Tarot in Bleeding Edge

Mon Feb 2 10:17:50 CST 2015

Great post! Alongside the subway-window glimpses as "a series of
fortune-telling cards," put a turn of phrase in our introduction to
DeepArcher, p. 77:  "a shuttle vehicle of some kind, rolling stock antique
and postmodern at the same time, vastly coming and going, emerging into
soaring meta-Victorian glass- and iron-modulated light. Serendipities here
are unlikely to be *in the cards*..."

There are also Pokemon cards, baseball cards, credit cards, even picture
postcards from Zigotisopolis. The deal is always going down.

Second Life comparison:  as we expect from Pynchon, it's the *nascent*
utopia / heterotopia that really draws him (the last night of M&D 759, "proud
fellowship in a Mobility that is to be, whose shape none inside this House
may know.") Actual implementations are always letdowns, tainted by history
and power and greed, colonized and corrupted as DeepArcher is. I wrote here
in October 2013:

***

No namecheck for the Miller brothers' Myst
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myst> (1993), but that's as clear a precedent
as any for this "wander around a spectacularly detailed environment"
software -- that plus Second Life <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Life>
, which combined multi-user interaction, avatars, and the ability for users
to contribute new elements to the virtual world. Second Life didn't launch
until 2003, but as the Wikipedia article notes:

"During a *2001* meeting with investors, Rosedale noticed that the
participants were particularly responsive to the collaborative, creative
potential of Second Life. As a result, the initial objective-driven, gaming
focus of Second Life was shifted to a more user-created, community-driven
experience."

***
You gotta love that juxtaposition of "collaboration, creative, community"
and "Hey, here's our revised business model." Paradise can't be monetized
fast enpough.

And re Sagittarius, in the same post:

***
75: The Archer is poised at [the abyss'] edge, bow fully drawn, aiming
steeply down into the immeasurable uncreated, waiting. What can be seen of
the face from behind, partly turned away, is attentive and unattached."
There are associations here with both Zen archery
<http://www.dhammawiki.com/index.php?title=Archery_%26_kyudo> and bowmen
from the Hindu epics (Ekalavya <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eklavya>, Shiva
as Rudra <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rudra>, Arjuna
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arjuna>). All invoke at times the idea that
one begins by aiming the arrow at a target, and transcends by *becoming*
the arrow -- not a bad metaphor for first-person-shooter video games
morphing into immersive virtual worlds. Or for Gottfried (God's Peace)
taking off in the A4.

On Mon, Feb 2, 2015 at 9:55 AM, Kai Frederik Lorentzen <lorentzen at hotmail.de
> wrote:

>
> "Even though its creators claim not to Do Metaphysical, that option in
> DeepArcher remains open, alongside more secular explanations ..." (p. 427)
>
> *M & D* has 78 chapters, the Tarot has 78 cards. In *GR*, more precisely
> in its last part, Pynchon first uses the Tarot for his artistic purposes.
> Very probably --- "Check out Ishmael Reed. He knows more about it than
> you'll ever find here."  (p. 588) --- inspired by *Mumbo Jumbo*. Pynchon
> takes up the theme explicitly again in *AtD*, where he draws a more
> conventional picture of the Tarot than in *GR*. And while in *GR* the
> reference is clearly A.E. Waite, it has been argued here by Alice that
> *AtD*'s Nickolas Nookshaft is actually a portrait of A. Crowley. Sounds
> plausible enough to me. As far as I know, there is no academic study on
> Pynchon's use of Tarot. What interests me today is the Tarot's shadowy
> half-presence in *Bleeding Edge*.
>
> The word "Tarot" - please correct me if I'm wrong! - appears in the novel
> only once. "'I designed it [DeepArcher]. Like that chick who did the tarot
> deck. Awesome and don't forget hip,' half, but only half, ironic" (p. 86).
> Why the Tarot mention here? Now, no matter whether Cassidy is referring to
> Pamela "Pixie" Colman Smith (who did the Waite Tarot) or to Lady Frieda
> Harris (who did the Crowley Tarot), the passage hints at the fact that
> women often contribute graphic design to projects. I don't think this is
> about feminist critique (à la 'women are only allowed to do the graphics
> but not the thing itself'), since Cassidy places herself in that tradition
> with pride.  Another meaning of the passage might be that Pynchon wants to
> draw a parallel between the outbreak of modern occultism and the emergence
> of the Internet and its culture.
>
> In the first paragraph of chapter 39 we get an echo of that one and only
> mention: "Sometimes, down in the subway, a train Maxine's riding on will
> slowly be overtaken by a local or an express on the other track, and in the
> darkness of the tunnel, as the windows of the other train move slowly past,
> the lighted panels appear one by one, *like a series of fortune-telling
> cards* [emphasis added] being dealt and slid in front of her. The
> Scholar, The Unhoused, The Warrior Chief, The Haunted Woman ... After a
> while Maxine has come to understand that the faces framed in these panels
> are precisely those out of all the city millions she must in the hour be
> paying most attention to, in particular those whose eyes actually meet her
> own---they are the day's messengers from whatever the Beyond has for a
> Third World, where the days are assembled one by one under non-union
> conditions. Each messenger carrying the props required for their character,
> shopping bags, books, musical instruments, arrived here out of darkness,
> bound again into darkness, with only a minute to deliver the intelligence
> Maxine needs. At some point naturally she begins to wonder if she might not
> be performing the same role for some face looking back out another window
> at her" (p. 439). A truly beautiful passage based upon an experience every
> subway rider knows! Pynchon possibly avoids the word "Tarot"because, having
> grown respect over the years, he did not want to abuse the tradition the
> way he did in *GR* where he invented "Der Grob[e] Säugling, 23rd card of
> the Zone's trumps major" (p. 707); in *AtD* there is no overstretch of
> the Tarot form. The form remains untouched and thus can work as as analogy.
>
> If this was all - and perhaps it is! - the Tarot reference in *Bleeding
> Edge* would be a mere reminiscence to *GR* and *AtD*. There is the riddle
> of DeepArcher, though, which might be relevant here too. Most reviewers
> perceived DeepArcher as "kinda 'Second Life'" (to quote a recent local
> review). Certainly not wrong, but when we look at the, well, symbolic load
> the motif carries all through the novel, this is perhaps not enough to
> understand what Pynchon wanted to say. Then there is, starting with Evgeny
> Morozov in his FAZ review from September 2013, what one could call the
> Foucault connection. About DeepArcher Morozov writes: "It’s a space of
> otherness and deviance – it’s what Michel Foucault once described as
> 'heterotopia.'“ A handful of reviewers followed that path, and we may
> discuss this - Foucault's short text *Of Other Spaces: Utopias and
> Heterotopias* can be read online in English for free -  another time in
> detail. But what about DeepArcher's spiritual aspects? Here it is
> interesting to note that 'Archer' is another word for 'Sagittarius' and
> vice versa. Now, I don't know much about Astrology, what I do know is that
> Sagittarius is, in the tradition Pynchon writes about in *GR* and *AtD*,
> connected to the Tarot trump 'Temperance' (Waite and others) bzw. 'Art'
> (Crowley). I don't know what to make with this, really, but when you look
> again at the opening quote of this mail - "Even though its creators claim
> not to Do Metaphysical, that option in DeepArcher remains open ..." it
> nevertheless might mean something.
>
> Now meditate upon that for a while!
>
> http://www.corax.com/tarot/cards/index.html?art
> http://ensemble.va.com.au/Treister/HEXEN2/TAROT_COL/Sword6_Heidegger.html
> http://www.corax.com/tarot/cards/index.html?star
>
>
>
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