Hi Evrybahdy!

Thu Jun 8 07:30:46 CDT 2017

Godolphin to Victoria Wren:

 "“The colors. So many colors.” His eyes were tightly closed, his

forehead resting on the bowed edge of one hand. “The trees outside the head
shaman’s house have spider monkeys which are iridescent. They change color
in the sunlight. Everything changes. The

mountains, the lowlands are never the same color from one hour to

the next. No sequence of colors is the same from day to day. As if

you lived inside a madman’s kaleidoscope. Even your dreams become

flooded with colors, with shapes no Occidental ever saw. Not real

shapes, not meaningful ones. Simply random, the way clouds change

over a Yorkshire landscape.”

...
“They stay with you,” he went on, “they aren’t fleecy

lambs or jagged profiles. They are, they are Vheissu, its raiment,

perhaps its skin.”

          “And beneath?”

          “You mean soul don’t you. Of course you do. I wondered about

the soul of that place. If it had a soul. Because their music, poetry,

laws and ceremonies come no closer. They are skin too. Like the

skin of a tattooed savage.
"

On Thu, Jun 8, 2017 at 8:00 AM, Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com> wrote:

> If I remember--not around a copy--there is something ' bout what evil
> created that riot of colors,
> Sorta all colors at once, I think.
>
>  I have read it, at times, as the right natural order of " things", the
> colors of the world, all upended. Not " the light across the ranges" [from
> later book] but a kind of pandemonium of the light...to spin on that
> McCarthy phrase. .....
>
> Which goes back to Milton, maybe, allusively? can't remember fer sure.
>
>
> Sent from my iPad
>
> On Jun 6, 2017, at 7:41 PM, Mark Thibodeau <jerkyleboeuf at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Anything about the wild colors of the primates in the land of Viesshu
> (sorry for the spelling... or am I even remembering the name right?) under
> all that ice in Antarctica?
>
> Man, I gotta read V again soon.
>
> Jerky
>
> On Tue, Jun 6, 2017 at 4:01 PM, Joseph Tracy <brook7 at sover.net> wrote:
>
>> One personally testable effect of complementary colors that I find
>> intriguing has to do with afterimage.  If you stare at a  colored shape
>> against a neutral background ( white, grey, black)  for say 20 seconds and
>> then close your eyes, the color you see will shift to its complement:
>> red/magenta to green( red will produce a medium or  dark blue green,
>> magenta a pale aqua green) , blue to orange, yellow to purple. two
>> comlements always add up to 3 primaries: yellow ( first primary) plus
>> purple( red plus blue second 2 primaries) . This effect can be done quite
>> well with a computer screen in a darkish room with a simple paint program.
>> What exactly this means is debatable, but it seems like the mind provides
>> a complement to what is being observed or considered. Perhaps any
>> perception of anything is only possible in reference to the larger whole,
>> yin yang style. I assume that to see red requires the temporaray
>> suppression of the receptors for blues and yellows that make green, a
>> suppression that is its own internal  shadow color which becomes internally
>> luminous when the eyes are closed.
>>    A fairly universal effect of psychoactive drugs is the perception of
>> the emanation of colors  and patterns from higher energy sources like
>> music, eyes, art, flowers fruit etc. It may be that the complementary
>> effects being produced by perceptions are no longer suppressed -   that
>> there is no longer any clear hierarchy of perception..   In my experience
>> magenta and green are particularly exaggerated in the plant world or in the
>> dark.
>> In Pynchon they seem to me  to have 2  or 3 effects; 1 as markers of a
>> mid zone between nonphysical and physical planes, or 2, simply a perception
>> of dissipating energy( entropy) seen as colored light. They can also mark
>> an acidic environment , danger, threat.
>>
>> On Jun 5, 2017, at 7:07 PM, John Bailey <sundayjb at gmail.com> wrote:
>> >
>> > I like this theory. M&D is full of characters with names like Wicks
>> > and Tenebrae ('shadows') and Lomax, which I swear is something to do
>> > with light or electricity. And AtD virtually treats light as a
>> > character throughout the novel, beginning with the epigraph ("It's
>> > always night, or we wouldn't need light").
>> > I always approached the magenta/green combo as something to do with
>> > their complementarity, ie they're 'opposite' colours so they produce
>> > the greatest contrast possible to the human eye. You can get a sense
