Re: M&D, the people’s memory vs the internet

[Joseph Tracy]

OK I went to my kindle version and this is not a quote that I could find so I assume you are stating the evident, that CCoke is creating impressions of history and personal memory mingled, but all assuming the graceful flow and hilarity of narrative.   He embodies and shares an oral flow belonging to the people and their memories.  
  The internet is similar in coded content with  added images and video  and text rather than memory  and narrative magic as the vehicle.  The large issues of history and ideas on the web are as disputatious as this M&D Enlightenment period, boundaries as contrived as ever. But there is this other flow that is lived lives that can’t be contained in any memory bank no matter how large. If nothing else than because all words are fictions, references, symbols, code.  We seem to be laying waste to the complex multi dimensional multi-elemental protein rich living memory  DNA code of life that is our living planet in preference for a binary translation that will always pale in comparison to experience and memory of life. 
 
   Memory is a major theme mediated both by CherryCoke and Mason and Dixon. The artfulness of CherryCoke Pynchon ( they are parts of a whole)  make Mason and Dixon come to life and turns George Washington and BenFranklin into cartoons. There is a sense here that to be remembered is to be falsified.

In my digital search( I do like these damned machines) I came to a quote: "we have but Memories of some Pause..”.  I could not remember enough to place it, going further backward and forward in the text to try to understand in the end reading 20 pages to understand a line. It was amazingly coherent as a meditation on memory and history. It starts, or rather I picked it up in a discussion of Shakespeare’s historical accuracy where among other things Tenebrae asks was Hamlet real. While answering CCoke is offered some peach brandy which he identifies as coming from a certain region, octarara. This sends him on a lengthy reverie of a  fortnight spent snowbound in octarara with little else to sustain him but peach brandy.

"’Twas a more tranquil time, before the War, when people moved more slowly,— even, marvelous to say, here in Philadelphia, where the bustling might yet be distinguish’d from the hectic. There were no Sedan Chairs. Many went about on foot. Even Saint Nicholas was able to deliver all his Gifts, and yet find time for a brisk Pint at The Indian Queen.  “ 352-3

He ends up in a lengthy coach ride with some hilarious dialog which ends in CherryCokes dream-like consideration of the end of the journey:
“What Machine is it,” young Cherrycoke later bade himself goodnight, “that bears us along so relentlessly? We go rattling thro’ another Day,— another Year,— as thro’ an empty Town without a Name, in the Midnight . . . we have but Memories of some Pause at the Pleasure-Spas of our younger Day, the Maidens, the Cards, the Claret,— we seek to extend our stay, but now a silent Functionary in dark Livery indicates it is time to re-board the Coach, and resume the Journey. Long before the Destination, moreover, shall this Machine come abruptly to a Stop . . . gather’d dense with Fear, shall we open the Door to confer with the Driver, to discover that there is no Driver, . . . no Horses, . . . only the Machine, fading as we stand, and a Prairie of desperate Immensity. . . .”



  

> On Apr 18, 2018, at 1:47 PM, Smoke Teff <smoketeff at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> Memory, Cherrycoke tells us, belongs to the people. 
> 
> Anyone have any thoughts on how the internet, the right to be forgotten, and/or Bleeding Edge play into this?
> --
> Pynchon-L: https://waste.org/mailman/listinfo/pynchon-l