M & D Chapter 13

[David Ewers]

a couple more noodles:  

p142 - Determining longitude = going against the earth's grain?  What's that got to do with Lines?
p142 - Dr. Zhang discovered Pluto in the East?  What's with the greenish blue blur (p143)
p143 - Susannah, Mason's crush with the wide-set eyes:  Does wide distance between eyes (besides suggesting prey rather than predator) have something to do with parallax?  Not the predator's laser-focused zeroing in, but a more inclusive, 'big-picture' view?


Thanks for holding down the fort, Mark.  

There's tons of stuff in Chapter 13, but Here are a few of my "off" Obs:

Riffing on the Crossroads references (the Yellow meets the Dog) and Hades/Pluto stuff, I get further impressions that St. Helena is a place for bad contracts and Faustian bargains.  
p127: 	Waddington and all his "all it says in my Contract is one Transit of Venus..."
p140: 	Maskelyne, talking about his rather Mephistophelian bro-in-law, Clive of India:  "He's not yet ready to make use of me, that's all.  Someday he must...I've been paid for... it shan't cost him anything." .... Whatever his Bargain, he's not happy with it.  Mason, who as yet hasn't seen the terms of his own, is but apprehensive."

The (infernal? Plutonic?) East India Company financed the Seven Years' War?  What did that bargain entail? ' Waves of Ink incarnadine'? (great word, incarnadine!)  
All that Ink incarnadine caused the Crown to tax the American colonies?  How did the E.I.C. benefit from the war?  Was it by charging the Crown interest? (another bargain...)

I also got a reminder here of the nexus/deal between Scientism and Corporatism.  How tightly are they bound?  Are they the same thing?

A few more random bits:

As to the bad instrument, do you suppose it's Lunar gravity that's effecting the plumb line (St. Helena a moon-ruled place, influenced by tides... tying in to the clocks from last chapter, moaning about what being on the water does to their mechanical sanity...)
Or does the gravitational anomaly have something to do with the island being a Slumbering Creature? (p128)  St. Helena is described as an Incubus, an infernal creation of the E.I.C.?
So, does the Company represent the birth of the modern (occult) death culture that will eventually bring us the Rocket (...the same machine that will take us, Charon's ferry-like, to the Moon... bringing the Contract full circle....  And what sort of Transit is that?)


Miscellanea:
p126 - James Town opens from the inside? ("Tho' small in secular Dimensions,...")
p129  - The Moon depicted as a White Luminary with the face of a Woman of the Town (a contractor, of [a few] sorts?)
p132 -The rain falling from Mason's tricorn hat: 3 plumb lines


On Mar 15, 2015, at 3:48 AM have a nice day, violet wrote this message:), Mark Kohut wrote:

> p. 141....."many,--as had the elder Cabot upon his deathbed,---claimed
> to've been told the Secrets of th eLongitude by God (os, as some preferred,
> Thatwhchever Created Earth and her Rate of Spin)
> 
> is that Cabot, one SEBASTION?
> https://books.google.com/books?id=GiESAAAAYAAJ&pg=PA302&lpg=PA302&dq=cabot+%2B+longitude&source=bl&ots=1suTbva96A&sig=o_lYAhr6VpKP4_KbbYhdCWJU9KI&hl=en&sa=X&ei=hV4FVdOULIiMNpnEg4AI&ved=0CDEQ6AEwBTgK#v=onepage&q=cabot%20%2B%20longitude&f=false
> 
> And don't you just love the soft satirizing of religious talk, or
> maybe "philosophical theology" which
> finds abstract ways to say what a word used to say......and/or what
> might be meant by a vague word
> such as 'God"....
> 
> Reminds me of what he seems to do in Against the Day.
> 
> p.142   riff on Latitude vs. Longitude...in which it is said that Zero Meridian
> is based on a certain Himalayan Observatory, in Tibet..........
> 
> ANOTHER throwing in of THIS nod to Tibetan centering of life.....
> Can we not help but think of the cover of Against the Day now that it
> is published?....
> 
> Eastern 'religious' thought slides into the text like certain
> 'anarchist' notions slide into
> GR and AtD, yes?..the kind of Eastern 'religious' thought we might
> characterize as
> non-religious (in any Western sense)?...
> 
> Tibetan Buddhism...a 'religion' without a hierarchy and without any
> scriptural must-interpret doctrine?
> a TRP 'ideal"?.....
> -
> Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l

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