>> > of the effect just on the Wikipedia page for complementarity:
>> > https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complementary_colors
>> > It's close to an optical illusion, the effect the contrast has on the
>> > eye. Supposedly complementary colours cancel each other out and create
>> > white or black as a result but I don't really understand what that's
>> > all about.
>> >
>> > On Mon, Jun 5, 2017 at 1:00 AM, da kid <peterock86 at live.com> wrote:
>> >> Cool thanks. Only skimmed the article so far but I like the idea of
>> >> purple/green indicating Slothrop is a projection. It agrees with my
>> vague
>> >> understanding of Pynchon's "hologram style characters" that his ex-gf
>> said
>> >> he was trying to create. I was wowed by that comment of hers when I
>> read it
>> >> on some obscure blog because previously I had been a fan of an essay
>> on M&D
>> >> comparing it's structure to a magic eye a.k.a. auto-stereogram.
>> >>
>> >> I'm currently finishing up ATD so there are two scenes that have stuck
>> with
>> >> me that I think have something to do with this. One is the scene where
>> the
>> >> Chums meet the Trespassers at Candlebrow U. where they dematerialize
>> and
>> >> reappear. At first they have a magenta and green edge to them and then
>> a
>> >> blue and orange tone (he's more specific of course).
>> >> The second is the scene when Kit is at the sanitorium after dodging
>> Foley at
>> >> Gottingen. This goofy scene features among other things a distracting
>> >> necktie in magenta and green that if look at right can show
>> entertaining
>> >> images. I'm personally of the opinion that this scene is one of a
>> handful in
>> >> ATD where Pynchon rolls out his old standby themes  from his other
>> books.
>> >> There's a football making a parabola I believe and the jelly doughnut
>> guy
>> >> who I suspect is the disguised  Eucharist - cannibalism question of
>> Rec'd
>> >> Cherrycoke's. Another big part of this scene is the "doctor" Dinkopf's
>> >> anti-Semitic hangups. He is a proto-Nazi who suspects everyone is
>> Jewish. To
>> >> me this sounds like Docs phone call to his Aunt in the  Inherent Vice
>> movie
>> >> (I haven't read that one) about I think Mickey Wolfman- "He's secretly
>> >> Jewish but thinks he's a Nazi". Dr. Hilarius too. I don't know if all
>> these
>> >> allusions are supposed to tie in a certain way or if it is some kind of
>> >> Pynchon montage.
>> >> I may be rambling too much here so basically magenta and green has
>> something
>> >> to do with holograms or 3d projections or perhaps television?
>> >>
>> >> ________________________________
>> >> From: Monte Davis <montedavis49 at gmail.com>
>> >> Sent: Sunday, June 4, 2017 8:51:32 AM
>> >> To: da kid
>> >> Cc: Pynchon-l
>> >> Subject: Re: Hi Evrybahdy!
>> >>
>> >> Magenta & green, etc -- "Coloring Gravity's Rainbow", downloadable:
>> >>
>> >> https://pynchonnotes.openlibhums.org/articles/abstract/10.
>> 16995/pn.374/
>> >>
>> >>
>> >> On Sat, Jun 3, 2017 at 3:49 PM, da kid <peterock86 at live.com> wrote:
>> >>>
>> >>> Hi I've been reading the p-list archives for a little while now and
>> admire
>> >>> the ideas of alot of the people here. Entries by Andrew Dinn, John
>> Bailey,
>> >>> Doug Millison among many others are Imho far better than New Yorker
>> or NYT
>> >>> essays for understanding TRP's books. I have tried to talk about
>> Pynchon on
>> >>> Reddit but I rarely ever encounter anyone who really wants to dive
>> into the
>> >>> text. So, I am excited to hopefully discuss some of the theories and
>> whatnot
>> >>> that have been bugging me for awhile. Pynchon's ubiqui-themes like:
>> >>>
>> >>>   Ourobouros through the ring
>> >>>
>> >>> Magenta and green specifically and his hangup with particular shades
>> >>> pigments in general.
>> >>>
>> >>>  Holograms/Layers
>> >>>  His "cartoonish" characterization that Chrissie Wexler refers to in
>> >>> Lineland.
>> >>>
>> >>> Vibrating to stay invisible (CoC & Inconvenience, the revealing of
>> America
>> >>> in M&D)
>> >>>
>> >>>  The Eucharist
>> >>>   The Holy Ghost and the Pentecost
>> >>>
>> >>> as well as my pet theories about the Hairy Ball Theorem in M&D and
>> Donald
>> >>> Barthelme as Dixon. I could keep rambling on but I'll stop for now.
>> >>>
>> >>> Anyways, I hope to get to the bottom of all this malarkey and reveal
>> the
>> >>> authors perverse schemes once and for all...
>> >>>
>> >>> Pete
>> >>>
>> >>
>> >>
>> > -
>> > Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l
>>
>> -
>> Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?listpynchon-l
>>
>
>
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