CoL49 (5) Sidney [Genghis] Cohen

[Robin Landseadel]

For some, The Crying of Lot 49 is primarily a literary puzzle, for  
others it’s a thin veil barely covering over great political  
conspiracies,  a collection of very odd jokes and puns or a pure  
artifact of the time it was written.

For me, mostly, it’s about putting your receptive feelers inside the  
head of someone who has every good reason to be afraid that they are  
about to lose their mind. Whatever might be hidden under the novel’s  
surface of puns, weird behaviors, historical references, scientific  
mumbo-jumbo and “in jokes”, the topsoil of event and reference point  
to issues around psychology as practiced in California, circa 1964.  
The novel’s plot threads emerge from a vision of the suburbs of the  
50’s incarnate—a more or less happy housewife at a Tupperware party— 
that moves towards visions of the sixties as filtered through an oh-so- 
slightly post-beat perspective. That single term that describes that  
skipping beat is LSD. The term has overlap with the Hippies and Beats  
thanks to figures like Allen Ginsberg, Alan Watts'  and Neal Cassady.

Oedipa’s release from her tower located in sunlit Kinneret leads her  
to that world on the other side of the tracks, the dispossessed, the  
other America—that which must be subdued, repressed. While Oedipa  
continues her quest for the Tristero, even after she has lost most  
everything that’s important to her—her husband, her shrink, most of  
her mind—she still has an overpowering, self-destructive need to find  
out if the forgeries are “real”, if Inveratity’s massive collection of  
stamps for the W.A.S.T.E. system really to connect to a historical  
“Trystero.” Mind you, she’s already tracked a W.A.S.T.E.-franked  
letter through an underground postal system that leads right back to  
where she started, just 24 hours previously. And doubtless there’s  
plenty of big-time metaphors to relate in that cyclic ring concerning  
entropy and its relation to information theory in Oedipa’s journey to  
Berkeley & San Francisco & back. But at the juncture where I pass off  
to out next contestants, Dave and Natalia—the end of chapter five— 
Oedipa, after a visionary night in San Francisco that gives her strong  
reason to distrust her rationality, finds her psychotherapist has gone  
mad and that her husband has taken the cure—LSD—from the  
aforementioned Nazi Mad-Scientist [Organ Stab!] that she just aimed a  
gun at who happens to have worked at Buchenwald [louder organ stab!],  
now working on new and ever more convoluted modes of making people go  
crazy [u.s.w.] including her HUSBAND!

Think of it as Theater of the Absurd or Cruelty or Panic with a budget  
the size of the defense department. Oedipa's reaction to her husband’s  
sudden transformation is sheer terror°:

	"Mucho," she said, impatient but also flirting with a wild
	suspicion. "Is this what Funch means when he says you're
	coming on like a whole roomful of people?"

	"That's what I am," said Mucho, "right. Everybody is." He gazed
	at her, perhaps having had his vision of consensus as others do
	orgasms, face now smooth, amiable, at peace. She didn't know
	him. Panic started to climb out of a dark region in her head.
	"Whenever I put the headset on now," he'd continued, "I really
	do understand what I find there. When those kids sing about
	'She loves you,' yeah well, you know, she does, she's any
	number of people, all over the world, back through time,
	different colors, sizes, ages, shapes, distances from death, but
	she loves. And the 'you' is everybody. And herself. Oedipa, the
	human voice, you know, it's a flipping miracle." His eyes
	brimming, reflecting the color of beer.
	PC 117

My take on this scene differs from most in that I see that LSD has a  
therapeutic effect on Mucho—later Count Drugula. I can also see that  
he’s tossing around some pretty crazy word salad, but please allow me  
to digress.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cfA1EYnmq5U

{Note kinship to Gengis Cohen}

http://www.erowid.org/culture/characters/cohen_sidney/cohen_sidney.shtml

There are those who returned to the well too often, but for the most  
part folks who took the call by and large hung up the phone once they  
got the message.

