CoL49 (5) Mirror, Mirror [PC 81]

[Robin Landseadel]

This is from page 81 in the First Perennial Classics edition of 1999.

	A sign in the lobby said WELCOME CALIFORNIA CHAPTER
	AMERICAN DEAF-MUTE ASSEMBLY.

Here's that "mute" again. While contemplating the content of this  
longish short story, note how many echos of the book's themes and  
historical elements seem to be casually thrown in, victims of:

	. . . a variety of abuses, such as overwriting. I will spare
	everybody a detailed discussion of all the overwriting that
	occurs in these stories, except to mention how distressed I am
	at the number of tendrils that keep showing up. I still don't even
	know for sure what a tendril is, I think I took the word from T. S.
	Eliot. I have nothing against tendrils personally, but my overuse
	of the word is a good example of what can happen when you
	spend too much time and energy on words alone. . .
	Slow Learner, 15

Mute or muting or muted, words like these & the concepts they carry  
get thrown around one whole hell of a lot in Lot 49. Perhaps the  
shaping of this novella is determined more by the rules [?] and  
regulations of Beat poetry* than by a need to expose some all- 
consuming conspiratorial cabal.

	Every light in the place burned, alarmingly bright; a truly
	ponderable silence occupied the building.

On Jun 16, 2009, at 2:22 PM, kelber at mindspring.com wrote:

> "In Golden Gate Park she came on a circle of children in their  
> nightclothes, who told her they were dreaming the gathering."
>
> "Among her other encounters were a facially-deformed welder, who  
> cherished his ugliness; a child roaming the night who missed the  
> death before birth ..."
>
> etc. etc.
>
> This sequence reminds me somewhat of Dylan's " A Hard Rain's a-Gonna  
> Fall."

My sense is that the background hum of deep paranoia you're hearing is  
a shared dread of "The Bomb": Gravity's Rainbow ratchets all that up a  
notch or two, but lurking behind the facades of San Narciso's suburban  
towers and the morale boosting anthems at Yoyodyne is dread of the  
great flash of light—a secular announcement of revelation, followed by  
annihilation. "I don't mean to make light of this. Our common  
nightmare The Bomb is in there too, It was bad in '59 and is much  
worse now," [1984] Hard Rain was on everybody's mind in the mid-sixties.

	The clerk took her to a room with a reproduction of a Remedios
	Varo in it, through corridors gently curving as the streets of San
	Narciso, utterly silent.

Note the repetition of this obscure artist and where this artist is  
placed within this story—clearly the author is pointing to something  
particular to Remedios Varo. In the "Slow Learner" introduction,  
Pynchon mentions how he is in thrall to surrealism:

	I had been taking one of those elective courses in Modern Art,
	and it was the Surrealists who'd really caught my attention.
	Having as yet virtually no access to my dream life, I missed the
	main point of the movement, and became fascinated instead
	with the simple idea that one could combine inside the same
	frame elements not normally found together to produce illogical
	and startling effects.
	Slow Learner, 20

However you wish to categorize Remedios Varo, her work clearly is in  
thrall to the distortions of surrealism, its dream-like qualities.  
Certainly by this point in his career, Pynchon is aware of the potent  
connections between surrealism and dreaming:

	She fell asleep almost at once, but kept waking from a
	nightmare about something in the mirror, across from her bed.
	Nothing specific, only a possibility, nothing she could see.
	When she finally did settle into sleep, she dreamed that Mucho,
	her husband, was making love to her on a soft white beach that
	was not part of any California she knew. When she woke in the
	morning, she was sitting bolt upright, staring into the mirror at
	her own exhausted face.

The mirror and sex are in conjunction earlier, over in Echo Courts. In  
Echo Courts the mirror is shattered. And there is voyeurism:

	"Blimey," somebody remarked. "Coo." Oedipa took her teeth out
	of Metzger, looked around and saw in the doorway Miles, the
	kid with the bangs and mohair suit, now multiplied by four. It
	seemed to be the group he'd mentioned, the Paranoids. She
	couldn't tell them apart, three of them were carrying electric
	guitars, they all had their mouth open. There also appeared a
	number of girls' faces, gazing through armpits and around
	angles of knees. "That's kinky," said one of the girls.

	"Are you from London?" another wanted to know: "Is that a
	London thing you're doing?"

Over here in Berkeley we have the mirror and a dream of sex, and now  
we are wondering about something in the mirror. Remember this is a  
muted text, there will be a ritual reluctance to name certain names.  
At the same time, in this book we have LSD, & we also have the subject  
of sex come up at the same time a mirror is mentioned.

Twice.

	In Operation Midnight Climax, the CIA set up several
	brothels to obtain a selection of men who would be too
	embarrassed to talk about the events. The men were dosed
	with LSD, the brothels were equipped with one-way mirrors,
	and the sessions were filmed for later viewing and study.

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

I'm not making a declaration here that the overarching subject of  
CoL49 is MKULTRA's "Operation Midnight Climax", but there are echos of  
that in this scene and there is a peculiar quality of nocturnal  
psychedelia in Oedipa's journey through San Francisco's night-town.

*Take me to your anarchist leader!