M&D CH 13: Fear and Loathing and Horniness and Astrology on St. Helena

[Mark Kohut]

but things
that obscure the day (night, fog) often portend, well, not exactly
doom, but certainly confusion and the feelings of danger.

The Day often means a hard work day in Pynchon; the Day also means the
Zeitgeist, the cultural consensus pot the times
AND, sometimes, is a synecdoche for the Age of Reason, it has been said.

On Wed, Feb 7, 2018 at 1:40 PM, Smoke Teff <smoketeff at gmail.com> wrote:

> CHAPTER 13
>
>
>
> p. 125
>
>
>
> “Fog begins to stir against the Day swelling near.”
>
>
>
> AtD. In Gravity’s Rainbow, it felt like day had the potential to be a
> sinister force—climaxing in noon’s evil hour. The sterile light of
> clinical observations. The oppressive panoptick gaze of the midday
> sun, the war machine, the light of inspection and consciousness. It
> felt like Day was associated repression, with opposition to/ignorance
> of the subconscious, deeper ways of being.
>
>
>
> In M&D, it feels somewhat different, at least in the earlygoing here.
> Day still bears the light of inspection, of consciousness…but things
> that obscure the day (night, fog) often portend, well, not exactly
> doom, but certainly confusion and the feelings of danger. Perhaps
> because this is earlier in the Enlightenment? The potential negative
> extreme expressions of the light of consciousness and reason have not
> reached their terminus in GR’s War quite yet. Of course, maybe this is
> just contemporary perception—maybe in the post-Enlightenment,
> pre-Freud west, the day has come to take on some of GR’s meaning.
>
>
>
> But of course, our astronomers are ever drawn away from the Day here.
> And we see the ways that the Day has been, like the world of men,
> striated—a hypnosis increasingly shared by all, clock-time, the
> stratified day, divided into units for monastic obedience but also for
> commercial and capitalistic purpose.
>
>
>
> Does (P’s sense of) history account for the change in the Day between
> M&D and GR? Discuss.
>
>
>
> “’It certainly isn’t Cape Town,’ Mason marvels.”
>
>
>
> Just tracking this.
>
>
>
> “no Curfew”
>
>
>
> Because the local conditions here don’t impel that kind of anality,
> the oppressive time-level control of the inhabitants on the part of
> the ruling trading company? We’ve seen some of the Dutch insanity
> regarding time and control—is this because “John Company,” i.e. the
> English East India Company, is not so hypnotized by the intersection
> of power and time as the Dutch company is?
>
>
>
> p. 126
>
>
>
> “[…]recognizes here the primacy of Tide Tables, and, beyond them, of
> the Moon,--ceding to her de facto rule over all arrivals and
> departures, including Life and Death, upon this broken Island, so long
> ill us’d.”
>
>
>
> The tide, the moon’s gravitational pull—external, sky-born vectors of
> force, of cosmic desire—the subconscious, astronomickal counterpart to
> the earthly forces moving underneath is, Ley lines, etc. The moon
> being classically associated with the subconscious (in a kind of
> photonegative, underbelly sort of way consistent with some of the
> book’s other entangled binaries of presence and absence) you’d think
> that would mark the upcoming journey as being one where logick and
> reason might fail us (aligns with the previous page’s suggestion of
> the fog working against the day)
>
>
>
> “’Tho’ small in secular Dimenstions[…]yet entering, ye discover its
> true Extent,--which proves Mazy as an European city…no end of corners
> yet to be turn’d. ‘Tis Loaves and Fishes, here in James’s Town, and
> Philosophy has no answer.’”
>
>
>
> Evoking Christian mythology when the loaves and fishes, Maskelyne here
> paints James’s Town as one of miracles and the unknown—which, in the
> sense of loaves and fishes, might lead to abundance? Or lostness—the
> labyrinth? Pynchon’s trope of suggesting something, by virtue of its
> complexity or unknowability, contains more space inside than its
> exterior suggests is possible.
>
>
>
> “The first two or three days’d be easy,--assuming one had a perfect
> knowledge of the Town and the Island,--for the initial Search-Parties
> would be of younger Writers and ‘Prentices, too new here to know even
> the Castle in its true Extension, disruptive lads, intimidating,
> alerting ev’ry Soul to the Imminence of a Search Island-wide,--that
> is, thro’ this entire World,--“
>
>
>
> Here Maskelyne and Mason discussing the possibility of disappearing,
> purposely. Maskelyne as bipolar and Mason as depressive?
