IVIV (7): He's So Heavy

[Joseph Tracy]

I never had a hallucinogenic experience that sent me into another  
world in the sense that Doc describes or that people attribute to  
Salvia etc., but I have had lucidly remembered dreams that closely  
approximate Doc's Burgie trip or the trip in the story with the  
vision of Shasta on the Golden Fang. I also recall a very similar and  
very intense experience with a group of artists in the 70'S doing a  
collective imagination experiment. To me it relates more to the  
archetypes and collective unconscious of Jung than LSD per se. I  
think that is more how Pynchon is using it  and LSD generally and  
several other references( Zomes, GNASH)  to openings between parallel  
worlds.  In essence, the reason Doc hates the memory of this trip is  
that it forms a kind of personal mythos, an explanation for his size  
and "heaviness"  which I mentioned in a previous comment:

   	"Is the LSD memory of another world from which Doc came and from  
which he derives his compactness and  a "density" that has him  
breaking through walls, a kind of reference to his ability to  
penetrate           	barriers to his investigations, and his focus on  
evidence and leads while smoking weed like a chimney?  The whole  
story  feels more Jungian than I first perceived but with a different  
set of collective 		memories, and while comic in tone, may be  
designed as a kind of alternative mythos of the detective story which  
will yield treasures to a probing search."

It brings up the whole topic of "genius", old souls, individual  
destiny, enlightenment, scientific "breakthroughs" , that kinda shit.  
Hard to explain the density, the gravitational pull of some people.   
Artists talk about artistic expression as coming to them or as a kind  
of birth. Same thing with scientific breakthroughs coming in dreams  
or picture language. Not discounting hard work and learning the  
language of a discipline here. Doc starts with some seedy work to  
learn the chops, but seems increasingly aware of the karmic  
implications of what he does.   Einstein starts with pure play in the  
realm of the physics of light, indirectly gives birth to nuclear age  
and ends up a voice for peace and non-violent resistance.  Tesla  
envisions a world made better by cheap clean electricity , seized by  
westinghouse to proliferate coal burning power plants.   Similar  
story with digital tech.  Genius is  easily coopted.  Entropy.

Density is probably the central quality of Pynchons writing, the  
detritus of culture takes on the weight  and shiny reflective  
brilliance of Osmium. Every word and phrase seeming to work in  
parallel universes. Doc feels alienated in world in which he is also  
deeply integrated, knows the handshake and everything, likes to hang  
out, smoke with friends, watches Basketball, longs for true love and  
good sex, but breaks through walls with the slightest pressure.  What  
he finds behind the facade of individuality, chosen affinities,  
addresses and style is a war that is far from overseas. The promised  
good guys of the movies are not so easy to identify. Like Wolfmann  
and the private collection displayed on his ties (speaking of ties,  
what, in the whole panoply of vice is he not tied to), the line  
between exploiter and exploited is less than razor sharp.  Typical  
for a detective noir, and a satirist.

On Sep 28, 2009, at 9:18 AM, Robin Landseadel wrote:

> Vehi Fairfield—apprentice Witch Sortilège's guru and apparently a  
> distributor for Brotherhood of Eternal Love LSD—sends Doc out on a  
> most intense acid trip via a magic can of 'Burgomeister Special  
> Edition.' Those who don't know should know that the correct  
> spelling is "Burgermeister", that it was a popular low-end beer  
> around 1970 and that around 1970 the can would look something like:
>
> http://www.angelfire.com/wi/beercans/images/bur5.gif
>
> In any case, Vehi & Sortilège had some code—calling a can of  
> otherwise everyday beer a "special edition" is supposed to mean  
> that it's got LSD, but Doc doesn't know this.
>
> So, caught unawares, Doc gets sent back three billion years and  
> seemingly into the sort of alien experimentation often associated  
> with particularly intense trips and DMT. The lab facility of the  
> alien scientists was made from a mountain of pure osmium:
>
> 	Osmium is an extremely dense, blue-gray, hard but brittle metal
> 	that remains lustrous even at high temperatures. Due to
> 	its hardness, brittleness, and very high melting point (the tenth
> 	highest of all elements), solid osmium is difficult to machine,
> 	form, or work. Osmium is generally considered to be the
> 	densest known element, narrowly defeating iridium.[2]
> 	Calculations of density from the space lattice may produce the
> 	most reliable data for these elements, giving a density of
> 	22.562±0.009 g/cm3 for iridium versus 22.587±0.009 g/cm3 for
> 	osmium.[3] The extraordinary density of osmium is a
> 	consequence of the lanthanide contraction.[3]
>
> 	Osmium possesses quite remarkable chemical and physical
> 	properties. It has the highest melting point and the lowest vapor
> 	pressure in the platinum family. Osmium has a very low
> 	compressibility. Correspondingly, its bulk modulus is extremely
> 	high, reported between 395 and 462 GPa, which rivals that of
> 	diamond (443 GPa). However, the hardness of osmium is low,
> 	only 4 GPa.
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Osmium
>
> The alien scientists rename Doc "Xqq" and declare him to be "the  
> perfect subject" for whatever weird experiment in intergalactic  
> time travel they've cooked up for him. Note how the Loony Tunes  
> leitmotiv pops up again:
>
> 	Before he knew it he was signing releases, and being
> 	costumed in what he would soon learn was a classic hippie
> 	outfit of the planet Earth, and led over to a peculiarly
> 	shimmering chamber in which a mosaic of Looney Tunes motifs
> 	was repeating obsessively away in several dimensions at once
> 	in vividly audible yet unnamable spectral frequencies ....
> 	IV 106
>
> Something about that Osmium gets picked up by Larry. He's so heavy  
> when he returns [more or less] to Gordita Beach, he manages to to  
> go through drywall construction with little effort. Of course this  
> also reflects the shoddy construction standards of new residential  
> buildings in L.A., circa 1970.
>
> 	"Well," Sortilege supposed, "many of us do get uncomfortable
> 	when we discover some secret aspect to our personality. But it's
> 	not like you ended up three feet tall with the density of lead."
>
> 	"Easy for you to say. Try it sometime."
>
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