BEER: Ch. 8—SCrying

[Robin Landseadel]

To rewind—my initial reaction to finishing this novel was one of  
despair. The absence of magic. You want Western Occult + paranoid  
conspiracies? And can you find higher proof examples of this than  
Gravity's Rainbow, Mason & Dixon, Against the Day, "V." too? And then  
there's those other books, but still, Vineland and Inherent Vice have  
plenty of that riding the surface, albeit parodistically enough to be  
dismissed as "Hippie Nonsense/New Age Silliness/Gas Music From  
Jupiter." Giodorno Bruno is doubtless the model for the tongue-ripping  
of Lot 49 in the Courier's Tragedy. The Education of Oedipa Maas  
includes a lot of Western Occult 101.

But of all of Pynchon's novels, I felt that on some level, BE has been  
the least "magical"—for want of a better word—of the 8. But I also  
suspected—the novel's epigram should clue us in—that perhaps one would  
have to dig deeper to find the metaphysical ore in a shaft the author  
might have mined once too often.

Chapter 8 expresses these sorts of concepts so glibly, it's easy to  
just let it go by. But on page 86

"I designed it. Like that chick who did the tarot deck."

A lot of what goes on in this chapter moves quickly from character to  
character. A woman is speaking here, the gal responsible for the  
"Splash Screen" for DeepArcher. The first thing that comes to mind is  
how the author name-checks one of those "chick [s] who did the tarot  
deck" in AtD—Pamela "Pixie" Coleman Smith, of Rider-Waite fame.  
Implied in Nookshaft/T.W.I.T. is Crowley and Crowley's 'take' on the  
Tarot. His Tarot deck is illustrated by Lady Freida Harris. I recall a  
woman whose circles I've crossed a number of time creating a female- 
oriented deck of circular cards. And then there's this delightful  
monstrosity:

http://www.littlereview.com/meg/tarot/barbietm.htm

In any case, zipping though the novel first time 'round, this struck  
me as one of the very few overt references to this sort of thing in  
BE. But going backwards through this short chapter, we find one of  
Maxi's "Natural Psychic Gifts" in her bladder, page 84:

"Among Maxine's more useful sensors is her bladder. When she's out of  
range of information she needs, she can go whole days without any  
interest in pissing, but when phone numbers, koans or stock tips from  
which she is likely to profit are close by, the gotta-go alarm has  
reliable steered her to enough significant walls that she's learned to  
pay attention."

In my strange sense that there is always something autobiographical  
going on in Pynchon's books and that in the TV novels he's speaking of  
environments he's lived in, there are two books where he has a female  
lead character, in some ways a stand-in of the author during the time  
the novels are supposed to represent. Between 1964 and 2013, our  
author must have 'wised up'. Oedipa, in the restroom of the "Tank"  
attempts to derive meaning from scrying the toilet stalls' walls and  
experiences failure in the attempt. But Maxi is the wise one, Oed was  
an innocent adrift. Maxi knows she's going to find meaning in those  
stalls. Maxine's bladder rings an alarm in the Flatiron District,  
leading her into a dive named "The Wall of Silence."

"Well, there's urgency, and then there's urgency" and on her way to  
the stalls, who should she run into but Lucas, co-creator of  
DeepArcher, who just broke up with Cassidy, previously quoted creator  
of DeepArcher's splash screen. Maxi slides into the toilet stall next  
to her:

"They sit there side by side, mutually invisible, the partition  
between inscribed in marker pen, eye pencil, lipstick later rubbed at  
and smeared by way of commentary, gusting across the wall in failing  
red shadows, phone numbers with antiquated prefixes, cars for sale,  
announcements of love lost, found, or wished for, racial grievances,  
unreadable remarks in Cyrillic, Arabic, Chinese, a web of symbols, a  
travel brochure for night voyages Maxine has not yet thought through  
making."

More lines to consider, Cassidy here explaining why she created this  
visual portal to DeepArcher, apparently not because of a contract :

"No, and not out of love either. Hard to explain. It was all just  
coming from somewhere, for about a day and a half I felt I was duked  
in on forces outside my normal perimeter, you know? Not scared, just  
wanted to get over it, did the Java, didn't look at it again. Next  
think I remember is one of them saying holy shit it's the edge of the  
world, but frankly I can't see a way they're going to build any  
traffic."

Looking into the edge of the world, that's something I'll have to  
ponder.


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Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l