Re: BEER: Ch. 8—SCrying

[John Bailey]

Wow, Treister is an artist who *must* be into Pynchon. I've never
heard of her but her stuff is totally P-List. One of us?

"In 1995 Suzanne Treister created the fictional alter ego Rosalind
Brodsky, a delusional time traveller who believes herself to be
working at the Institute of Militronics and Advanced Time
Interventionality (IMATI) in the twenty-first century. IMATI is an
independent research institute with government and corporate clients,
based in South London... HEXEN 2039 reveals links between conspiracy
theories, occult groups, Chernobyl, witchcraft, the US film industry,
British Intelligence agencies, Soviet brainwashing, behaviour control
experiments of the US Army and recent practices of its Civil Affairs
and Psychological Operations Command (PSYOP), in light of alarming new
research in contemporary neuroscience."

Her Amiga series is worth scrolling through, for those of us for whom
BE's digital content touches on the kind of formative horizon-making
that film and TV occupy in other Pynchon novels.
http://ensemble.va.com.au/Treister/Ampages/Amenu.html

On Sun, Nov 10, 2013 at 10:54 PM, Kai Frederik Lorentzen
<lorentzen at hotmail.de> wrote:
>
> 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
>>
>>
>
> -
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