AtDTDA: [38] pgs. 1079, 1081 "Talk about anomalies in Time!"

[Mark Kohut]

Lotsa choice, some "chance", spheres--shape of the mind, one might say?---
full of almost infinite scope..............

TRP here has found some great metaphors for his stress on one's "inner self" in M & D, throughout ATD, elsewhere............among other meanings
for such metaphors.

Banishing some of those who have written his fiction is "deterministic"....

--- On Tue, 8/12/08, robinlandseadel at comcast.net <robinlandseadel at comcast.net> wrote:

> From: robinlandseadel at comcast.net <robinlandseadel at comcast.net>
> Subject: AtDTDA: [38] pgs. 1079, 1081  "Talk about anomalies in Time!"
> To: "P-list" <pynchon-l at waste.org>
> Date: Tuesday, August 12, 2008, 11:01 AM
> Things are about to get a whole lot more fictional. The
> infinite whorls of 
> possibility, all the the possible insinuated fictions come
> into play from 
> here on to the end of the novel, expressed as joy in
> possibility.
> 
> The Professor, having reconnoitered with Kit in the
> Scottish Cafe:
> 
>           . . . .Kit discovered the Scottish Cafe and the
> circle of more and 
>           less insane who frequented it, and where one
> night he was 
>           presented with a startling implication of
> Zermelo's Axiom of Choice. 
>           It was possible in theory, he was shown beyond a
> doubt, to take a 
>           sphere the size of a pea, cut it apart into
> several very precisely 
>           shaped pieces, and reassemble it into another
> sphere the size of 
>           the sun. 
> 
>           "Because one emits light and the other
> doesn't, don't you think." Kit 
>           was taken aback. "I don't know." 
> 
>           He spent awhile contemplating this. Zermelo had
> been a docent 
>           at Gottingen when Kit was there and, like
> Russell, had been 
>           preoccupied with the set of all sets that are not
> members of 
>           themselves. . . .
> 
> From: Can a Mathematical Idea Have Political Import?
> HYPOTHESES - A Matter Of Choice
> By Jim Holt
> 
>           What is this much-invoked thing called the axiom
> of choice? 
>           Is it really devoid of political significance, as
> Sokal and Bricmont 
>           claim? Or could it turn out to pack an
> ideological punch beyond 
>           the imagination of even the most wild-eyed Left
> Bank postmodern 
>           theorist?
>  
>           To understand what the axiom of choice is, start
> with this homely 
>           example, apparently thought up by Bertrand
> Russell. Suppose 
>           you have an infinite number of pairs of shoes and
> you want to pick 
>           out one shoe from each pair. There is an obvious
> rule for doing this: 
>           Take the left shoe from each pair (or use the
> right-shoe rule—it 
>           doesn't matter). Now suppose you have an
> infinite number of pairs 
>           of socks and you want to select one sock from
> each pair. Since 
>           socks in a pair, unlike shoes, are identical,
> there is no rule for 
>           defining a set that consists of precisely one
> sock from each pair. 
>           The choice for each pair would have to be
> arbitrary; and since 
>           there are infinitely many pairs, that means an
> infinite number of 
>           arbitrary choices. Here is where the axiom of
> choice comes to the 
>           rescue. It allows one to assume the existence of
> such a "choice 
>           set," even though there is no rule for
> constructing it. . . .
>  
>           . . . .Today, mathematicians are overwhelmingly
> pro-choice. 
>           Without the axiom of choice, much of modern
> mathematics 
>           would simply not exist. . . .
>  
>           . . . .But wait. Subversion lurks. Let us go back
> to the year 
>           1924. The scene is the Scottish Café, in the
> city of Lvov 
>           (then in Poland, now in Ukraine). Among the
> logicians 
>           and mathematicians who haunt this bohemian spot
> are 
>           Stefan Banach and Alfred Tarski. Together, using
> the axiom 
>           of choice, they come up with a theorem that is
> literally incredible: 
>           It is possible to take a solid sphere, dissect it
> into a finite number 
>           of pieces, and then, without stretching or
> bending those pieces 
>           in any way, reassemble them to form two solid
> spheres each 
>           of which is the same size as the original.
> Equivalently, it is 
>           possible to take a solid sphere the size of an
> orange, dissect 
>           it into a finite number of pieces, and reassemble
> them to form 
>           a solid sphere the size of the sun.
>  
>           The Banach-Tarski paradox, as this theorem came
> to be called, 
>           certainly appears dangerous. It is a sort of
> mathematical miracle 
>           of the loaves and fishes, one that threatens to
> abolish scarcity, 
>           that linchpin of bourgeois economics, and usher
> in a postcapitalist 
>           utopia rather like the one envisaged by Marx.
> (Just think of what 
>           it would do to the gold market.) And it all hangs
> on the axiom of 
>           choice. . . .
> 
> http://www.csub.edu/~mault/mathematicalideas.htm
> 
> The next Professor Vanderjuice episode is the purest of
> Dues ex machina
> demonstrations, down to archetypical specifics:
> 
>           . . . .Then the dome of the courthouse began to
> lift, or expand 
>           skyward, till after a moment I saw it was in fact
> the spherical 
>           gasbag of a giant balloon, rising slowly from
> behind the dome, 
>           where it had been hidden. Sort of that
> pea-and-sun conjecture 
>           again, only different. Of course it was the Chums
> of Chance, 
>           not the first time they'd come to my
> rescue-though usually it 
>           was from professorial inattention, walking off
> cliffs or into 
>           spinning propellers .... But this time they had
> rescued me from 
>           my life, from the cheaply-sold and dishonored
> thing I might have 
>           allowed it to become. . . .
> 
> As someone once said:
> 
>           ". . . .there's still time to change the
> road you're on. . . ."
> 
> And it appears that Lvov might well be Kit's personal
> Shambhala:
> 
>           "What just happened?" Kit feeling
> dazed. He looked around 
>           a little wildly. "I was in Lwow-" 
> 
>           "Excuse me, but you were in Shambhala."
> He handed Kit the 
>           glass and indicated one stamp in particular,
> whose finely-etched 
>           vignette showed a marketplace with a number of
> human figures, 
>           Bactrian camels and horses beneath a lurid
> sun-and-clouds effect 
>           in the sky.
>  
>           "I like to look at these all carefully with
> the loupe at least once a 
>           week, and today I noticed something different
> about this ten-dirhan 
>           design, and wondered if possibly someone, some
> rival, had crept 
>           in here while I was out and substituted a
> variant. But of course I
>           found the change immediately, the one face that
> was missing, your 
>           own, I know it well by now, it is, if you
> don't mind my saying so, the 
>           face of an old acquaintance .... " 
> 
>           "But I wasn't ... " 
> 
>           "Well, well. A twin, perhaps."
>           AtD, p. 1081 
> 
> As regards bilocating Shambhala & Lwow, the evidence is
> in the stamps:
> 
> http://tinyurl.com/56wm5w
> 
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lviv
> 
> http://against-the-day.pynchonwiki.com/wiki/images/e/ec/ATD_stamp.gif
> 
> . . . .there's three towers with a lion under in Lwow,
> the "Tibetian Chamber of
> Commerce stamp has a lion under three Mountains. 
> 
>           Maybe it's not the world, but with a minor
> adjustment or two 
>           it's what the world might be.