science-fiction-economic-collapse-Durban-Jason Velveeta

[Joseph Tracy]

Global  apartheid has been restored as the center of western civilization in Durban South Africa. Obama may go down - in whatever larger history remains to an oil addicted empire and  in whatever collective memory remains of those who inherited the beautiful climate balance that engendered human society - as the greatest coward America ever produced - Jason Velveeta masquerading as Martin King and elected President.  In a world already facing record weather disruptions, melting glaciers,  and growing dead zones like the Niger Delta and the Gulf of Mexico, Obama is choosing to effectively end the feeble but effective start represented in the Kyoto Protocols and says we can wait til 2020 to start thinking about maybe doing something about greenhouse emissions.   In Durban South Africa, a place where political independence has been earned at tremendous cost and against all odds, the kind of struggle that allowed Obama's presidency,  and now the site of the last hope for this generation of world leaders  to take a stand against turning the world into a long term greenhouse of hellish heat and storms, Obama is a pathetic no-show.  ( Yes, I am still firmly persuaded that the junior varsity pimp of IV, Jason Velveeta, is Pynchon's satiric sketch of Barack Obama)

The sad thing is that there are many world class developments in the field of alternative energy and some of the best tinkerers are still in the US.  So here are 5 ways Pynchon uses scientific tinkering  in ATD  which concern relevant issues: 1)  alternative non polluting energy- Tesla  is used here not as  a magic answer , not as a safe, non-disruptive visionary, but as a genius whose aspiration to provide liberating alternative technologies was crushed and subverted by the capitalist paradigm, whose urge to use science for the benefit of all left behind  2) the transmutation of silver to Gold - having to do with alternative economic models and the relationship between value and labor( the silver has to be worked to become argentaurum/gold)  3) the use of silver as photographic mirror of a soul in time,  to see history accurately , to see reality not as a captive moment but a continuum   4) the implications of Icelandic spar as crystal using technology's(everything from spectrscopic analysis to cumputer tech to laser tech)  potential/ danger as a fork in every communication road the double refraction of light's messages. Something that can expand and enlighten or open a pandora's box of delusion. 5)  The unearthing of unintended consequences by extractive technologies in the search for Iceland Spar- One can't avoid seeing nuclear fission in this mad dash for new rays.   Also we find in the Vormance the dangerous interdependence between scientific research and colonial greed ala King Leopold .  ( the political and karmic  implications of Leopold's version of slave-labor capitalism is seen in  the industrialized  death that came to Belgium in WW1 and the even more dire implications of Nagasaki/Hiroshima.)

*There is a scene in ATD where Professor Vanderjuice, a rare  liaison between the chums mythic world and the world the main characters inhabit, begins to lecture at Candlebrow U. (Pychon may not be as enthusiastic about higher education as Obama, characterizing CU as providing" exactly the mixture of nostalgia and amnesia to provide them a reasonable counterfeit of the Timeless." Gottingen and Yale come in for similar treatment.)   Anyway the professor is lecturing about time and how the fundamental structure of everything is like a spinning vortex when a big cyclone shows up directly overhead.   This is where we are at today. Since the lecture began at the birth of scientific inquiry into the greenhouse effect in the late 1800s until now,  the correctness of those scientific concerns has gathered over all our heads like a harbinger of armageddon. Global warming and the contraction at the end of an oil fueled economy is no longer in the future.  The bankers and CEO's have taken refuge in the collective pockets of the safely colonized taxpayers . But the swirling vortex just gets bigger. The politicians are  telling us about  the high tech jobs of the future, the nimble recovery of the free markets, the importance of  finding and killing anything that might be thought of as a terrorist threat to the final glorious triumph of capitalism  while refusing to look up, down or anyplace else where they might find reality roiling like the biggest storm cloud in human history.    And the vortex gets bigger.  The priests of science say it's  just a minor course correction; the 3 priests of Abraham say  fight on, our side is about to win;  the priests of passivity say breathe deep,  and buy my latest book on how to be happy in a holocaust;  the priests of survivalism say they'll never get me, I got food for years and plenty of guns. But any way you look at it or lie about it , without a serious change a lot of people are going to get raped and kllled.  This can only be modified or actually remedied in a time frame that my mom used to call "RIGHT NOW!"  That is what mother earth is saying  and we are all too small, and too dependent to run away or hide. Also, as we are learning, there is no away. The distopian future of science fiction and 1984 and Brave new World  and Blade Runner have swirled together in day to day reality and are upon us. 


Was the choice of the name for the airship "Inconvenience"  in a novel released in November 2006 just conveniently coincidental with the movie An Inconvenient Truth, released in May 2006? Interestingly the movie poster features a swirling hurricane rising from a smokestack.* (see above)
Below are my first thoughts on this general topic  with a few edits.  But enough already , no one responded to this one  and prolly about the same for above. 

