the Merle center

[Bled Welder]

I'm with you; if you want to call the
character you'd most like to be the moral center, I'm following now. 
Maybe the idol center, the mirror, the ego center, the idle, my
reflection, my idle idol reflection.



So far, I'm going to choose Tesla as my
moral center.  Something very conduity with what he's doing up there,
with his coils.  Maybe Vormance, though not because I know anything
about him, he might not be anything like me (Merle maybe moreso me
than Lew, at least I'm more of a photographer than a PI), but I'm
interested in what's going on up in Iceland.  Such a perfect thing to
come across right now this book.  I think maybe, taking Eco's
suggestion that Finnie's Wake is an attempt at a perfect language,
I'll read it too, during the course of the rest of this year, and
read Foucault's Pendulum again for good measure.  So far AtD is rife
with mentions of the psilocybe.  Who knew?  I'm trucking right along,
plowing through the icefields in search of psilo-overmen--



“'...Maybe you've been too close to
see it...We, on the other hand, have seen little else, since clearing
the Eightieth Parallel.  A Zone of Emergency has been declared for
hundreds of mile's radius.  The peak in whose lee you have chosen to
set up your command post is far too regular in shape to be the
nunatak you imagine it.  Did
none of you suspect an artificial structure?  In fact it was not
situated here by accident, and you could have chose no site more
perilous.'”
p.139



“...'Fairies under mushrooms,' from a
heckler somewhere in the group, whom nobody, strangely, seemed quite
able to locate.”...
p.133
> Date: Tue, 28 Feb 2012 20:42:39 -0500
> Subject: Re: the Merle center
> From: michael.lee.bailey at gmail.com
> To: pynchon-l at waste.org
> 
> hate to borrow from Bill Clinton, because his fund come from the World
> Bank and you know those guys are Shylocks...
> 
> but it seems to me, you have to define what the word - in this case,
> "moral center" - means...
> 
> now if alice were posting, I'd need to defend my notion that a certain
> amount of subjectivity is ok - even ineluctable - here.
> i.e. what am I looking for in a moral center?
> 
> Outside the academy, that is.  I'm actually rather conservative in
> that respect: if there aren't agreed-upon conventions there, how can
> we assign letter grades?  a-and without letter grades, how would
> people know what career they want?
> 
> but I think you can formulate an individualistic read based on
> criteria that you make up for yourself (or more likely, customize some
> prefab ones for the purpose) and even write interestingly and possibly
> even usefully thereabout.
> 
> So, I did Google moral center and skimmed a couple things.  But for my
> purposes, the idea here of moral center that I will develop is
> actually developed from Merle...
> 
> Basically, and this is an enveloping concept sans elaboration (just
> throwing it out there), ie stepping back another remove so we have
> text -> Merle -> moral center -> what I am looking for when I read AtD
> or any novel
> 
> and that would be a notion of "what's going on" (in the world, in the
> book, in the author's mind)
> 
> (actually could step back further but it's already going to be hard to
> define moral center and suggest Merle in say 3 more paragraphs in a
> post already uncomfortably long)
> 
> but this idea of reading to find out what's going on indicates a
> liberal turn of mind, that is, I want a chunk of text artfully wrought
> by someone of obvious intelligence, in order to ruminate and develop
> my own ideas against and further develop my picture of what's going on
> by either agreeing or disagreeing (or both) with what the writer is
> driving at (goes without saying that trying to figure that out is part
> of the fun) --
> 
> so, in AtD with its large cast of characters, the appropriate moral
> center would be somebody who takes the appropriate position on all the
> issues that arise --- the class struggle, revenge, technology, love --
> by virtue of who they are...drawing from a blurb on the jacket of a
> Camus book (which was the only thing I brought away from that book, I
> humbly admit), somebody who impresses me with "the decency of his
> impulses."
> 
> Merle's jib's cut, methinks, fills the bill.
> a) class struggle - early on, the text talks about a professor for
> whom Merle works as a lab assistant, referring to him as "his friend".
>  Basically, naively, like pacifism, this is the only way to defuse
> class hostility and survive -- to consider employers and employees as
> friends.
> b) revenge - in the absence of justice from the legal system, Merle
> provides Frank with a snapshot of Deuce and some good, if obvious,
> advice.  Like Lew in this respect, he throws in with the injured
> parties to a very limited extent because of his own sense of justice.
> c) now Mark has made some telling points w/r/t the destructive aspects
> of technology, electric lighting, trains usw, but Merle uses
> photography to consort with a naked lady in nature, adapts some retro
> tech to make a nice rolling home for himself that travels on his own
> timetable, isn't blind to the charms of wood- and herb-craft during
> his ginseng gathering, and engages at every step with not just the
> trappings of techno-capability but with the concepts behind technical
> progress to develop his mind, conversation, friendships...
> d) love - like Whitman, there are suggestions that Merle enjoys a
> "jolly, bodily life" mostly in his younger days, with a variety of
> partners, but he also extends his heart to commit to Erlys when she
> needs it, and takes loving care of Dalley until she's grown up enough
> to find her own way.  There is more than a suggestion in the book that
> love includes the ability to let go, and this too he does when
> appropriate.
> In sum, Merle is the person in the novel whom I would most like to be.
> (which is yet another stipulation for moral center that seems relevant
>  To borrow from George Clinton (a more pleasant prospect), he's an
> Atomic Dog, he gets up for the downstroke, he gets on the good foot...
> 
> addendum: Unfortunately, I'm a bit, well, considerably, more like Lew.
>  I didn't start out industrious and make my own way, never looking
> back, but instead have had conscience instilled in me gradually by a
> series of fortunate associations.
 		 	   		  
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