AtDTDA: (12) whatever has happened to my brain? 350

[robinlandseadel at comcast.net]

              mikebailey:
              since Robin is observing the 4th great 
              injunction, and keeping silence on the occult
              implications, I'll cite another great injunction
              ("guard the secrets: reveal them constantly")
              and spill what little I know or can find out. . . .

Well, thanks. I've just looked up the charecteristics of Amethysts:

              Amethyst is a purple variety of quartz often used 
              as an ornament. The name comes from the 
              Greek a ("not") and methuskein ("to intoxicate"), 
              a reference to the belief that the stone protected 
              its owner from drunkenness; the ancient Greeks 
              and Romans wore amethyst and made drinking 
              vessels of it in the belief that it would prevent 
              intoxication.

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

Put the health/spirit aspects of Garnets and Amethysts together and 
they form the inverse of wine and a hangover cure as well. Yet their 
depth of colour and intensity of hue mimics wine. I'm sure if we jump 
down this rabbit hole we will find a unexpected density of allusion in 
this passage, "beyond time, before memory". I'm sure that the 
tall magician's assistant is a member of the Zombini family. We do 
have a flashy magical introduction to an extraordinary magical change in 
Dally's life. Note that Merle is an alchemist, a kind of a purist whereas 
Eryls is a stage magician, in radical opposition [1]. Dally is moving away 
from the hermit's life to a very public one. I see Dally as tied (like at
the subatomic level) to Kit, analogous paths that take an extreme
fork in the road. Then there's that "CABINET OF MYSTERY" to 
consider, the synthesis of various forms of genre fiction into the
weird gumbo that is AtD. Dally's slipped a classic noir mickey finn
and slides into a different world, one that includes 
bifurcating/bi-locating cruise ships, and that wonderful phrase:
"a strange eclipse of time."

This probably seems [and probably is] a strange digression, but my 
copy of "Anatomy of Melancholy" arrived in the mail yesterday. This 
pull quote from the back cover indicates its relevance to Pynchon:

              One of the maddest and most perfectly paranoid, 
              obsessively organized, etceterative assaults of the 
              feeble human powers of concentration aver 
              attempted." Angus Fletcher 

There's a whole world of horrid puns you could make out of that 
man's name, making the pull quote even more Pynchonian. Here, 
have a slice:

Which is yet more to be lamented,
they persuade them this hellish course of life is holy, they promise heaven
to such as venture their lives _bello sacro_, and that by these bloody
wars, as Persians, Greeks, and Romans of old, as modern Turks do now their
commons, to encourage them to fight, _ut cadant infeliciter_. "If they die
in the field, they go directly to heaven, and shall be canonised for
saints." (O diabolical invention!) put in the Chronicles, _in perpetuam rei
memoriam_, to their eternal memory: when as in truth, as [323]some hold, it
were much better (since wars are the scourge of God for sin, by which he
punisheth mortal men's peevishness and folly) such brutish stories were
suppressed, because _ad morum institutionem nihil habent_, they conduce not
at all to manners, or good life. But they will have it thus nevertheless,
and so they put note of [324]"divinity upon the most cruel and pernicious
plague of human kind," adore such men with grand titles, degrees, statues,
images, [325]honour, applaud, and highly reward them for their good
service, no greater glory than to die in the field.

http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/1/0/8/0/10800/10800.txt

Like the man said, it's an "etceterative assault", listmaking of the highest
caliber. It's the sort of text that Pynchon must have read in preparation for 
Mason & Dixon and a possible influence upon the listmaking we find in
Against the Day. Among other things:

              On its surface, the book is a medical textbook in which 
              Burton applies his large and varied learning in the 
              scholastic manner to the subject of melancholia 
              (which includes what is now termed clinical depression).

              Though presented as a medical text, The Anatomy 
              of Melancholy is as much a sui generis work of 
              literature as it is a scientific or philosophical text, 
              and Burton addresses far more than his stated 
              subject. In fact, the Anatomy uses melancholy 
              as the lens through which all human emotion and 
              thought may be scrutinized, and virtually the 
              entire contents of a 17th-century library are 
              marshalled into service of this goal.[1]

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

On its surface, Against the Day is Web[b] of tales concerning Anarchists
and Plutes and the skirmishes between the two groups, on the other it 
is a sui generis work of literature, one that weaves together many different
genres of writing, with the voices of many different sorts of narrators. Note 
that the big change in Dally's life happens when she's steered into the
Cabinet of Mystery. 

[1] I see Merle as a radical purist, one who could easily commune with 
Webb Traverse, a magician living the life of a gypsy. But the Zombini 
family is very out there, very theatrical and (as entertainers dependant
on ticket sales) tied to the money flowing from the great engines of 
commerce It's the kind of dicotomy you can find in Ursala K. LeGuin's
"The Dispossessed", with the hardscrabble radicals on the Moon, and 
the Earth being a land of great social division and many potential
luxuries for the select few.