VL-IV Chapter 9: People are Strange [pgs. 132/133]

[Robin Landseadel]

On Jan 25, 2009, at 2:04 PM, Amy E. Vorro wrote:
	. . . any pointers regarding etiquette or other
	such things are more than welcome.

Well, allow me to apologize for not being more involved the previous  
week. Finished up my nth* reading of Vineland today. I’ll say that  
Vineland's final "rapture" can be taken at face value even while it  
oozes  with plot conventions derived from made-for-TV-movies &  
features bright neon signifiers of media saturation & damage. I'll get  
into Jess Traverse's Emerson quotation when we get there [page 369],  
but if that ain’t the Sermon on the Mount of Karma, I don’t know what  
is. And I probably don’t anyway. The linking material that joins  
Vineland to Against the Day is Karma & Family. I’d be remiss if I  
didn’t point out concepts & signs related to Buddhism and Pynchon's  
take on the martial arts constantly turns on the issue of karma.

On page 133 DL is fleeing the grip of gentleman mobster Ralph Wayvone  
via a 1966 Plymouth Fury—a car that sounds like a Firesign Theater  
appellation for a vengeful Puritan transport device—

	”By this time she was used to the car and its unorthodox push-button  
shifting,
	having made the analysis "stick shift = penis" and speculating that a  
push-button
	automatic might at least appear more clitorally ladylike, or, as DL  
might've put it,
	regressive, if there'd been anybody anymore to talk to, which of  
course there
	wasn't.

Radio station KFWB is playing the Door’s “People Are  
Strange” [September 1967] ° as DL high-tails out of L.A. like Marion  
Crane with a trunk full of cash & body parts. Somewhere around  
Columbus, Ohio DL does her level best to become invisible; to become a  
one-woman witness protection program:

	. . . She knew she'd been slowly poisoning her spirit, drifting
	further into her obsession with Brock Vond. Here was Ralph,
	promising resolution and release.  What was she complaining
	about? Only that acts, deeply moral and otherwise, had
	consequences - only the workings of karma. One unfelt
	touch to the correct piece of Vond anatomy could commit her to
	a major redirection of her life. There was no question that she'd
	ever be free of Ralph. A girl did one Death Touch job and right
	away people started getting ideas. Whatever she chose to do
	would get her in trouble. She promised to give him her decision
	at dinner the next evening, and then she got the hell out of town . . .
	Vineland, pg. 132

On page 126 we find out that DL’s karma was compromised from the get- 
go anyway:

	I'm working for you, does that mean -"

	"Our connection is of very old giri, lot of details, Japanese names,  
you'd lose
	track. The war figures in heavily. But you and I, we're connected  
only by bonds of
   	master and disciple, free to disconnect at any time. If you could  
leave your
	parents' house that lightly, you'll have no trouble leaving me."

	What was this? Guilt? "You want me to go back?"

	He cackled and fell into sounding not quite decipherable. "You will  
go back. Till
   	you do, stick around!"

The sensei senses that Darryl Louise is not destined to be a champion  
of pure martial arts. He knows DL's more of a mistress of the lower  
depths:

	This was what he felt he had to pass on - not the brave hard-won  
grace of any
   	warrior, but the cheaper brutality of an assassin. When DL finally  
tumbled, she
   	brought it to his attention.

	"Sure," he told her, "this is for all the rest of us down here with  
the insects, the
   	ones who don't quite get to make warrior, who with two tenths of a  
second to
   	decide fail to get it right and live with it the rest of our lives  
- it's for us drunks, and
   	sneaks, and people who can't feel enough to kill if they have  
to ... this is our
   	equalizer, our edge - all we have to share. Because we have  
ancestors and
	descendants too - our generations ... our traditions."

	"But everybody's a hero at least once," she informed him, "maybe your  
chance
	hasn't come up yet."

	"DL-san, you are crazy," he diagnosed gently, "seeing too many  
movies, maybe.
   	Those you will be fighting - those you must resist - they are  
neither samurai nor
	ninja. They are sarariman, incrementalists, who cannot act boldly and  
feel only
	contempt for those who can .... Only for what I must teach you have  
they learned
	respect."

The DL/Takeshi material echos the Geli Tripping/Tchitcherine plot  
thread—gals on “The Path” take a detour to the black arts, but ‘cause  
their hearts are pure there’s a positive magickal spin in their  
expressions of dark magic. Geli’s spell [derived from A. E. Waite's  
Book of Black Magic] has positive & pacifist blowback. DL’s ‘death  
touch’ leads to true [albeit cheap] romance. Intent might not be  
exactly everything—you do need a toolkit—but it’s a great big deal in  
magickal operations.‡ Deep down inside, DL feels a need to do the  
right thing and even though she uses criminal & near-criminal methods  
to do these things, in the end DL’s quality of intent pays off.
	
*I lost count somewhere towards the end of the Clinton Administration.

° which leads me to a question: did KFWB go back to playing music? I  
recall my newscasting uncle Charles G. Arlington’s triode-polished  
bass-baritone booming out of KFWB, a station that went all-news-all- 
the-time on March 11, 1968. I recall that up until that day KFWB was a  
top 40 station. Does this limit our time-frame for the death-touch? Is  
this a pointer to MK-Ultra’s expansion? Can I have my Thorazine now?  
Please?

‡ The “Postmodern Mysticism” thread reminded me that no matter what  
OBA thinks or believes, he’s read plenty on the subject. Fast or slow,  
the Law’s the Law.