VL-IV (12) Memesis, Magical Realism & Parrots, 172/173, 233/226

[Robin Landseadel]

On Feb 25, 2009, at 3:17 PM, Dave Monroe wrote:

> has anyone commented yet on parrots as emblematic of mimesis . . . ?


	"¡Pendejo!" screamed the parrot. "Think! Double refraction! Your
	favorite optical property! Silver mines, full of espato double-
	refracting all the time, and not only light rays, naw, uh-uh! Cities,
	too! People! Parrots! You just keep floating along in that gringo
	smoke cloud, thinking there's only one of everything, huevon,
	you don't see those strange lights all around you. Ay,
	Chihuahua. In fact, Ay, Chihuahua, Chihuahua. Kid engineers!
	All alike. Closed minds. Always been your problem."
	Against the Day, page 387

Think! Double refraction!

Pynchon's narrative processes are driven more by poetry than plotting.  
Driblette's dialog comes to mind,:

	"You don't understand," getting mad. "You guys, you're like
	Puritans are about the Bible. So hung up with words, words.
	You know where that play exists, not in that file cabinet, not in
	any paperback you're looking for, but"—a hand emerged from
	the veil of shower-steam to indicate his suspended head"—in
	here. That's what I'm for. To give the spirit flesh. The words, who
	cares? They're rote noises to hold line bashes with, to get past
	the bone barriers around an actor's memory, right? But the
	reality is in this head. Mine. I'm the projector at the planetarium,
	all the closed little universe visible in the circle of that stage is
	coming out of my mouth, eyes, sometimes other orifices also."

The "story" isn't the point as much as the poetic interlinking of  
words and word-contents bumping up against each other—"rote noises to  
hold line bashes with". The word-play's the thing.

Enter ARIEL:

	To every article.
	I boarded the king's ship; now on the beak,
	Now in the waist, the deck, in every cabin,
	I flamed amazement: sometime I'ld divide,
	And burn in many places; on the topmast,
	The yards and bowsprit, would I flame distinctly,
	Then meet and join. Jove's lightnings, the precursors
	O' the dreadful thunder-claps, more momentary
	And sight-outrunning were not; the fire and cracks
	Of sulphurous roaring the most mighty Neptune
	Seem to besiege and make his bold waves tremble,
	Yea, his dread trident shake.

On page 387 you have Joaquin screaming about double refraction. On  
page 389 you have:

	"Crazy gringo motherfucker," opined Joaquin the parrot.

	Frank and Ewball proceeded up to a patch of rocks overlooking
	the valley Inside of ten minutes, a line of soldiers appeared
	below, tightening, folding stretching, repeating the motion, like a
	disembodied wing against an ashy sky attempting to remember
	the protocols of flight.

 From parrot to a poetic simulacrum of flight to some serious double  
refraction and scrying on page 391:

	Frank had been looking at calcite crystals for a while now,
	through Nicol prisms of lab instruments whose names he'd
	forgotten, among the chats or zinc tailings of the Lake County
	mines, down here in the silver lodes of the Veta Madre and so
	forth, and he doubted anything like this piece of spar had ever
	been seen on Earth, maybe since the early days up in Iceland
	itself, yes quite a specimen all right, a twin crystal, pure,
	colorless, without a flaw, each identically mirrored half about
	the size of a human head and what Ewball would call "of
	scalenohedral habit." And there was this deep glow, though not
	enough ambient light in here to account for it-as if there were a
	soul harbored within.

	"Be careful. Look into it, see things."

Back to flight—or a simulacrum of flight, someone's pulling the rug  
from under reality here—on page 392 as Frank takes his "Hikuli" trip:

	It didn't kick in for a while, but when it did, Frank was taken out
	of himself, not just out of his body by way of some spectacular
	vomiting but out of whatever else he thought he was, out of his
	mind, his country and family, out of his soul.

	At some point he found himself in the air, hand in hand with
	young Estrella, flying quite swiftly, at low altitude, over the starlit
	country. Her hair streaming straight out behind her. Frank, who
	had never flown before, kept wanting to turn right or left and go
	explore arroyos filled with a liquid, quivering darkness, and tall
	cactuses and dramas of predatory pursuit and so forth that now
	and then seemed also to be glowing in these peculiar colors,
	but the girl, who had flown often, knew where they had to go,
	and he understood after a while that she was guiding him, so
	relaxed and flew along with her.

In four pages the story moves from a parrot's curse to astral travel.

Getting from parrots to astral travel takes less time in Vineland—the  
whole trip happens on page 223. Van Meter's trip to "someplace far" is  
a trip to the land of the Thanatoids, the land of the not quite dead  
but certainly not alive. "Blackstream Hotel" suggests the river Styx,  
certainly in its darkness. But things already are slippier in  
Vineland, there's a lot of karmic adjustment under way anyway:

	. . . right at the beginning DL had to sit Takeshi down for an
	elbows-on-the-table talk. "It ain't a-zackly Tokyo here, you know,
	you can't just go free-Iancin' in 'karmic adjustment,' whatever
	that is - nobody'll pay for it."

	"Ha-ha! But that's where you're wrong, Carrot-head! They'll pay
	us just like they pay the garbage men from the garbage dump,
	the plumbers in the septic tank - the mop hands at the toxic spill!

	They don't want to do it - so we'll do it for them! Dive right down
	into it! Down into all that - waste-pit of time! We know it's time
	lost forever - but they don't!"

	"Keep hearin' this 'we.' .. ."

	"Trust me - this is just like insurance - only different! I have the
	experience, and - better than that, the - immunity too!"
	Vineland, pages 172, 173

The narrative flow in Vineland often dives into the waste-pit of time.  
very much in the style of Made for TV movies. And that's just what  
happens when we meet Dr. Elasmo—oops, I mean Larry. Interesting to  
note that Weed Atman's memory is triggered because of Dr. Elasmo's TV  
commercials. Then again, we're dealing with ghosts here:

	She was afraid of what that meant. "Immunity from ... ," her eyes
	wavering to the skylight and windows, she gestured outside, at
	the unseen insomniac population of Shade Creek.
	"Takeshi-san . . . . they're ghosts."


	He winked lewdly. "Do you want to - bite your tongue - or can I
	do it for you? That word - around here it's a no-no!" They were
	victims, he explained, of karmic imbalances - unanswered
	blows, unredeemed suffering, escapes by the guilty - anything
	that frustrated their daily expeditions on into the interior of
	Death, with Shade Creek a psychic jumping-off town - behind it,
	unrolling, regions unmapped, dwelt in by these transient souls
	in constant turnover, not living but persisting, on the skimpiest of
	hopes.
	Vineland, page 173

Just so you understand—uttering the word "Ghost" just ain't PC no- 
more. But isn't a ghost, really, a kind of simulacrum? A person  
without a body, a body without organs, a soul without the substance or  
qualities of the original man or woman? And doesn't that describe so  
beautifully the quotidian lives of those who gave up on or were  
betrayed by the 60's, those "returning deceased war veterans" and once- 
upon-a-time revolutionaries turned couch-potatoes? Ghosts?