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

[Michael Bailey]

Wheh wow, darn, we're getting very near the end...

one thing that I recurrently think in passing, is that in a Nabokovian,
non-psychological way, a book in general and therefore this one
is a map of the author's consciousness...

Anne Tyler, for one author at least, has said her idea of Heaven would
be to live
in a place populated by her characters, so I hope a few jottings about
AtD in that light might not be terribly out of line:

all these characters are partial differentials of OBA projected
backwards in time:
The Chums, their giddiness and silliness and discipline those of his own
HuckTom fantasies about life, juxtaposed against or bouncing off the jutting
jetty of reality

Especially one might picture him as each of the Traverses
Webb Traverse the crusader, whose soul was stirred by injustice

Frank the merely competent set adrift but meeting up with indigenes
and revolution

Reef the lucky gamer crazy and giddy yet capable of acting soberly

Kit the mathematician whose ambitious path was distorted by some
kind of turbulent field, but warped into a surrealistic victory of
space and time

Lake, the rebellious and sad, the dark sterile mother (Binah)...

but also the other players -

Cyprian, somehow relates to the P-lore of him sitting at a cocktail party
staring at an ice cube, for, like, a really long time
(the kind of devout attention to the usually unattended that I impute
prehaps correctly to Cyprian)
 and also the Huck-homoerotic-male bonding that
underlies military, organizational, sports and other behaviours
delineated and exacerbated in Cyprian's story...
(but that ice cube incident also relates to the sentient ice and even
the northern-beast)

Vibe the magnate - surely vibes with the past family wealth and also,
perhaps, with his real wealth-position ie his word-hoard and perhaps
his attitude toward other authors (or an attitude an unreconstructed emanation
of himself might take - his place in the canon as Michael Berube suggested
being reproached silently by Tolson's exclusion, for instance - one might
imagine a character without the sweetness that the real P has reacting
to Berube's
monograph as Vibe in his Pearl Street study animadverted on the faceless masses
threatening him)

Fleetwood Vibe, the aristocratic explorer, the inescapably privileged
whose merits
as a thinker and doer - though indubitably considerable - are eclipsed by the
sins natural to colonialism (boilerplate into which all the stories of America
are just filling in blanks) - as Eliot might have said, a moment's
(sometthing) which
an age of prudence cannot undo (and the measure of Fleetwood must include
the fact of his acceptance and knowledge of the guilt)

Somebody like Merle, too, I'd see as close to the author's heart,
able to work. A lot.  Yet not without a social component and not for mere
gain or power, but for the glory of the work...

and so forth


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


-- 
"He ain't crazy, he's a-makin' pottery" - Finley Pater Dunne