>
>
>
> Also: the Castle preys on the ignorance of its younger subjects (to
> “its true Extension”).
>
>
>
> And Pynchon doing more work to establish the apparent world-insularity
> of this place. The world sometimes segments into differentiated
> realms—the human mind sometimes provides the boundaries that make this
> effectively true.
>
>
>
> p. 127
>
>
>
> “I don’t do Satellites of Jupiter, all it says in my Contract is one
> Transit of Venus,--and that’s what I did. If you wish me to observe
> the next, there’ll have to be a new Contract.”
>
>
>
> There have been a lot of indications, thus far, that the fledgling
> trade of professional stargazing is young enough that it’s not really
> a wise route for those who would seek profit or security or
> advancement of some kind—for the most part, it seems to be (perhaps
> like the early days of the internet) a pursuit only undertaken out of
> love.
>
>
>
> This refusal suggests, to me, that reducing human initiative to the
> strictures of a Contract inhibits the ability of the human to feel
> natural love for what s/he is doing.
>
>
>
> p. 128
>
>
>
> “’For a while I firmly believ’d this Place a conscious Creature,
> animated by power drawn from beneath the Earth, assembl’d in secret,
> by the Company,--entirely theirs,--no Action, no Thought nor Dream,
> that had not the Co. for its Author.’”
>
>
>
> More about forces working underneath the surface to influence human
> affairs. Are these forces necessarily sinister? I don’t get that
> impression elsewhere—it seems that these particular forces, in this
> part of the world, in combination with the actions of the Company, the
> hypnosis of the people under the Company’s spell, combine to produce
> something sinister. Does it have something to do with a) natural
> subterranean forces and b) some of the laws of human density and
> collectivization suggested elsewhere in the novel?
>
>
>
> “’All[…]go about most softly. What Authority enforces the
> Practice?[…]I suggest that more than either, ‘tis the awareness of
> living upon a Slumbering Creature, compar’d to whose Size, we figure
> not quite as Lice,--that keeps us uniquely attentive to Life so
> precarious, and what Civility is truly necessary, to carry it on.”
>
>
>
> Civility as impelled by…just the (forces working inside the) earth? Or
> by those forces as translated through the Company?
>
>
>
> Seems Hobbesian, to me—civility as impelled by the obvious monopoly on
> violence held by some much more powerful thing. Can this “Civility”
> (without the servile connotations of obedience) be achieved through a
> more positive kind of worship? Is it necessarily fearful when the
> monopolist transitions from the realm of the deistic to the realm of
> the…incorporated, the profit-seeking, the diffuse and faceless…
>
>
>
> “Hence, no Curfew. To live, we must be up at all hours. Every moment
> of our Waking, pass’d in fear, with the possibility ceaseless of
> sliding into licentiousness and squalor,--“
>
>
>
> A kind of mythology of English propriety? Just as we compulsively
> maintain the monastic/clerical class even in secular times, because we
> subconsciously feel the divine or the mysterious or the asecular must
> be beheld by some, even if not by us….so must the Company, or the
> beast sleeping underneath it here, be beheld by the eyes-open fear of
> its subjects
>
>
>
> “You have not yet seen Squalor, Sir,--be advis’d that you now live in
> the Metropolis of that Condition.”
>
>
>
> Rome, the zero point, of all squalor
>
>
>
> “Obs of Sirius must be taken as far apart as possible, mustn’t
> they,--at least six months of what the World no doubt sees as
> Idleness[…]”
>
>
>
> More work drawing upon this idea that the kind of attention necessary
> for beholding the important mysteries looks useless, like Idleness, to
> those hypnotized by the profit-hunger and the apparently secular.
>
>
>
> p. 129
>
>
>
> “miniature mirrors set inside the Covers, that allow them to View ther
> Features, tho’ one at a Time. All that is not thus in Fragments, is
> Invisible.”
>
>
>
> Cosmetologickal equivalent of not being able to see the forest for the
> trees—a resonant idea, here in the Age of Reason, and a rather
> beautiful metaphor of self-interest and superficiality. We can only
> glimpse the smallest part of creation at any given time.
>
>
>
> “Ornamental Lanthorns scarcely bigger than the Flames they hold,
> dangling from the Wrists of young Ladies with business at this Hour.”
>
>
>
> Just noting this because I find the image compelling. Dangerous and
> elegant both.
