First Couple-Three Pages: 6/11 - ATDTDA (11): 296 - 326 --The Deep Read:

[robinlandseadel at comcast.net]

        Mark Kohut:
        Birds of Prey everywhere in ATD.......tell me more.

I'm thinkin' omniscient P.O.V. in fiction, in particular the Omniscient (or in 
some way psychical [Colombo Knows 'cause he's Colombo. Wim Wenders picks 
up on this in "Wings of Desire"; Peter Falk Knows he's in the presence of an 
Angel---one of the great moments of a great film, a pure demonstration of 
Gnosticism]) Detective as Narrator. It's one of the significators of Genre 
Fiction. Chums of Chance, in terms of their general assignment in the Deck, are 
Birds of Prey, and being on-board the Inconvenience allows us that P.O.V., 
though it also makes for a bit of work unraveling all the story threads. 

In Crowley's "Thoth" deck, the one card that contains the image most akin to an 
"Eye of God" is the Tower card, a card that figures heavily in Pynchon's take on 
the Tarot. Do with what thou wilt. Throughout Pynchon's we find forces working 
Against Revelation, restraining forces that hold the world together [sort of]. 
That mute in the posthorn, turned "Against the Day", instead of towards it.

As for the "first, couple-three" that's gonna lead to four, ain't it? So there 
we start turning into a bunch of T.W.I.T.'s looking for embedded subtexts, a 
long list of words that weren't used and the arrangements thereof along with 
other kabbalistic sidetracks and red herrings, usually resolved at the pun 
level. Ahem (prof Irwin Corey passes his hat and Jacket to Annie Sprinkle, who 
is standing nearby, radiantly glowing with her dazzling smile and mammoth 
knockers, chroma index jammed up a bit on the set or is it this veggie drink the 
babushka-ed lady handed to me this morning?) Need to get a closer look at that 
Cyclomite shit, from tiny acorns and so on. I mean, Lew and Merle do link up, 
kinda on the psychical level? Like, resolving the novel at the genre-fiction, 
murder mystery resolution two or three pages [here expanded to more like 30] 
before the end of the novel?

Anyway, that "First, Couple, Three" seems like a cue for Pythagorean Principles. 
As I recall, much of M & D was concerned with the various paradigm 
shifts in "The Age of Enlightment", when all sorts of generally held concepts 
were rendered preterite. Ash heap of history, and so on, In M & D, it's 
Alchemy's traversal from generally held markers for consensus reality to really 
wackko shit for sandaled, joss-sticked losers. Astrology has a similar fate and 
a similar place in M & D. Certain Pythagorean principles that were rendered 
preterite by Quantum Physics traverse over to occult uses. What was once radiant 
sunlight is rendered into a seeming absence of light, events deep in the bowels 
of the underground, and so on. So, everywhere in Pynchon you find ideas burying 
themselves underground. All of the author's writings, on some level, are 
concerned with this endless movement underground.