ATDTDA (33) - p. 927-30 - railroads

[Mark Kohut]

The Tarahumares are a traditional people renowned for their long-distance running ability.
  Why them here foreknowing the bi-plane? 
   
  Humanly, they touch the limits of natural speed and distance via running, but now comes a machine that can beat them?  
   
   
   
  Current estimates put the population of the Tarahumara in 2006 at between 50,000 and 70,000 people. Most still practice a traditional lifestyle, inhabiting natural shelters such as caves or cliff overhangs, as well as small cabins of wood or stone. Staple crops are corn and beans; however, many of the Tarahumara still practice transhumance, raising cattle, sheep, and goats. Almost all Tarahumara migrate in some form or another in the course of the year.
   
   
   
  

kelber at mindspring.com wrote:
  
"The harsh hum filled the valley."

A biplane turns up. "Though this was the first time it had come up this way, the Tarahumares appeared to know what it was."

This doesn't seem to relate to any historical event. Pynchon seems to have chosen this region as some sort of portal of time travel. Through peyote, the locals can travel through time? Trespassers from the future visit here?

Frank and Wren visit the ruins at Casas Grandes and Wren wonders "why the Mormon odyssey and the Aztec flight should have so many points in common." Mormons as incipient colonialists (my Mormon in-laws would beg to differ)? Mormonism expanded exponentially once its missionaries hit African and Latin America. 

While Cyprian, Yashmeen, Reef and Kit et al are dealing with Eastern expansionism, Frank understands that here, there's westward expansion: "the history of all this terrible continent, clear to the Pacific Ocean and the Arctic ice, was the same history of exile and migration, the white man moving in on the Indian, the eastern corporations moving in on the white man, and their incursions with drills and dynamite into the deep seams of the sacred mountains, the sacred lands."

He's at a cusp of history where the sacred land (Aztlan, Shambhala) is being usurped by railroads, the white person's path. The railroad is the instrument of oppression.

There's a lot of leave-taking by railroad in ATD: Mayva says goodbye to Kit, Merle to Dally. Stray and Ewball leave together on the Juarez train amid public displays of affection. Now, Frank says goodbye to Wren, who's likewise leaving on the Juarez train.

Frank muses (p. 930):
"Who at some point hadn't come to hate the railroad? ... it took away everything indiscriminately, to be sold, to be slaughtered, to be led beyond the reach of love."

In Pynchon's vision of justice (I’m positing, anyway) the inhabitants of Aztlan were driven out by sinister invaders and the Traverse family was similarly invaded by the Eastern corporations. Via peyote or Zen meditation, we can seek what we've lost in visions, or we can fight the invaders via anarchism.

Laura





       
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