M&D12: The Insanity of Clock-Time and Maskelyne

[Smoke Teff]

CHAPTER 12



p. 116



“Mason, Dixon, and Maskelyne are in a punch house”



An obvious continuation of the three-guys-bar joke structure that ends Ch. 11



“A Gust of Panic crosses Maskelyne’s face briefly, then his Curatickal
Blank returns.”



Maskelyne was voraciously competitive and ambitious. Also, more
curated affect—seems especially prevalent among the class of people
who would have their portraits painted. Though Maskelyne betrays some
class resentment—and hero worship: “To live at Cambridge, to step
where Newton stepp’d? I would have become a servant’s servant.”



One thing this makes me appreciate is the extent to which worldly
figures—especially those enlightenment thinkers and scientists—have
become the flesh deities, of rationalism/scientism/affairs of state.
Dixon agrees: “Newton is my Deity.”



p. 117



“’So both of us quickly learn’d our way ‘round the Larders, the
trysting places, the passageways inside the Walls.’”



More labyrinthine spaces—there’s no space or object, in P, you can
truly (or at least superficially) get to the bottom of.



“Mason, as if newly arriv’d, speaks at last. ‘Forget not London
itself, as a pre-eminent author of Madness.’”



More on the notion that urbanism—perhaps merely human density beyond a
certain threshold, or perhaps that in combination with the centralized
power of the nation-state and the forces of competition
everywhere—leads to madness. Londoners go mad as Malays run amok?



“Maskelyne, choosing to hear in this a rebuke, snaps, ‘Perhaps too
many damn’d Gothickal Scribblers about’”



Preemptive enlightenment resentment toward the Romantick?



“The Ghastly Fop”



First variation/repetition of this. So funny.



“As Mason considers some reply, Dixon gallantly fills in.”



They become increasingly protective of one another, work in increasing tandem



p. 118



“’Yet surely,’ Maskelyne all but whining, ‘there’s far too much of it
about? Encouraging,’ his Voice dropping, ‘all these melancholick
people[…]’”



Does expression of affect beget more of that affect? Perhaps, if it
makes the affect fashionable? Or does it become popular because it
expresses an affect the unartistick don’t see externalized? I feel
like you could ask this question about Pynchon’s relationship to
paranoia (other modern instantiations of this kind of questioning
might involve the ability of video games to perpetuate violence,
pornography to perpetuate…)



“’too many idle Minutes to be fill’d, soon pile up, topple, and
overwhelm the healthiest Mind,--‘”



Idleness is increasingly positioned as the enemy in the Age of Reason.
It is in opposition to utility/exploitation/profit. But are moments of
idleness not the precursor to our celebration of being, or the
opportunity to apprehend the coming God? Here’s GR’s narrator (in
maybe my favorite passage of P):  “If the rockets don’t get her
there’s still her lieutenant. Damned Beaver/Jeremy is the War, he is
every assertion the fucking War has ever made—that we are meant for
work and government, for austerity: and these shall take priority over
love, dreams, the spirit, the senses and the other second-class trivia
that are found among the idle and mindless hours of the day. . . .
Damn them, they are wrong. They are insane.”



GR’s War is but an extreme expression of what Maskelyne expresses here.



“’Congratulations, much Joy,’ wish Mason and Dixon.’”



Is this the first collective mention of them? And one of those moments
of fictional irreality you accept or don’t—kind of an awkward phrasing
for two people to utter simultaneously. Unless this is them
increasingly harmonizing.



“O, inhospitably final year of any Pretense to Youth, its Dreams now,
how wither’s away…”



Pretty melancholick from Maskelyne here.



What about Youth? Reminds me of P in the Slow Learner intro, saying
the Beat movement “placed too much emphasis on youth, including the
eternal variety.”



We see now, in 2018, the increased perversion, commodification, and
pop-commercial focus on youth/adolescence/the years of one’s maximal
liberty (apparently) and reproductive prime. Does this begin in the
Age of Reason, with its perverse emphasis on utility, with the
commodification of human generation all around?



p. 119



“’The Sisson instrument,--someone’s put the Plumb-line on wrong[…]the
Error owing to the Plumb-line is[…]enough to submerge utterly the
Result he seeks. Yet he continues here under Royal Society orders,--as
now, apparently, do we.’”



Maskelyne’s role in the fate of our astronomers and the workings of
the RS and the EIC is very mysterious. What does it mean that he’s on
as doomed a mission as our astronomers found themselves to be on the
ship?



“a dead Fighting-Cock trailing its last Blood in splashes like
Characters Death would know how to read.”



