Roland, the wind. 2nd try

[Mark Kohut]

P 30.   " each curious and civil as if the round table held some
Game of chance" .....
What meanings? Chance as Monod's Chance  and Necessity is on the table so to pun....there are common understandings ;  chance is a key notion in CS Pierce's cosmology. 

Sent from my iPhone

On Apr 14, 2016, at 1:21 PM, Joseph Tracy <brook7 at sover.net> wrote:

> GNOSTIC AGNOSTICISM, THEM, ANTIDOTES?
> 
> I have some of the same thoughts about the Firm’s interest in the paranormal and the nature of Them as Monte is touching on. I mentioned it in my antidote post:
> 
>     "One aspect of the focus on paranormal 'spies' is the resemblance to  prayers in a foxhole. The war effort has enormous resources, including many with talents that seem unlikely to be useful. What do you do with a Pavlovian researcher during a high tech war? Maybe you just loosely let them do their thing and make proposals or bring information which you then test. Any help will do when threatened, and who really knows? 
> ““It(PP's grin)’s as useful to him as he is to the Firm—who, it is well known, will use anyone, traitors, murderers, perverts, Negroes, even women, to get what They want. They may not’ve been that sure of Pirate’s usefulness at first, but later, as it developed, They were to grow very sure, indeed.”(p. 33) 
> 
> What PP’s main usefulness proved to be I can’t recall,(???) but  in my memory of his development it seemed to be more about unscrupulousness as an agent than dream stuff. 
> 
> THEM
> The tendency to bureucratic stumbling and desperation does not in my mind dismiss the effective reality of various incarnations of Them. Large societies and especially global empires are structured to give enormous power to very few decision makers. So the fact that those with powers are not of a single coordinated mind, often fight and disagree, and that they are often paranoid and desperate and misguided  matters little if  and when those with the power to do so choose to ignore fundamental social contracts. Once it is clear that there are those who are above the law, a cultish phenomena starts which people really do internalize as Them. In the passage above even the insider PP thinks about this power elite as Them. After all, he is not included in the higher levels of decision; there may in fact often be no explicit decisions, but he knows that he either pleases Them, whoever they are( some he knows;some he doesn’t), or fails to please them and enter their comfortable company which he seeks. 
> When certain decisions are made- i.e.  to invade Iraq, to start MK Ultra, to murder Jews, - very few are informed and it is almost impossible to find all who participated in these choices. In that sense “They”, which people really do use with frequency, is not a term resulting only from paranoia. It is often used because someone is making decisions and those people are hard or imposssible to identify.  In that sense it is practical. What else can “they” be called.  Pynchon simply capitalizes it to draw attention to the phenomena. Yes it can become a paranoid way of thinking and applied foolishly, but isn't the pervasive growth of the term a bad indicator for democratic self rule as much as a grass roots indicator of paranoia and ignorance.?   
> 
>  ANTIDOTES
> In GR Slothrop serves to stand in for 2 phenomena inevitably generated by secret decisions to ignore the social contract: guinea pigs and resistors. 
> 1) Empires generate slaves and use them as guinea pigs and cheap energy. TS is chosen and sought as a guinea pig to be used without his knowledge or consent  in a nasty Nazi style human experiment/investigation to determine his usefulness in predicting rocket strikes and open new doors for controlling people. There are tens of thousands of actual human guinea pigs in the history of the US, Britain, Germany, Japan, Russia, Rome etc. . The usefulness of the information these experiments  and human sacrifices provided is pathetic. 
> 2) Resistors to imperial plans have throughout history been infiltrated, demonized and made examples of. TS resists the will and plans of the empire. Slothrop senses and uncovers evidence of what is going on and flees toward freedom also inadvertantly connecting his pursuit to other forms of resistance/counterforce.  ( The persecution of resistors is ongoing; from Nixon to Obama, whistleblowers and activists are carefully undermined, often contrary to constitutional law. What troubled Pynchon at the time is still with us.) ( The ripples produced by resistors is also striking: MLK, Gandhi, Abbie Hoffman, Dan Berrigan, Neil Young, Dorothy Day, Julian Assange, mothers against drunk driving, Greenpeace )
> 
>   I think P is using GR to explore the ideas and cultural forces that generate fascism/totalitarianism/machiavellianism/colonialist wars and where and how such forces can be and are evaded, resisted, limited, changed.  He seems determined to leave no possible avenue of counterforce unexplored: human love, ecstatic personal freedom, snide comedy, Luddism, disobedience, counter-violence,lefties, cosmic karma, trans-dimensional spiritual modes of experience. In GR his prognosis is not good but there is a rainbow which offers a shimmering hope if one wishes to embrace that. 