	"Psychedelic experience is only a glimpse of genuine mystical
	insight, but a glimpse which can be matured and deepened by
	the various ways of meditation in which drugs are no longer
	necessary or useful. If you get the message, hang up the
	phone. For psychedelic drugs are simply instruments, like
	microscopes, telescopes, and telephones. The biologist does
	not sit with eye permanently glued to the microscope, he goes
	away and works on what he has seen..."
	Alan Watts, (Joyous Cosmology Prologue, 2nd ed. 1970).

http://www.erowid.org/culture/characters/watts_alan/watts_alan.shtml

And in fact, Mucho Maas does “hang up the phone” long before he points  
out his LSD experience to Zoyd as a cosmic insight—an insight that is  
highly [justifiably] controversial round these parts—rebirth,  
reincarnation, returning to the physical plane to work out karma, the  
notion that all is interconnected, that everything eventually returns,  
transformed but still alive:

	In our modern world many people seem to feel that science has
	somehow made such "religious ideas" untimely or old-
	fashioned.

	But I think science has a real surprise for the skeptics. Science,
	for instance, tells us that nothing in nature, not even the tiniest
	particle, can disappear without a trace.

	Think about that for a moment. Once you do, your thoughts
	about life will never be the same.

	Science has found that nothing can disappear without a trace.
	Nature does not know extinction. All it knows is transformation!

	Now, if God applies this fundamental principle to the most
	minute and insignificant parts of His universe, doesn't it make
	sense to assume that He applies it also to the masterpiece of
	His creation--the human soul? I think it does. And everything
	science has taught me--and continues to teach me--strengthens
	 my belief in the continuity of our spiritual existence after death.
	Nothing disappears without a trace.
	Werner von Braun: The Third Book of Words to Live By,
	(pp.119-120)

http://www.thomaspynchon.com/gravitys-rainbow/extra/von-braun.html

In some way being "Born Again."

Pynchon revels in paradox, and nowhere more so than here. Mucho’s a  
product of MKULTRA, government funded research into the possible  
therapeutic uses of LSD. While a lot of what the DJ is saying about  
sound sounds crazy, it’s the kind of thinking that will eventually  
turn him into a big-time Rock & Roll producer—He’s displaying a  
sensitivity to the nuances of sound that is the basis of the kind of  
critical listening you’re going to need while producing any sort of  
music*. I’ve worked a session where the producer goes: “In bar 17 the  
oboe was sagging on the e-flat” and you look at the sheet music and  
it’s a riot of sixteenth notes and baroque ornaments. If someone is  
listening with the ears [and eyes] of a well regarded Rock & Roll  
record producer, one would know that one [out of seventeen] violins  
had a sharp E string. Trust me.

I don't know that OBA projected Mucho's future career. But it seems  
like Mucho is feeling a whole lot better after dropping a tab or two.

Government-funded research into the possible therapeutic uses of LSD  
was a reality of 1964. For whatever reason—probably just reading too  
damn much of the “wrong stuff” at the time—I was aware of LSD in the  
mid-sixties, particularly so in 1966. It was in the news on the tube  
and the papers, it was starting to leak into the music, but mostly it  
was in the magazines. And just like now, with the internet rotting my  
brain, it was always easier to read a magazine than a book,  
particularly if the librarian let you into the stacks. Bit by bit I  
became aware that celebrities were taking this stuff as a therapeutic  
agent, many claiming that it gave one mystical insight. Then came the  
horror stories, but that was mostly post-1966. Back in 1964 you could  
walk into a black & white government sponsored health clinic and come  
out in flaming technicolor.

http://jhp.sagepub.com/cgi/pdf_extract/5/2/147

http://skeptically.org/recres/id14.html

Now, I’m just sayin’, but these sorts of psychedelic themes are all  
over Gravity’s Rainbow and [more than anywhere else] Against the Day  
and I’m sure all sorts of self-incriminating evidence is just gonna  
ooze out of Inherent Vice. Please let me note, in passing, the  
author’s enduring fondness for the subject. It's like Love, it never  
goes away, Never completely dies. . .

° which will continue to get worse.

*I realize he’s also showing all the social graces of Rasputin.