M&D new question

[Steven Koteff]

I read the book like a year and a half ago and haven't yet picked it up for
this group read (in fact may not) but to call it meaningless seems to me a
totally believably human response, from Cherrycoke in particular.
Exercising a little empathy, if great lengths were gone to in the name of
drawing a boundary on the earth (especially if I am, in title and
inclination, a man of a more, how you say, cosmic scope), it might strike
me as being inherently meaningless. TRP is always trafficking in the
relationship between the seen and un-, the real and un- and sur-, if I read
him right. What's that old line about the relationship between reality and
perception?

"The map is not the territory." Doesn't this show up in *Inherent Vice*? Or
there's at least a nod to it and: "The word is not the thing."

It seems to me the conventional way to interpret and *feel *this concept is
meaning that the systems we use to categorize and perceive and understand
the physical world are just that and/but are not themselves the world. It
seems to me that, to occupy the world in real time as a boundary is being
drawn would only magnify the disparity between the map and the territory.

And that map/territory inequality works in two directions. A) The map is
insufficient to render/evoke/explain the territory because the territory is
of course exponentially vaster and more complicated and more real,
containing things the map could not possibly capture. B) The map is
actually not just insufficient but in some ways excessive, containing
things that the territory does not (and not just vice versa), boundaries
among them.

Also, I don't remember every nuance of Cherrycoke's character and
temperament and inclination, but in technical designation at least he does
have some relationship to an extraterrestrial/trans-human realm (excuse the
imprecision here; typing kind of fast). So I would maybe suggest there is
some caution to be exercised in not confusing *influence/impact *with
*import*. Yes the line is enormously impactful in the scope of human
affairs, but that, maybe to someone like the Rev espesh, does not
necessarily mean it *means*, if that makes sense.

And actually if I can try to sort of imagine myself occupying his mind and
experience a bit, I believe that 'meaningless' reaction even more. Like,
Cherrycoke saw firsthand the consequences of the drawing of the line, the
impact of that whole enterprise. I would say that, for some people with a
more cosmic or long-range bent, certain seemingly seminal moments in human
history (especially since those moments tend disproportionately to the
bloody) exhibit an inversely proportional relationship between human impact
and trans-human meaning. That is, the more lives lost as the result of
something, the more meaningless it then seems or feels (not saying this is
true, but I understand this response). (I couldn't point you anywhere too
specific but Tolstoy for one (TRP for two? I probably shouldn't say that)
seems to endorse the idea that what we understand as the most important
moments of human history are rarely that; history exists not in grand
events but tiny alterations of human consciousness.)

Also, think about yourself living in one country, watching
extra-terrestrial boundaries be drawn on it, watching it go through a war
for independence, some might call it a civil war, then watching life
basically go back to normal with normal everyday problems continuing
unabated or at least not greatly altered (to say nothing of them being
solved) by that war (an event that would seem to be indisputably
meaningful)--doesn't it make sense to think that that imaginary line you
witnessed the drawing of so many years before does not actually contain any
innate meaning? Or at least to feel that way?

I dunno. Forgive if me if I've got some history or some details of the book
wrong--I probably shouldn't comment without reading it alongside you
people.

On Tue, Jan 13, 2015 at 11:29 AM, Mark Wright <washoepete at gmail.com> wrote:

> A line that situates the "speaker" Rev'd Cherrycoke in his moment. The
> un-named boundary they inscribed upon the earth was "meaningless," but the
> _named_ boundary, the Mason-Dixon Line, bears a tottering superstructure of
> meaning in history.
>
> Maybe M&D is the story of all the snarled lines, the tarry fixed lines and
> yellow manilla running lines of rigging that entangled Mason and Dixon
>
>
> On Tuesday, January 13, 2015, Joseph Tracy <brook7 at sover.net> wrote:
>
>> No thoughts? dumb question?
>> On Jan 12, 2015, at 12:36 PM, Joseph Tracy wrote:
>>
>> > All the questions have been provocative, so I hope this won't be a
>> complete dud.
>> >
>> > One question/observation that jumped out at me in the introduction is
>> the word meaningless to describe the completed M&D line in Cherrycokes
>> introduction to the Mason Dixon story. It did not strike me on the first
>> read how boldly the writer seems to be characterizing the endeavor at the
>> very opening of the work. He seems himself to be drawing a line or at the
>> very least posing a deep question about everything implied by that line.
>> Was anyone else surprised at how early this question is set forth, or am I
>> treading into the obvious?
>> >
>> > Even the word meaningless is provocative- both historically and
>> metaphorically an odd choice to characterize something with such import.
>> But it fits with Cherrycoke's probable attitude at this time. I don't know
>> if I can defend that; I just feel it.-
>> > Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list
>>
>> -
>> Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?listpynchon-l
>>
>
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