ATDTDA skipping around, tenuous connections, febrile speculation...

[robinlandseadel at comcast.net]

          Michael Bailey:
          flighty tonight!

And morning too!

          Tomorrow

Today

          I will treat 10 pages

To a drink!

          as soberly and chastely as I can,

While 3 sheets to the Wind in Copenhagen!

          but tonight I'm'a skip around and shoot 
          off my big fat virtual mouth...

Skippity, skip, skip. . . .

I've been enjoying a number of recent changes in my life, avoiding 
Against the Day partially in order to complete other projects and 
partially to clear my head. A lot of what has been happening in
my life lately has re-introduced me to ceremonial magicians 
and card readers. There's a point where they overlap, our beloved 
author is intimately familiar with that "mystery spot." There's a 
passage, about 15 pages back, where the Grand Cohen talks
just like the people I've been encountering lately:

          "We are light, you see, all of light---we are the light offered 
          the batsmen at the end of the day, the shining eyes of the 
          beloved, the flare of the safety-match at the high city 
          window, the stars and nebulae in full midnight glory, the 
          rising moon through the tram wires, the naphtha lamp 
          glimmering on the costermonger's barrow. . . . When we 
          lost our aethereal being and became embodied, we slowed, 
          thickened, congealed to"---grabbing each side of his face and 
          wobbling it back and forth---"this. The soul itself is a 
          memory we carry of having once moved at the speed and 
          density of light. The first step in out Discipline here is 
          learning that how to re-aquire that rarefaction, that 
          condition of light, to become once more able to pass where 
          we will, through lantern-horn, through window-glass, 
          eventually, though we risk being divided in two, through 
          Iceland spar, which is an expression in crystal form of 
          Earth's velocity as it rushes through the Aether, altering 
          dimensions, and creating double-refraction. . . ." He 
          paused at the door. "Atonement, in any case, comes 
          much later in the journey. Do have something to eat, 
          there's a good chap".
          AtD 687/688

"Atonement", in addition to expiation has a deeper layer of 
meaning---"At one ment" or sitting besides, being at one with.

I've said it before, the Grand Cohen is Nicholas Nookshaft, is
Aleister Crowley, and what is said in this passage is consistent 
with Uncle Al's "Every man and woman is a star". Question is,
how seriously does our beloved author take this miasma of
spiritual quackery and metaphysical pettifoggery? 

Pretty seriously:

http://www.themodernword.com/pynchon/pynchon_essays_stone.html

. . . .seeing how this could turn into a virtual screed/scroll, I'll continue in 
the next post.