> 
>  In a deeper sense than the political/social one which  I just outlined, this chapter begins to hone in on the question of what is consciousness and what is it for. RF veers away from his lifelong obsession with mechanisms of guidance  into an ecstatic experience of the wind. PP, a hard-bitten spy determined to earn a place in the empire, reveals a profound tenderness toward love, a deep longing that is universal and hard to suppress. Gloaming recalls earier chapters by pointing out that the univesal concern of those he observes is “death”. Jessica Swanlake enters with a goddess-like grace and invokes another guidance system for her small rocket of feminine consciousness, hitting dead center with powerful waves rippling out into the story. 
> 
> GNOSTIC AGNOSTICISM
> Willed confusion or willful mystery, asks Mark K? 
> 
> I personally feel that Pynchon uses his intelligence, knowledge and imagination to explore almost all human dimensions of experience with a kind of fundamental agnosticism. Myth, dream, Karl and Grouch Marx, psychic contact with Rathenau, Benny the Bulb,Peenemunde, the Kenosha Kid, The London blitz,  Jessica Swanlake and Tyrone Slothrop are all equally real in his novel and imbued with mystery. But I say almost all because he clearly has a deep aversion toward the inherent violence of the colonialist mindset. He doesn’t often directly state that POV on empire or violence, he mostly demonstrates what it does and the picture isn’t pretty to most readers.  
> 
> On the other hand Pynchon’s agnosticism as a narrator or projector of world's isn’t pure. He occasionally invades the text with authorial comments and when he does the language is unequivocal, clear and seems to indicate whatever there is of his own gnosis. 
> 
> 
> Please P-listers, Do jump in with anything  relevant to these pages. Anthing really.
> I need to do my taxes. Didn’t see that one coming. 
> 
>> On Apr 14, 2016, at 9:08 AM, Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com> wrote:
>> 
>> I have had some time-demanding personal responsibilities that have kept me from my usual overbloviating on all these interesting posts. Preparing them in my head, but this prolegomena: 
>> 
>> Morris and Tracy and all on Control, yes......I thought first of the Firm's " control" even of the Beyond, they brought it inside [the Firm? The world?]...and that meaning merges with all this scientific, engineering, internal guidance control stuff, yes?..everything below is another education for me and, esp at this stage and this section's  bits of hints -- at much much more to come-- seems like a very likely way to tease out some meanings ( in this, a non-first time reading for all of us ,  yet, also,  there is no reading,  only rereading) .
>> 
>> Maybe this whole scene is willed confusion by TRP, as Morris sez( if I do not distort HIS meaning).  With Pynchon's  great poetic 'ambiguities' of contextual meanings, I always believe, even if he slips on a banana peel or two, that the confusion is ( mostly) resolved somehow, somewhere. Unless he himself doesn't want that, a willful " mystery" , which is in some kind of play here re The Great Beyond, yes? 
>> 
>> Later. 
>> 
>> 
>> Sent from my iPad
>> 
>> On Apr 14, 2016, at 8:13 AM, Monte Davis <montedavis49 at gmail.com> wrote:
>> 
>>> JT> the  science approach which in this case is just a long shot directed toward “actionable intelligence"
>>> 
>>> Meditating on "long shot" a little... 
>>> 
>>> Wartime brings with it (1) a lot of money sloshing around, and (2) a lot of intense, life-or-death, win-or-lose anxiety. So some of that money goes to ideas and projects that would never get a hearing -- or funding -- in peacetime. Those ideas and projects range from high-risk / high-return long shots (A-bomb, or rushing the V-2 from R&D to production)... through realms of lesser sanity and higher risk... to frankly crazed or outright swindles, like some of the big-data and AI ventures to pinpoint terrorists that Homeland Security put money into in the 2000s. Cf. also some of the psychic research (precognition, clairvoyance, mind control etc) that cropped up in both the USSR and US during the Cold War. 
>>> 
>>> I think that in creating the White Visitation (first coming into view at the seance) and Blicero, Pynchon had in mind both that psychic research -- perhaps the CIA's LSD experiments, too -- and the record of some Nazi leaders' interest in occultism, the hollow earth, etc. He would return to this murky zone in M&D, and with Tesla and other weird-science and weird-math figures in Against the Day. So talking about "the science approach" in his books takes in a very broad spectrum.
>>> 
