CoL before BtZ: miracles

[Steven Koteff]

In rereading 49 today I'm having a few thoughts pertaining to the Zero read: Potboiler though it may be, there is a lot of stuff in 49 that maybe because simplified acts a sort of signpost for things that are more densely layered and elaborately woven in, say, GR. 

I'm paying a fair amount of attention to the different manifestations of the colliding-spheres definition of a miracle Arrabal tells Oedipa about. This obviously plays out in lots of conceptual, macro, plot-/history-level ways in this book, and in GR. But I'm also noticing, maybe with more thrust than on my last read, how much Pynchon ties this metaphor to the everyday lives, and especially emotional lives, of human beings. The notion of people being on opposite sides of a membrane and occasionally, every so often, stumbling into permeating it. I know it's gonna have a lot of resonance and continuation in Beyond the Zero. Something I'll be paying attention to. The way the collision of those spheres (i.e. Miracles) on the individual level relates to them on a more historical and even, I dunno, cosmic level. 

Oedipa contemplating a dance in which every couple dances something different, p. 107 of the Harper Modern Classic paperback: "There would have to be collisions. The only alternative was some unthinkable order of music, many resumes, all keys at once, it choreography in which each couple nest easy, predestined."-
Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l