AtDTDA (43) Tristero's Empire 968

[robinlandseadel at comcast.net]

I realize I'm jumping ahead. 

"Against the Day" means just that, it's in opposition to the 
white-out of total revelation/annihilation, to Daylight, to
"overexposure", a fear of light. In these pages, entering 
World War One proper [while noting that war of 
sorts is really non-stop through-out the book] themes of 
light and revelation come to the fore just as themes 
reminiscent of The Crying of Lot 49 emerge.

I'd say that WWI starts on 962.  Cyprian plays Eurydice 
as he/she (the name Cyprian points to Venus) becomes a 
bride of the night. Pynchon goes to great pains to bring up 
the Orpheus/Eurydice myth, as the myth has been playing 
in the background for quite a while. I've had plenty of 
conversations concerning the "Mystery Girls", their culture, 
history and magic. And the sense is that the music of the 
tribes that were backed into the mountains and villages of 
Bulgaria carried on musical traditions that go back to Orpheus.

The obvious parallel is Oedipus/Oedipa.

On 953 it is revealed to Cyprian that light 
itself is the new terror weapon, leading to Cyprian musing on 
the phrase "Born of light." In his personal moment of revelation  
Cyprian has the horrible vision of the flash, that great and 
growing fear of the twentieth century, the collective dread of the
great plutonian era that blossomed into the mushroom cloud 
of our collective nightmares.

It's only fair to note that pages 957/958 have the greatest 
concentration of pink tabs in the book. I'm gonna toss out a 
few ideas, this is jazz, not rocket science.

First off: W.A.S.T.E. I'd say first and foremost, this is a riff on 
the Wasteland, there's other riffs on the wasteland in Against 
the Day, really good ones. I can think of all sorts of reasons 
why Thomas Pynchon is keen on T.S. Eliot. Bear/Stearns
downfall is history repeating itself/the most obvious proof that 
we are now in a depression/more wasteland.

Second, Philatilly. I know it's the ultimate trainspotting [used 
to obsessionally collect every single Charlie Parker record, 
before I wised up and realized the great Goddess gave us 
editing tape for a reason!] But it's all over CoL49 and AtD
with AtD's postal armies of the night even more all-encompassing,
what with new and even weirder modes of distortion popping up 
all the time. For more, here's Edna Mosh.

Thoid, the images of the stamps/postcards described are the 
sorts of images on the Tristero stamps in The Crying of Lot 49.
If you spent enough time scanning the online images for stamps
coming out of the mythical shambhala---somewhere in Chinese
Turkestan---you can see echos of Tuvan stamps in this passage:
"illustrated with scenes of the War", "printed in two or three languages",
'"Turkish and Cyrillc alphabets'", "provisional overprints",
all found in these Tuvan stamps, stamps that lead back to 
Shambhala, like the stamp on the cover of the book or Lord 
Overlunch's stockbook. But wait there's more! The scenes of 
gruesome carnage, the acid-bummer green of the fluorescent
inks on the stamps---if they ain't W.A.S.T.E. stamps then I 
don't know what is!

This passage speaks of a place that exists in many people's
imagination on account of these stamps, stamps that really are 
not attached to any government at all, an anarchist's postal service.

I'll stop counting, and please note "They posted them, in the 
sure and certain hope of none arriving. . . ." straight outta
San Narcisco, baby, let's "do it" to George of the Jungle re-runs, 
that monkey is getting me hot! The connections to the realm of
Tristero are poetic, Rilke and Joyce and T.S. Eliot---there is an
emptiness and anticipation in the art of the surrealists that
Pynchon evokes in his novels, in particular in Gravity's Rainbow, 
The Crying of Lot 49 and Against the Day. Maybe I'm finally ready 
to "get" V., looking at surrealism and an engine of creation for OBA. 
I do think the boy sees the first world war as the real catastrophy 
of the twentieth century.He constantly points to these breaks in art 
at the time, the Surrealists, the Theater of the Absurd, as if the 
music really died with the soundless echo of Cyprian's departure. . . .

. . . .Und nicht einmal sein Schritt klingt aus dem tonlosen Los. . . .

. . . .his absorbtion into the night. So many of the threads in 
Pynchon are best understood as riffs on poetic concepts, 
there's a "Beat" sensibility under it all---"keep cool but care."
At times the stuff's funny, at times it's scary, sometimes the 
assult of raw data can overwhelm and mis-direct you back into 
the stone age but the connective tissue is poetry---more 
allusive and evocative than anything else.