ATD stars above, abyssal plain below

[Monte Davis]

> I've met, so to speak, this way hot mathematician, a
> BABE, but I fear she'll flicker in and out of
> existence as the Chums of Chance seem to do. Perhaps
> this is quantum-mechanical fiction...

Sho nuf. Over at the Chumps of Choice AtDblog yesterday, folks were talking
about Yashmeen and her adoptive dad Auberon Halfcourt. Does he *really* know
of a *real* Shambhala, did she *really* walk through the wall, etc. Someone
asked: "If you write off Shambhala, then what else do you have to write off
and reinterpret somehow? The whole book?" I replied:

Yes.

>From Stencil's quest in V. onward, Pynchon has been playing the scales of
his characters' hope for a transcendent Answer, a Counterforce, an anarchist
miracle, a signal buried in the sferics or a city buried in the sand, a
perfect reconciliation of history and hope (aka parents and children).

That hope is not merely *analogous* to our hope as readers that we can
penetrate the veil of the Temple (cf. Jachim and Boaz, p. 346 [thanks,
David!]) and suss out What TRP Really Personally Sincerely Believes In. It
is the *same* hope.

This is not some varnish of unreliable narration and modernist meta that we
can strip away, arriving at a checklist of what's true vs. what's Yashmeen's
or Halfcourt's delusion. (Is Oedipa crazy, or is she on the cusp of
revelation?)

This is *radical*, root-and-branch ambiguity, and we're not going to find a
stable resting place from which to resolve it, any more than we're going to
find an absolute, pre-Einsteinian clock and meter stick to tell us when and
where we *really* are.