On Dec 3, 2011, at 10:18 PM, Joseph Tracy wrote:


> Another aspect of the chums and other characters in ATD that relates to the final scene and Pynchon's probing relationship to the concept of grace is the field of alternative technology.  I wonder if fiction isn't itself acknowledged throughout P as an alternative technology and a generator of same. There is plenty of Jules Verne in ATD. The  airships, like Popular Science do-it-yourself gadgetry taken to the next level, function with increasing autonomy on technologies that represent roads not taken in mainstream physics. They are also outside the rush of  high speed propulsive  fossil fuel tech. The ether winds of the imagination continue to blow long after Michaelson and Morley are dead and who knows when some tinkerer will figure how to power a turbine with such scientifically abandoned forces. The chums themselves are aging far more slowly than the rest of the planet's inhabitants.  This all could be looked at as silliness and a spoof of this genre's boys' adventure obsession with gadgets and science and the dreams of escape from the the gravitational pull of death. But let me turn to today's inconvenient truth and the grim lines of geo political power in a hothouse planet. 
> 
> Here is where certain kinds of technologies could make a huge difference in how physical power is available and therefor in how other kinds of power is distributed.. The struggle between Tesla and JP Morgan is still alive.The truth is that a change in how physical power is negotiated  has to happen or we will boil or nuke ourselves, competing over ways to fill the sky and waters with shit.  I think there is a constant toying in P's fiction with the interaction between technologies and the consciousness they engender. The paramorphoscope, one of the wittiest words ever invented  embodies this fusing of the spiritual/philosophical/karmic/duality/love  aspect of consciousness with the the scientific tools to evaluate the data map as it extends into the subatomic, the geophysical and the mysteries of light, matter, space, time, energy. MInd is the paramorphoscope and because it is a balance of female/male  east/west (up, out ,space)/ (down, in, matter),  water/air/fire energies it is dangerous when it is only the plaything of the boys and their competitive - mine is bigger than yours and I've got the oil rigs and   corporate jet to prove it and more nukes than you, too -mentality.  This  state of consciousness locks up the waters  of biospheric transmutation in underground caverns like tears unshed and rivers that never see light . Because oil has induced the worship of fire we live in a world where cities are visible from the moon; but where deserts,  dead zones(and desserts)  grow; and where gardens, glaciers  (and healthy food availbility) shrink . 
> 
> If Rossi's cold fusion energy catalyzer is real, ( Interestingly, it relies on hydrogen, the gas in the chums' gas bag, and nickel, one step down in from silver among  precious white metals)or as similar breakthroughs in safe sustainable non polluting energy makes power inexpensive, local or even personal in scale and universal in availability, and the  freshly locally empowered  peoples of the planet tell the war-mongers to shove it - well some new doors of consciousness may also open( may have already been opened),  new winds blow,  cleansing rains fall. Just sayin.
> 
> 
> 
> On Dec 2, 2011, at 11:03 PM, Joseph Tracy wrote:
> ( in response to the following M Bailey  response to M Kohuts initial questions and thoughts
> 
>>> but just on the flying toward grace passage in general, it's I suppose
>>> natural that he ended the book with the Chums, since he began with
>>> them as well.
>>> So basically the Chums is the frame tale, sort of?  and their
>>> progression by a commodious vicus of recirculation is from a voyage to
>>> a specific destination (viz the Columbian exposition) to a generalized
>>> movement toward grace.  What has changed in them?  Rather than
>>> exhausting the genres, cutting and drying them, could the tale be
>>> revivifying them?  and if so, how?  If a Chums-like stance is
>>> suggested as a reader of the genre fictions, above them and but
>>> partially involved in the emotions of those tales, the rest of one's
>>> consciousness involved in aerial maneuvers and missions, how does one
>>> read the Chums?
>> 
> 
>> As some may recall, I think P projects his vision in 3 dimensions, separate but interactive:
> Hey, it's right there on the cover,  3 layers,  with the light coming from the reader.
>> 1) complete fiction/myth/imagination existing outside laws of physics and plausibility but true to their own mythos.  ie  the chums, the thanatoids, benny, Vaukanson's Duck, the rats in V, vieshu   2) the plausible fictive and  3)the actual historic :Tunguska, Nixon...
>> 
>> The chums are the mythos of the boys adventure fiction from late 1800s to current times. One could trace their origins back to medieval knights and beyond, but there is a distinctively western and Christian quality to this corpus.  What changes in them is their relation to their author. First they are on missions for which they don't question the purpose or morality. They have rivals and enemies but don't ask why this is the relationship.  They are like their readers. They accept the authority and meanings assigned by the author. Male authority figures  with religion and science, age and money. The dominant mythos of the readers is Christian, western, and because sex is not safe for young boys they fly through the hollow earth and burrow through desert sands. Such innocence is fun but sinfully dangerous.  This is, however the world of a great many people; tell us who the bad guys are and we will fight them. By the end the Chums are their own authors, have come into equal relationships with women and are independent contractors .  In other words, after a lot of arguing and exploring and questions and the dark lessons of war  a new mythos has been negotiated and grace, that beautiful, terrifying, loaded word, has become something otherworldly in its humane chance of being normal.