AtDtDA(28): In the Pale Blue Aftermath

Sun Mar 23 15:43:48 CDT 2008

   "In the pale blue aftermath, the first thing they noticed was that
the city below was not the same as the one they had arrived at the
night before...." (AtD, Pt. IV, p. 793)

"The streets were all visible now"

Cf. ...

"those precise light-frequencies which would allow human eyes to see"

http://www.jibjab.com/view/76920
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D1uaw3WIOlc

"'Shambhala'"

Yes?  No?  Let me know ...

"the veil separating their own space from that of the everyday world"

Cf. (?) ...

"the veil of Maya" (AtD, Pt. II, p. 224)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maya_(illusion)
http://against-the-day.pynchonwiki.com/wiki/index.php?title=ATD_219-242#Page_224

In Against the Day, as they become increasingly counterfactual to the
world below, the intensity of their vector becomes transcendental:
they begin to leave us, though they visit once in a while to help....

http://www.scifi.com/sfw/books/column/sfw14197.html
http://waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l&month=0708&msg=120739

"'It was the Trespassers'"

Presumably individuals in the company of Mr. Ace and Alonzo Meatman,
whose intentions toward the Chums of Chance are apparently sinister
and for their own benefit. They appear to travel back through the
stream of time without any kind of permission to execute their plans,
thus making them trespassers (or parasites).

The idea of trespass could be thought of in another way too. Miles
mentions Mr. Ace knowing him as a 'peeper' who observes the
trespassers as they come to his time. We could think of the
'trespassers' as anyone in any time who looks back at a point in
history. As such, they are actually 'peepers'. That these seem to have
found a way not just to peep but actually to participate makes them
more than peepers, in fact, it is this that constitutes their
'trespass'.

Pynchon seems to be playing with how we view history and the past, a
theme common to all his work. The Chums, whose existence is, to an
extent, fictional even within the work of fiction, are a nexus meant
to control boundaries between points in time (e.g. the future and the
present, or its past). Historians and other future observers want to
use the past for their own purposes. If they become visible to the
people in that past, they will appear as 'trespassers' and violators.
As Miles says, they do "not have our best interests in mind".

We ourselves (readers and perhaps even more, Wiki authors) are also
trespassers from the standpoint of the Chums. We read about them in
the novel, which takes us to the past, to their present, and inserts
us in a way that is invisible to them. We then write up entries and
think thoughts about what they do. We are in their world in some way
that to them is utterly mysterious and sinister because, again, we
have own agendas in mind and not theirs.

http://against-the-day.pynchonwiki.com/wiki/index.php?title=ATD_397-428#Page_417

Down where the 'Hidden People' live, inside their private rock
dwellings, where humans who visit them can be closed in and never find
a way out again. Iceland spar is what hides the Hidden People, makes
it possible for them to move through the world that thinks of itself
as 'real,' provides that all-important ninety-degree twist to their
light, so they can exist alongside our own world but not be seen. They
and others as well, visitors from elsewhere, of non-human aspect.

"They have been crossing here, crossing over, between the worlds, for
generations. Our ancestors knew them. Looking back over a thousand
years, here is a time when their trespassings onto our shores at last
converge, as in a vanishing-point, with those of the first Norse
visitors.

"They arrive here in criminal frames of mind, much like those early
Norsemen, who were either fleeing retribution for offenses committed
back where they came from or seeking new coastlines to pillage. Who in
our excess of civilization strike us now as barbaric, incapable of
mercy. Compared to these other Trespassers, however, they are the soul
of civility." - p.134

"There's no discovering them unless they choose so." 413; "We are here
among you as seekers of refuge from our present—your future—a time of
worldwide famine, exhausted fuel supplies, terminal poverty—the end of
the capitalistic experiment." 415; time-travellers from The Future,
424; 793; and Aztlan, 926; Professors return to "the other side" 930;

http://against-the-day.pynchonwiki.com/wiki/index.php?title=T

http://waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l&month=0708&msg=120841

"the Tesla device"

Cf., e.g., ...

"The machine would run him in circles if he let it, and he would gain
nothing by asserting his titular master over it. The Tymbrimi spy who
had lent the Niss to him had made it clear that the machine's
usefulness was based upon its flexibility and initiative, however
irritating it became." --David Brin, Startide Rising (1983)

http://www.davidbrin.com/startiderisingsample4.html

Tierra del Fuego

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tierra_del_Fuego

"'Everything here just went chaotic'"

Recall ...

""Aspects of the landscape of Tierra del Fuego ... began to show up in
Siberia ..." (AtD, Pt. IV, p. 784)

http://waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l&month=0803&msg=125117

... a novel "double-whammy" theory suggesting that an impact on one
side of the earth could produce massive volcanic activity at the
antipode -- a point directly  opposite on the far side -- and that the
combined effect would cause disaster....

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,537675,00.html

Gibbs

Gibbs, Professor Willard

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Willard_Gibbs

29; 158; 318-19; 532-3; 793; Gibbsian, 526; 532; Josiah Willard Gibbs
was arguably the greatest American scientist of the 19th century,
bringing the power of thermodynamics and statistical mechanics to what
had been cookbook and rule-of-thumb chemistry. He demonstrated and
extended the value of modeling in "phase space," a graph in which each
physical state of a system is represented by a point representing
pressure, volume, temperature, etc. ("water in all its phases," 368)

http://against-the-day.pynchonwiki.com/wiki/index.php?title=G
http://waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l&month=0701&msg=114904

Thanks, Tim ...

Kimura

Kimura, Shunkichi

29; 318; translated Tsurigane into English, 532; 567;

http://against-the-day.pynchonwiki.com/wiki/index.php?title=K
http://waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l&month=0701&msg=114905

Thanks again, Tim, and see as well, e.g.,  ...

Tesla and Japan

http://www.asahi-net.or.jp/~VE3M-SND/japan.html

On the Nabla of Quaternions
Shunkichi Kimura
The Annals of Mathematics, Vol. 10, No. 1/6 (1895 - 1896), pp. 127-155

http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0003-486X(1895%2F1896)1%3A10%3A1%2F6%3C127%3AOTNOQ%3E2.0.CO%3B2-H

Meanwhile, I think I might name my next band The Pale Blue Aftermath ...