>
>
>
> p. 130
>
>
>
> “We need Men, in The Moon”
>
>
>
> To my ear, this song conflates the fantastic imagery of the day with
> WWII-era enlistment propaganda, anticipating not only that propaganda
> (possibly also related to the enlistment pushes going on for the 7
> Years War—and about to go around for the American war for
> independence)
>
>
>
> “that extremity of Quidnunc which, given enough time, necessarily
> emerges upon a small Island surrounded by Ocean for thousands of
> Soul-less leagues in ev’ry direction, where the village-siz’d
> population have only one another to talk about, and anyone newly
> arriv’d is feasted upon with an eagerness match’d only in certain
> rivers of South America.”
>
>
>
> The hyperlocal relationship to gossip. For an external relationship to
> gossip, cf. p. 293: “enjoying viciously as any recreational Traveler
> the quaint Stridencies of a Politics not his own”
>
>
>
> “Everyone comes to know what everyone else knows,--and the strange
> mind-to-mind Throb may be felt distinctly, not to mention
> apprehensively, by the New-comer.”
>
>
>
> Some of the recent chapters have dealt with concepts that reminded me
> of the collective unconscious mind. This feels somewhat relevant
> here—except it’s a collective consciousness, one that is shared and
> comes to form a kind of psychic border/force-field tangible to the
> outsider. The throb of the island hive mind. Minds making/bordering
> their realms together (as opposed to individuals perceiving borders
> around and realms around themselves).
>
>
>
> “’That’s Clive of India’s brother-in-law,’” referring to Maskelyne,
> who, as the reader now knows, is juiced with the higher powers of the
> East India Company (or is he?).
>
>
>
> p. 131
>
>
>
> “In return for suffering the familiarities of a celebrity-mad
> Knit-wit, Maskelyne is allow’s to run up a Tab[…]Maskelyne may also
> feel the weight of Family Tradition[…]Maskelyne is still trying to
> work out what [his sort of place] might be.”
>
>
>
> An interesting moment, where we get a kind of extended period of
> interiority with Maskelyne. Especially as we feel so uncertain as to
> his motivations toward the two characters with whom the reader has
> most identified—M&D. Of course, malevolence/benevolence is never
> itself a category Pynchon much obeys when deciding which characters’
> psyches to really investigate. Still, this moment stands out to me.
>
>
>
> “Dr. Halley’s difficulties with the early Fog that often fill’d the
> great Ravine.”
>
>
>
> Here the vaporous material continuity trope connects different
> astronomers across time—like the skies do? A different kind of
> continuity. Fog is like half the unchanging sky, half the
> ever-changing (and so unchanging) river.
>
>
>
> p. 132
>
>
>
> “’Aren’t you feeling, I don’t know,--disturb’d?’”
>
>
>
> Maskelyne’s paranoia.
>
>
>
> “’Disturb’d? Why, no, Maskelyne, after the Cape I find it quite
> calming here, in a Tropical way, pure Air, Coffee beyond compare.’”
>
>
>
> Interesting to refer to the clear air given how much attention has
> been paid to the fog.
>
>
>
> “’Ahhckk! Mason, can y’ not feel it? This place! this great
> Ruin,--haunted…an Obstinate Spectre,--an ancient Crime,--none here
> will ever escape it, ‘tis in the Gases they breathe, Generation unto
> Generation,--Ah! ‘Tis it! There! Look ye!’”
>
>
>
> Maskelyne’s paranoia, or schizophrenia, or simple witness, or terrible
> revelation? The description of the great “Ruin” contrasts with the
> idea that the island is atop a slumbering consciousness—unless that
> slumbering consciousness, like Nietzsche’s god, is dead? “Ancient
> Crime” brings the notion of original sin to my mind, which, given some
> of the mentions of collective un/conscious in the novel thus far,
> makes me wonder if a buried dead consciousness/ancient crime isn’t
> suggested to be somehow part of our firmware. The crime being
> connected to the death/ruin of the island, of the consciousness
> underneath it? What killed that consciousness? Not just colonialism…it
> doesn’t seem right to call colonialism ancient, at this point.
>
>
>
>
>
> p. 133
>
>
>
> “He already suspects that the Island enjoys a Dispensation not perhaps
> as relentlessly Newtonian as Southern England’s,--and as to whose
> Author’s Identity, one may grow confus’d, so ubiquitous here are signs
> of the Infernal.”
>
>
>
> Mason starting to be affected/infected/hypnotized/possessed by
> whatever has gotten into Maskelyne.
>
>
>
> “a patch of Nothing”
>
>
>
> Feels relevant, especially given Mason’s enthusiasms and difficulties
> with meditation
>
>
>
> “against What approaches, Shot is without effect.”
