IVIV (7): He's So Heavy

[Robin Landseadel]

On Sep 28, 2009, at 10:41 AM, Joseph Tracy wrote:

> I never had a hallucinogenic experience that sent me into another  
> world in the sense that Doc describes

I have, which in an odd way makes this scene a little harder to suss  
out.

> 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.

There was a time when my dreams were like that as well.

> 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.

I recall a guided meditation that led to some of these portals as well.

> 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.

Sir William Rowan Hamilton receiving Quaternions in a vision,  
ultimately leading to computer animation and untold consequences of a  
more dire variety.

> Similar story with digital tech.  Genius is  easily coopted.  Entropy.

Slothrop's temporal density drawing down V2s.

> Density is probably the central quality of Pynchons writing,

But don't forget chewiness or rich chocolaty goodness . . .

> 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.

Typical for Pynchon as well. But you already knew that.

Again, great post.