Another personification of Death



p. 121



“’Tis said of the French Astronomers, that they never turn their
Instruments, be it out of Pride or Insouciance or some French
Sentiment we don’t possess, whilst what seems to distinguish us out
here, is that we do. We reverse our Sectors, we measure ev’rything in
both Directions[…]’Tis the British Way, to take the extra step that
may one day give us an Edge when we need one, probably against the
French. Small Investment, large Reward. I regard myself as a
practitioner of British Science now.’”



This fits in with my general notions of how the British understand
their taxonomickal differences from the French. I don’t know if this
reflects actual contemporary scientifick practice. Also don’t exactly
feel like I have a firm handle on how this instrument reversal fits
into any of the thematic schemata running through the novel. The
underbelly/subequator stuff involves reflection and translation—but
reversal?



“For a short while, the two Clocks stood side by side, set upon a
level Shelf, as just outside, unceasingly, the Ocean beat…”



More relentless Ocean pulse.



“However well sprung the Bracket arrangements, these Walls were fix’d
ultimately to the Sea, whose Rhythm must have affected the Pendula of
both clocks in ways we do not fully appreciate,--“



And so the Ocean, our environment, affects huz. Through its pulse and
through the clock, whose changes we ultimately abide by.



“Both are veterans of the Transit of Venus, as well as having been
employ’d, Hour upon dark Hour, in Astronomers’ work, from
Equal-Altitude Duty to the Timing of Jupiter’s Moons, which back and
forth like restless Ducklings keep vanishing behind their Maternal
Planet.”



Amazingly loaded sentence. Introduces a passage of conversation
between the two clocks, a favorite (another instance of P investing
nonhuman or even (apparently) nonliving things with a consciousness
that is somewhat human, at least in its articulation to us—Byron the
Bulb from GR being somewhat similar). Also—ducklings and “Maternal
Planet” are both sort of introductions to part of the novel’s
increasing exploration of paranormality. Maternal Planet also having
psychoanalytic resonance—the womb, the maternal planet you ever long
to return to.



“’You’ll be on Duty twenty-four hours, is what it comes to[…a]long
with the usual fixation upon one’s rate of Going….’”



Funny. Also, apt personification—even the clocks suffer with the
expectations of their way of being. It’s a specifically temporal
experience of the forces that are shaping the discipline of the modern
human (in a Foucoultian sense).



p. 122



“Haven't Dutchmen, for Generations, been living with Dutch Clocks in
the House, after all,— even whilst they sleep? Indeed, 'tis exactly
that Dutch Stolidity of Character that's requir'd, for their Clocks
strike each Quarter-hour, and without warning,— BONGGbing! sort of
effect. Takes a certain Personality, 's what I'm saying.”



More affiliation of the Dutch with time—time keeping, time obedience,
time obsession—and with practicality & Stolidity. Makes the effects of
time on the psyche seem…traumatic. Also conceives of time as being
essential to personality, to shaping a person, a component of
Discipline. Perhaps different cultures or groups who find assimilation
and harmony difficult are suffering from an inability to harmonize
their…time-languages.



p. 123



“’Maskelyne is insane, but not as insane as some, among whom you must
particularly watch out for—‘

“Too late.”



Very funny. Also, so far as we trust the wisdom and judgment of these
clocks, interesting to get such a clear diagnosis about Maskelyne, who
might be seeming odd and precarious to the reader right now.



“And indeed, what they wanted to talk about all along, was the Ocean.
Neither Clock really knows what it is,-beyond an undeniably rhythmick
Being of some sort[…]What they feel is an Attraction, more and less
resistible, to beat in Synchrony with it, regardless of their
Pendulum-lengths, or even the divisions of the Day.”



Clock : ocean :: humans : the divine?



We sense the presence of it around us, though we do not encounter it
directly. We feel compelled to apprehend and harmonize with it, though
we don’t always yield to that compulsion. Our training, purpose,
pendulum-lengths (our body-ego presence in the material world) offer
us more and less ability to resist the compulsion to beat
synchronously with it. At the very least, more exploration of the
susceptibility of the body to the not-fully-knowable forces, energies,
rhythms in the atmosphere around it.



p. 124



“’I am resolv’d upon no further criticism of any Brother Lens[…]Even
one to whom Right Ascension may require a Wrong or two’”



Dixon’s diagnosis on Maskelyne. Some skepticism about the soundness of
Maskelyne’s judgment, perhaps the inclination that Maskelyne will need
some kind of suffering to course-correct. But not a condemnation of
his redeemability, especially as filtered through the common lens of
their vocations/callings/orientations.
-
Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l