CoL49 (4) Lost [PC 76]

[Robin Landseadel]

On Jun 4, 2009, at 7:54 AM, Mark Kohut wrote:

> So, what might be some other metaphorical meaning(s) of Maxwell's  
> Demon in Cof L49?

Look at the shifts in the environment that's mutating around Oedipa.  
Remember, she's a sheltered girl, really means well & all but she's  
been thrown into such unfamiliar waters. At the bottom of it all,  
smack dab in the very center of CoL49*, the author lays it out for us:

	She could, at this stage of things, recognize signals like that, as
	the epileptic is said to—an odor, color, pure piercing grace note
	announcing his seizure. Afterward it is only this signal, really
	dross, this secular announcement, and never what is revealed
	during the attack, that he remembers. Oedipa wondered
	whether, at the end of this (if it were supposed to end), she too
	might not be left with only compiled memories of clues,
	announcements, intimations, but never the central truth itself,
	which must somehow each time be too bright for her memory to
	hold; which must always blaze out, destroying its own message
	irreversibly, leaving an overexposed blank when the ordinary
	world came back. In the space of a sip of dandelion wine it
	came to her that she would never know how many times such a
	seizure may already have visited, or how to grasp it should it
	visit again. Perhaps even in this last second—but there was no
	way to tell. She glanced down the corridor of Cohen's rooms in
	the rain and saw, for the very first time, how far it might be
	possible to get lost in this.

 From this moment on, Oedipa is lost to the world she once knew—she no  
longer can trust her mind. Oedipa's old world ended in the summer of  
1964 when she first saw how out-of-hand things have become outside her  
tower.  Oedipa's survey of all this wasteland points to the zeitgeist  
in the wake of JFK's assassination. Many of the novel's subplots point  
to activities of various "Black Ops" types and their minions. The  
C.I.A. is mentioned in a context of theater of cruelty that only those  
that knew would know.

Part of the general freakiness that's creeping into the novel is the  
possibility of psychic powers, a theme that our beloved author  
frequently deploys. Pynchon's concept of Maxwell's Demon points to  
telekinesis, magical thinking &  freaky scientists doing freaky things  
in Berkeley in 1964. By 1966 those that knew, knew it to be both the  
center of LSD operations [Owsley],  and the national center for  
nuclear research [Lawrence Livermore Labs, with offsite facilities on  
the U.C. Campus.]. Note the all psychics in the White Visitation and  
drugs on the streets of Berlin? That thread continues in Against the  
Day, but really takes off in this book.

I suspect that Thomas Pynchon's experiences at Boeing are a major  
inspiration for much of CoL49:

	. . . one of Pynchon's colleagues at Boeing, Walter Bailey, who
	worked "'a couple of desks over'" from Pynchon "in Boeing's
	giant Developmental Center." According to Bailey, Pynchon
	"wrote for an intramural sheet called the 'Minuteman Field
	Service News' (to be distinguished from the company's official
	house organ, The Boeing News)." Specifically, the two men
	"worked in the Minuteman Logistics Support Program," and
	Pynchon had "a 'Secret' clearance." Pynchon, Bailey recalls,
	was an introvert, had few friends at Boeing, and, while working,
	would occasionally "shroud himself in the enormous stiff sheets
	of paper used for engineering drawings and work within this
	cocoon, like an aerospace Bartleby, by whatever light filtered
	in"

http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_6750/is_46-49/ai_n28819965/

That "secret" clearance of Pynchon's at Boeing afforded him access to  
info that few others had at the time. A lot of that info would be  
hieroglyphics to most people. A lot of that info could tell you how to  
deliver a nuclear "device" to a distant location.

The CIA had an ongoing program for developing "Remote Viewing" back  
then:

	. . . declassified documents reveal a memo written when Helms
	was deputy director for plans in 1963. For 10 years a small
	group in the Technical Services Division had been studying
	hypnosis and telepathy for use in clandestine operations but
	concluded that these fields were not ready for operational
	applications. Helms disagreed and sent a memo suggesting
	more research in "this somewhat esoteric (and perhaps
	scientifically disreputable) range of activities." He argued that
	given the Soviet preoccupation with "cybernetics, telepathy,
	hypnosis, and related subjects . . . recent reported advances . . .
	may indicate more potential than we believed existed."

http://www.usnews.com/usnews/culture/articles/030127/27stargate.htm


The language that surrounds and overwhelms Oedipa—her immersion into  
the Brave New World of Southern California, 1964 and the even weirder  
world of the freaky scene emerging in San Francisco & environs— 
revolves around impending revelation and fear of revelation. Oedipa's  
fear of revelation "destroying its own message irreversibly, leaving  
an overexposed blank when the ordinary world came back" contains an  
unstated fear of the bomb, something that hovered nervously over the  
psychic landscape of the mid-sixties. The fear that Revelation in the  
mid-sixties would come in the form of a mushroom cloud was real and  
omnipresent.

	Our common nightmare The Bomb is in there too. It was bad
	enough in '59 and is much worse now [1984].

Pynchon repeatedly underlines how that great burst of white light may  
very well be an atom bomb. Being a rocket scientist [or at least a  
writer who wrote for rocket scientists] would tend to focus one's  
thoughts on various eschatological scenarios others might not  
consider. If the revelation offers no promise of return, what else?

*76 x 2 = 152, the number of pages in the 1999 Perennial Classics  
edition.