>>> I connect that with the McHale-Duifhuyzen questioning of what Slothrop's starred map actually means... and the questions that opens up about how scientific Pointsman's and his unseen superiors' view -- and use -- of Slothrop actually is. Maybe as well as reading Them as cool, far-seeing puppet masters, we should read them as desperately clutching at straws for *anything* to do about those goddamn rockets. Remember: we know with hindsight that the V-weapons (and the Germans' jet fighters, appearing at the same time) were never numerous enough, technically mature enough, or effective enough to turn the tide or even low it much -- but that was far from clear in late 1944. Maybe German super-science *was* about to snatch victory from defeat. There was panic in the air. And that applied to people with doctorates, talking about Zipf's Law and Poisson distributions and conditioned reflexes, just as much as to the man and woman in the street.
>>> 
>>> On Wed, Apr 13, 2016 at 9:15 PM, Joseph Tracy <brook7 at sover.net> wrote:
>>> I’m going to re-post my last message, trying for greater clarity and ease of reading.
>>> 
>>> 
>>> “Once transected into the realm of Dominus Blicero, Roland found that all the signs had turned against him. . . . Lights he had studied         so well as one of you, position and movement, now gathered there at the opposite end, all in dance . . . irrelevant dance. None of Blicero’s traditional progress, no something new . . . alien. . . . Roland too became conscious of the wind, as his mortality had never allowed him. Discovered it so . . . so joyful, that the arrow must veer into it. The wind had been blowing all year long, year after year, but Roland had felt only the secular wind . . . he means, only his personal wind. Yet . . . Selena, the wind, the wind’s everywhere. . . .”
>>> 
>>> 
>>> There is an opposition here between the words “transect”,  “position", “studied", “movement” on one side  and the words “dance", “wind", “veer", “joyful" on the other.  The first group of words have to do with the plan that Feldspath is party to, and the second are the record of his actual experience. It is  also worth noting that the medium( Eventyr/fairytale) is  first narrating in 3rd person and then speaking directly for Felspath . The passage is a partial microcosm of our discussions on the flexibility of P’s narrative structure. It also implies the difference between plans for a kind of experiment  and the veering into direct experience that results. That difference brings my thoughts back to Mark’s notes on control of the uncontrollable.
>>> 
>>> Direct experience, especially when it is free from constraint( Feldspath is free from the mortal coil) is incommunicable in it’s saturation, all the senses are involved along with a more subtle and intuitive consciousness comparable to the sensitive flame. Experence of this kind is  better conveyed through poetry than prose but is always beyond language.This language gap  exists within the  gap between the 2 approaches to getting information. One is the  science approach which in this case is just a long shot directed toward “actionable intelligence"  and the second is  the shamanic or paranormal means of knowledge which originated in a different setting and is largely discredited for many.
>>> 
>>> 
>>>  The whole idea with science is to isolate and control the phenomena under question to yield reliable and repeatable information, but whole organisms get hard to manage in this way because of the variables in a complex system.  In this passage Feldspath has been somehow directed to cut into the “realm of Dominus Blicero”. Transect is a very linear abstract concept, a left brain approach to knowing. Realm is metaphoric, complex, a combination of imagined and real structure. Despite some shared preparation between Roland and those directing this inquiry,” Lights he had studied so well as one of you, position and movement,…” he finds "the signs had turned against him, lights are gathered in irrelevant dance, none of Blicero’s progress, no something new… alien.”
>>> 
>>> "the signs had turned against him” is a pretty inscrutable phrase that might fit a parlor room  seance, but it comes before a shift toward the second group of words - dance , wind, joyful, veer into, - words that culminate in first person language- Selena, the wind, the wind’s everywhere. This language seems to me interesting in that it is kind of like someone on psychedelics trying to describe his/her experience.
>>> Roland has been directed toward Blicero by a left brain manipulation, a desire to add to a usable dossier, but he is in an immersive complex right brain  out of the body experience unfiltered by expectations.
>>> 
>>>  It is a bit startling that GR's first mention of Bicero, the villain and hungry witch,  is associated with wind, spirit, joy, at least for Felspath. Regardless Feldspath is overwhelmed with a direct experience that doesn’t fit the plan. Does this discord/cotrast srike other readers?
>>> 
>>> Further thoughts on any of this ?
>>> 
>>> To me this discrepancy makes more sense of Felspath’s next thoughts on internal pre-planned control systems which are also presented in a first person mode.
>>> 
>>> The whole passage seems a demonstration of the subtlety and layering possible in imaginative prose when it interacts with realism and history. -
>>> Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?listpynchon-l
> 
> -
> Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l
-
Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l