>
>
>
> More apocalyptic prophesying from Maskelyne, also known (on this page)
> as “Maskelyne’s Sermons upon the Unknown.”
>
>
>
> “Soon the Rain-Fall is spouting from all three corners of his Hat at
> once, regardless of what Angle he places his Head at.”
>
>
>
> I believe this is the second time this has been mentioned?
>
>
>
> “A little traveling Stage-Troupe, is St. Helena really, all
> Performance,--a Plantation, sent out years since by its metropolitan
> Planet[…]Many here, Descendants of the first Settlers, would never
> visit the Home Planet”
>
>
>
> More language of interplanetary travel, extraterrestrial migration.
> Conflating it with the language of colonization
>
>
>
> “this place till then serving as an Aide-Mémoire, a Representation of
> Home.”
>
>
>
> More on the theme of representation—here representation as a memory
> aid, representation in/of a place, representation as transcending not
> only oceans, national boundaries, or the life-death boundary, but as
> transcending time, and serving an important psychic function—we make
> the realms we require out of the environments that surround us. With
> little regard for the ability of someone else to construct a meaning
> for the shared environment that totally differs from ours.
>
>
>
> p. 134
>
>
>
> “some notion of the Garden in Genesis, as an instance of
> extra-terrestrial Plantation.”
>
>
>
> This is an obviously big conceptual moment. The notion of the source
> of life, innocence, happiness on earth as being somehow unnatural, a
> colonization. And if colonization inevitably corrupts the world,
> colonizer and colonized, then the fall in Genesis happened before the
> actual fall. Game was rigged, sort of thing. The original sin was
> already baked into us. Baked into our subconscious.
> Extraterrestriality here as elsewhere being used in conversation with
> the workings of the unconscious.
>
>
>
> “Maskelyne is the pure type of one who would transcend the
> Earth,--making him, for Mason, a walking cautionary Tale.”
>
>
>
> Mason is totally earthly—fallen. Likes looking at the stars, does not
> want to be among them.
>
>
>
> “For years now, after midnight Culminations has he himself lain and
> listen'd to the Sky-Temptress, whispering, Forget the Boys, forget
> your loyalties to your Dead, first of all to Rebekah, for she, they,
> are but distractions, temporal, flesh, ever attempting to drag the
> Uranian Devotee back down out of his realm of pure Mathesis, of that
> which abides.”
>
>
>
> Cf. Dixon re: the spirit on p. 101: “’It abides,--‘tis we who are ever
> recall’d from it, to tend to our various mortal Requirements…? and so
> another such Visit soon becomes necessary,--another great Turning, and
> so forth…? Howbeit, ‘tis all Desire,--and Desire, but Embodiment, in
> the World, of what Quakers have understood as Grace…?’”
>
>
>
> “His realm of pure Mathesis” is where the spirit abides, at least as
> far as Mason is moved to worship. This is a complicated moment. Mason
> is, on the one hand, feeling some repulsion from Maskelyne’s yearning
> for transcendence, though he is also suggested to, perhaps
> repressedly, resent the worldly anchors of his life, and yearn for his
> own transcendence. Interestingly, his grief for Rebekah does not
> deliver him from but anchors him in the material world.
>
>
>
> “For if each Star is little more a mathematickal Point, located upon
> the Hemisphere of Heaven by Right Ascension and Declination, then all
> the Stars, taken together, tho' innumerable, must like any other set
> of points, in turn represent some single gigantick Equation, to the
> mind of God as straightforward as, say, the Equation of a Sphere,— to
> us unreadable, incalculable. A lonely, uncompensated, perhaps even
> impossible Task,— yet some of us must ever be seeking, I suppose.”
>
>
>
> The equation of all the stars. Everything apprehended at once—by God.
> Our inability to perceive but the most meaningless fragment of all the
> stars—yet we are compelled to seek. Some of us.
>
>
>
> Does this relate to the language of extraterrestriality also? We are
> compelled, despite (because of?) our limitations, to regard
> exterrestrial and possibly deistic powers greater than and beyond our
> world.
>
>
>
> “the last Orange-Grove upon the Island,--a souvenir of a Paradise decrepit”
>
>
>
> The fall, which brought down the Garden, has not totally succeeded in
> obliterating all hope. Though not much: “all, with the volcanic Meadow
> where the two stand, circl’d by the hellish Cusps of Peaks unnatural.”
> Another kind of bull’s eye—a little island of life.
>
>
>
> “’Saint Brendan set out in the fifth century to discover an Island he
> believ’d was the Paradise of the Scriptures, and found it.’”
