Ch 28 In which George Washington and his happy negro smoke dope with Mason and Dixon

[Mark Kohut]

Somalia writes:
> 
> And how does the enclosure of space in the horizontal realm—the Earth’s surface, though only really true in the abstract, the world of ideas—relate to verticality of the Great Chain of Being?
> 
> Cf. The bit, can’t find page number at the moment, about Jesus’s cross as a kind of collapse or zero point of these two dimensions 

I do think the insight of that not-yet-published essay by a scholar is right here: Pynchon's insight patternings are: vertical is metaphysical, " religious" in meaning ( even if parodic, anti-meanings) and secular, earthbound, in the horizontal. 
Jesus on cross fits.