a flow like molten stone."

http://cloudscapes.antville.org/topics/Thunderstorm
(scroll right for the vertical sequence, "Around 8 pm..."

Like Annie Dillard in the ecstatic _Pilgrim at Tinker Creek_ and _Holy the
Firm_, Pynchon here insists that we *look* at every leaf, at the bridal
secrets in the moss, at evanescent sparks when the iron wheel-rim and the
rock and the shadow in the rut are all just so. If this be exile, make the
most of it.

http://pinker.wjh.harvard.edu/photos/new_zealand_II/images/glossy%20leaves%2
0forest%20floor.jpg

http://www.prairierivers.org/Archives/Photos/1999/04/12/Fox_River/Freese/Lea
ves072.JPG

And somehow it isn't exile any more, it's a home three states high and wide.
Years are going by. This density of detail, these undescribed exchanges with
the wildcrafters, are adding up: they're a childhood, a stroboscopic study
of the heart of a continent -- and a Dally who will grow into a queenly
confidence that's all in the details. Where does that come from? Right here.
Whatver Erlys took, it leaves a space in Dally, not a scar.

***

"They pushed out into morning fields that went rolling all the way to every
horizon, the Inner American Sea, where the chickens schooled like herring,
and the hogs and heifers foraged and browsed like groupers and codfish..."

http://www.engg.ksu.edu/research/images/research/konza.jpeg

We've been sailing with Pynchon for a long time now: on the Norfolk ferry
and a xebec out of Valletta, on the Rucksichtslos, on the Seahorse -- but
also "Over the Blue Mountain, over Juniata, up into Six Nations Country,
into the roll of great Earth-Waves ever northward, the billowing of the
Forests, in short-Cycle Repetition overset upon the longer Swell of the
Mountains..."

And he's always had an eye for the island girls:

"White man welcome ta Puke-a-hook-a-look-i island! 
One taste o' my pa-paya and y'll never wanna go a-waaaay!"

"Well Sailor ahoy,
Put down that Harpoon,
You're a fortunate Boy,
For ye've beach'd on The Moon..."

The focus on the Midwestern girls suggests at first a view over Merle's
shoulder (and don't stake much on his celibacy over these traveling years).
But Dally's using her eyes, too. She's learning a lot -- and she won't be
waiting by a fencepost for anyone.

***

Let's open up that window in Albert Lea, Minnesota, because it offers quite
a view.

In 1835, Lt. Albert Miller Lea led an Army surveying party north from Iowa
to the Minnesota River. Their scout was Nathan Boone, Daniel's son,
connecting back to the Forks of the Ohio, Charles and Jeremiah.

In 1860 Lea, now a prominent Texan, wrote to Gov. Sam Houston about their
mutual acquaintance:  "Colonel Robert E. Lee would not touch anything that
he would consider vulgar filibustering; but he is not without ambition and
under the sanction of the government, might be more than willing to aid you
to pacificate Mexico; and if the people of the U. States should recall you
from the 'Halls of the Montezumas' to the 'White House,' you will find him
well-fitted to carry out your great idea of a Protectorate. . . . "

Other developments intervened. In January 1863, Major Lee, CSA, took part in
the Batlle of Galveston.

http://www.sonofthesouth.net/leefoundation/civil-war/1863/january/battle-of-
galveston.htm

His son, Lt. Commander Edward Lea, USN, was mortally wounded there aboard a
Union vessel.

The senior Lea made it back to Minnesota only once, for a town celebration
in 1879. By then the place had become the headquarters of a flourishing
little grain business run by the Cargill family. But Cargill, sailing its
own oceans of grain, would move away long before becoming the second largest
privately held company in the US. So Albert Lea wouldn't have much to offer
by the time baby Eddie Cochran came along in 1938...

Fade out "Summertime Blues," as the trains go choiring by.

http://www.wtblock.com/wtblockjr/albert1.htm
http://www.cargill.com/about/history/history.htm
http://www.eddiecochran.info/biography_home.htm

***

No longer exiles, Dally and Merle returning to the towns, their sounds,
their own form of rosebuds-and-bluebirds. The brown creeper is a bird, not a
vine --  listen at:
http://www.birds.cornell.edu/AllAboutBirds/BirdGuide/Brown_Creeper.html#soun
d.

The sun moves a minute of arc, measured against the background of the fixed
stars, in about 25 minutes. Interesting choice of units.

"Ready to forgive...." That and a good haircut will take you a long way.