BEER: Ch. 8—SCrying

[Kai Frederik Lorentzen]

A female Tarot deck which fits perfectly into the BE context is Suzanne 
Treister's Hexen Tarot 2.0:

http://ensemble.va.com.au/Treister/HEXEN2/TAROT_COL/HEXEN_2_TAROT.html

(Treister's take on the Tarot is artistic; the deck is of limited use 
for actually spiritual purposes.)

Do note that the Archer in DeepArcher is also Sagittarius which is 
related to the Tarot trump card
"Temperance" (Waite) bzw "Art" (Crowley)!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Temperance_%28Tarot_card%29

"Temperance is almost invariably depicted as a person pouring liquid 
from one receptacle into another. Historically, this was a standard 
symbol of the virtue temperance 
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Temperance_%28virtue%29>, one of the 
cardinal virtues <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cardinal_virtues>, 
representing the dilution <http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/dilution> of 
wine <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wine> with water. In many decks, the 
person is a winged person <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Person>/angel 
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angel>, usually female or androgynous, and 
stands with one foot on water and one foot on land.

In addition to its literal meaning of temperance or moderation, the 
Temperance card is often interpreted as symbolizing the blending or 
synthesis of opposites. An influential tradition originating with the 
Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn 
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hermetic_Order_of_the_Golden_Dawn> 
associates Temperance with the astrological sign 
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Astrological_sign> Sagittarius 
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sagittarius_%28astrology%29>. It is also 
commonly associated with the letter *ס* (Samekh 
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samekh>) in the Hebrew alphabet 
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hebrew_alphabet>."

Interesting in the Pynchon context is also this reference to the world 
of the dead, which makes me think not only of those people in BE who 
search in DeepArcher for a virtual cemetery but also of Vineland's 
thanatoids and the zombies of Inherent Vice:

"In some traditions, Temperance does the judging. In those schools, the 
cups in Temperance’s hands are the functional equivalent of scales, and 
Temperance, like Maat <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maat>, an Egyptian 
goddess of wisdom, judges the soul’s worth before passing it on to the 
beasts of the underworld <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Underworld>. In 
some stories, Maat both judges the souls against a feather and protects 
the scale from being tipped by Set 
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Set_%28mythology%29>. If the soul is 
heavier than a feather, it will be fed to the eater of souls.

In other traditions, Temperance is the remixing of life, accepting the 
dead <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead> into the underworld, into the 
blessed lands, and deciding what to send back into the fray. Every atom 
in our bodies has passed through thousands of forms, and will pass 
through thousands more. Temperance reminds us of our connection to the 
greater forces."

The alchemical character of the card ('Solve et coagula' - dissolve and 
combine) is emphasized in the Crowley/Harris deck; on the Tree of Life 
the path associated with Temperance/Art leads from Yesod to Tiphareth 
(which has, at least for Crowley, tantric implications).

In Suzanne Treister's deck the Temperance card refers to the Arpanet:

http://ensemble.va.com.au/Treister/HEXEN2/TAROT_COL/TAROT_Temp_Arpanet.html

No mystical reason for this, I guess, but it makes the reader think of 
Inherent Vice. The question arises in which relation IV's Arpanet and 
BE's DeepArcher do stand to each other in Pynchon's poetic universe.

Not sure all these things add up to anything coherent, but the 
continuity of female graphic design from Tarot decks to websites, that 
the novel evokes, certainly has to have some meaning.


On 10.11.2013 01:02, Robin Landseadel wrote:
> 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.
>
>
> -
> Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=nchon-l
>
>

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