ATDTDA (5.4) - Bad Ice After Midnight

[Tore Rye Andersen]

John:

>There's the notion that ice may be in some way 'alive', firing up
>another Pynchon theme, the animate vs. the inanimate. It's suggested that
>the ice may be "trying to express some argument of its own," there is "bad
>ice," and "icefields which sought as if with conscious malevolence to take
>the unwary down like quicksand, without warning". We hear, in one of the
>last few biographical details about Constance Penhallow, that as a girl she
>attended a class in school where "the topic of study would be Living
>Creatures. 'I suggested ice. They threw me out of class.'"

[...]

>Is all this stuff about a possible consciousness in the ice directly
>connected with the 'Figure' which the Vormance Expedition eventually brings
>back with them?

It certainly seems that way to me. As I noted in an earlier post, the 
unnamed glacier and the Figure are described in remarkably similar terms. 
The description of:

"a far-spreading glacier, the only one in this entire domain of ice that had
never been named, as if in fearful acknowledgment of its ancient nobility,
its seemingly conscious pursuit of a project...." (129)

- mirrors this remark about the Figure:

"But who could have foreseen that the far-fallen object would prove
to harbor not merely a consciousness but an ancient purpose as well, and a
plan for carrying it out?" (149)

Both are ancient, and both have a consciousness, and a purpose. And both, of 
course, point us back to that well-known Pynchon theme of mineral 
consciousness and sentient rocks. Time and time again, the metaphors and 
themes of AtD seem to be elaborations of metaphors and themes in Pynchon's 
earlier novels, GR and M&D in particular. The idea of the Earth/rocks as 
living creatures surfaces several times in GR. On pp. 496-97 of that novel, 
Oscar tells us how his mother once insulted a rock (for twenty minutes!), 
and on p. 590 Lyle Bland discovers during one of his astral journeys that 
the Earth is alive:

"it's hard to get over the wonder of finding that Earth is a living critter, 
after all these years of thinking about a big dumb rock to find a body and 
psyche"

And on p. 612-13 of GR, the idea is elaborated even further in the passage 
about Felipe who makes "his noontime devotionals to the living presence of a 
certain rock back in the wasteland of La Rioja":

"But Felipe's particular rock embodies also an intellectual system, for he 
believes (as do M. F. Beal and others) in a form of mineral consciousness 
not too much different from that of plants and animals, except for time 
scale. Rock's time scale is a lot more stretched out. "We're talking frames 
per century," Felipe like everybody else here lately has been using a bit of 
movie language, "per millennium!" Colossal. But Felipe has come to see, as 
those who are not Sentient Rocksters seldom do, that history as it's been 
laid on the world is only a fraction, an outward-and-visible fraction. That 
we must also look to the untold, to the silence around us, to the passage of 
the next rock we notice - to its aeons of history under the long and female 
persistance of water and air (who'll be there, once or twice per century, to 
trip the shutter?), down to the lowland where your paths, human and mineral, 
are most likely to cross..."

This passage is probably the fullest elaboration of this theme in all of 
Pynchon's novels, and it seems to express some of the ideas behind Pynchon's 
frequent use of the theme: taking the long - the very long - historical 
view, for instance. We're not masters of this planet, merely recent guests, 
and we should act accordingly, with proper respect towards these ancient 
Presences which include rocks and ice.
Mason and Dixon also encounter these Presences during their journeys in 
America. At one point they move past South Mountain, "the last concentration 
of Apparitions", and we hear that: "Beyond lies Wilderness, where quite 
another Presence reigns, undifferentiate,-- Thatwhichever _precedeth_ 
Ghostliness..." (M&D, 491), and this ancient Presence - elsewhere 
characterized as "whatever was here before the Indians" (M&D, 442) - seems 
related to both the living ice, the glacier, and the Figure from AtD. The 
idea of the living Earth also recurs in M&D. When Mason visits Maskelyne on 
St. Helena, Maskelyne says of this island:

"For a while I firmly believ'd this Place a conscious Creature, animated by 
power drawn from beneath the Earth [...] 'tis the awareness of living upon a 
_Slumbering Creature_, compar'd to whose Size, we figure not quite as 
Lice,-- that keeps us uniquely attentive to Life so precarious, and what 
Civility is truly necessary, to carry it on." (M&D, 128)

- and we also hear that Maskelyne in his solitude has "reach'd a Compact 
with the Island, as if 'twere sentient" (M&D, 182). Also on St. Helena, the 
ghost of 'Bekah brings Mason an important message:

"Look to the Earth," she instructs him. "Belonging to her as I do, I know 
she lives, and that here upon this Volcanoe in the Sea, close to the Forces 
within, even you, Mopery, may learn of her, Tellurick Secrets you could 
never guess." (M&D, 172)

Some of these Tellurick Secrets are of course known by Captain Zhang, who 
likewise believes "the Planet Earth to be a---living Creature" (M&D, 602).

The ancient, conscious ice and the horrible odalisque of the snows - which 
may be a living meteorite - of AtD are but the latest manifestations, then, 
of this old Pynchon theme. And that they are connected with the previous 
novels becomes evident when one member of the Vormance expedition extolls 
the virtues of Iceland Spar and is met by this skeptical rejoinder from 
another member:

"Another Quest for another damned Magical Crystal. Horsefeathers, I say. 
Wish I'd known before I signed on. Say, you aren't one of these Sentient 
Rocksters, are you?" (AtD, 133)

The use of the term Sentient Rocksters leads us directly back to the same 
term in the passage about Felipe's rock from GR - one of relatively few 
overt allusions to GR in AtD, which surely underlines the importance of the 
theme.

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