M&D - Chapter 18 - Up Late Between the Stars

[Monte Davis]

Further reflections on http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareidolia ... Coming
up in Ch. 21, Mason and Maskelyne will dine in London with French
astronomer Jerome Lalande:

“Dr. Bradley was the Lumina of our little Constellation of As
​
tronomers, Sir,” the Frenchman, to appearance sincere, greets Mason.
​
“Lemonnier, my Mentor, worship’d him.” [213]

Both constellations and asterisms, their unofficial counterparts, are of
course patterns we project because we have no depth perception (parallax)
on that scale: stars that seem close to each other are often at wildly
different distances. There is some overlap between Pynchon's play with real
and projected conspiracies -- when are astronomers brothers in
transnational science, and when are they servitors of admiralty? --  and
the Bokononism in Vonnegut's _Cat's Cradle_, which posits the *karass* ("A
group of people linked in a cosmically significant manner, even when
superficial links are not evident") and the *granfalloon* ("a false *karass*;
i.e., a group of people who imagine they have a connection that does not
really exist").

It is, of course, entirely coincidental that in defining a granfalloon
Wikipedia
adds: "Another example is a Cornellian, a student or graduate of Cornell
University <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cornell_University>."

On Thu, Mar 26, 2015 at 1:05 AM, Johnny Marr <marrja at gmail.com> wrote:

> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apophenia
>
>
> http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/patternicity-finding-meaningful-patterns/
>
> It widely acknowledge among the scienticif community that the human mind
> has an outstanding capacity for recognising patterns and sequences. It's
> also widely acknowledge that the human mind has an outstanding capacity for
> perceiving patterns, regardless of how meaningful the data actually is.
>
> Pynchon's entire body of work both encourages, and can be guilty
> of/provides myriad examples of pattern recognition. Mason, like many of
> TRP's previous characters, seems to find structure and wider implications
> in what others might dismiss out of hand as a series of coincidences.
>
> Bradley seems to have had the same complex. He reported on the comets of
> 1723 and 17377, but not 1744 ("one day to be term'd the finest of the
> Century"), as this was also the year of his marriage to Susannah, nor in
> the 1757, the year she passed away. Mason himself, "desperate with longing"
> of his own for Susannah,  can't resist connecting "the fast-moving image of
> a female head in the Sky, its hair streaming in a Wind inconceivable, with
> posthumous visitation".
>
> He never approached the subject with Bradley, not even in 1759 when
> Rebekah died a month before Halley's Comet. Instead, Mason found himself by
> Rebekah's deathbed,
>
> "And when she was so close that there could remain no further doubt, how
> did he hold himself from crying out after the stricken bright Prow of her
> Face and Hair, out there so alone in the Midnight, unshelter'd, on display
> to ev'ry 'Gazer with a Lens at his disposal? He could not look too
> directly...as if he rear'd a direct stare from the eyes he fancied he saw,
> he could but take fugitive Squints, long enough to measure the great Flow
> of Hair gone white, his thumbs and fingers busy with the Micrometer, no
> time to linger upon Sentiments, not beneath this long Hovering, this
> undesired Recognition".
>
> It's hard to do justice to such a tender passage of writing. I'll limit
> myself to mentioning that Mason's wiedling of his technical equipment in
> the face of his wife's departure seems like a helpless retreat rather than
> a stubborn, blind petty obsession. I'll also add that Pynchon deploys the
> word quotinoctian [every day] to pleasing effect.
>
> In further retreat from the pain of worldly loss, Mason spends his night
> of bereavement in his Observatory, listening to hear Rebekah's ghostly
> approach amongst the Owls and night creatures, either hearing or convincing
> himself that he's heard "the Sound itself that possess'd them, an
> independent Force, using them as a way into the Secular Air, its purposes
> in the world far from the Rodents of the Hill-side, mysterious to all".
>
> Pattern recognition provides Mason's occupation, his vocation and his
> curse.
>
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