>
>
>
> We see how long this has been going on, and realize the crime
> Maskelyne is lamenting actually is ancient—like original sin. And it
> starts with…seeking paradise? Of course paradise was fallen and
> unnatural even before it got to this planet.
>
>
>
> “So will the Reign of Reason cheerily dispose of any allegations of
> Paradise.”
>
>
>
> Can’t help but hear the opening to AtD in “cheerily” here. But mostly
> I note the rather naked suggestion here of how the Reign (is that what
> we’re calling it now? Sounds suddenly rather sinister) of Reason is
> working against the credibility and potency of many of man’s dubiously
> natural notions of paradise, of the otherworldly.
>
>
>
> p. 135
>
>
>
> “’Serpent, Worm, or Dragon, ‘tis all the same to It, for It speaketh
> no Tongue but its own. It Rules this Island, whose ancient Curse and
> secret Name, is Disobedience. In thoughtless Greed, within a few
> pitiably brief Generations, have these People devastated a Garden in
> which, once, anything might grow. Their Muck-heaps ev’rywhere,
> Disease, Madness[…]whilst the unremitting Wind carries off the last
> soil from the last barren Meadow, with nought but other Humans the
> only Life remaining then to the Island”
>
>
>
> Here we get a received myth about what slumbers underneath the
> ground—inside the Volcanoe. Like other forces of either mysterious or
> malevolent (or even benevolent, maybe?) power in the novel thus far,
> it is functionally resistant to gnosis (“speaketh no Tongue but its
> own”) and the people exist in a relationship of Disobedience and
> antagonism to it.
>
>
>
> The destroyed Garden here obviously relates to the “Garden in Genesis”
> mentioned on the previous page. “anything might grow”==land fertility
> is a relative strong recurring trope in P, I think, as the land/soil
> is one of the primary sites of generation.
>
>
>
> I’m not sure how the “unremitting Wind” is functioning in this vision,
> exactly. The Wind, elsewhere, is something that literally and
> metaphorically drives the actions (and thoughts) of men—it is one of
> the purest manifestations of the will (or powerful willlessness) of
> some extra-human kind of being. Here, is the unremitting Wind
> contributing to the Madness? Or just exacerbating by carrying off the
> barren soil?
>
>
>
> “[…]how will they take their own last step,--how disobey themselves
> into Oblivion? Simply die one by one, alone and suspicious, as is the
> style of the place, till all are done? Or will they rather choose to
> murder one another, for the joy to be had in that?’”
>
>
>
> A really haunting apocalyptic vision here. People dying alone and
> paranoid (i.e. with delusions of connection, albeit sinister) or by
> murder. Perhaps this is the flowering of the recurring motif of Murder
> as a kind of ultimate human crime—murder is ever a grave Disobedience,
> ever a march toward the species’ ruin. Though it’s done for the joy to
> be had in it—because disobedience of the highest kind is the
> only/intensest remaining joy?
>
>
>
> So who’s being Disobeyed? The volcano/dragon? God?
>
>
>
> Also—there’s an emphasis here on humans being the last animal
> remaining. Cities are the realm where humans dominate especially, so
> this may be expanding on the notion of urbanity/human density tending
> toward murderousness?
>
>
>
> “’How soon is this, that we’re talking about?’”
>
> “’Pray we may be gone by then’”
>
>
>
> Maskelyne’s death wish for the species—apocalypse wish. (Not an
> uncommon yearning among believers in a fallen world.)
>
>
>
> “’Against my father’s wishes I study the stars.’”
>
>
>
> More positioning astronomy as somehow disobedient, irreverent,
> subversive—again, like rock & roll.
>
>
>
> “’Reason, or any Vocation to it,--the Pursuit of the Sciences,--these
> are the hope of the Young, the new Music their Families cannot follow,
> occasionally not even listen to.’”
>
>
>
> Using a recognizable sign of impending cultural change to reorient us,
> again, to the beginning of the Age of Reason. Maybe to remind us that
> change is ever unwelcome—as reason and science must have been to many.
>
>
>
> Also, Reason and music are both depicted as being kind of subversive
> and having culturally disruptive potential (in addition to its
> military potential, p. 53)—cf. Chapter 26 especially for a family-wide
> discourse on the different potential uses of musick, including (pp.
> 261/2): "How not?" protests Ethelmer. "Excuse me, Ma'am,— but as you
> must appreciate how even your sort of Musick is changing, recall what
> Plato said in his 'Republick',— 'When the Forms of Musick change, 'tis
> a Promise of civil Disorder.'''
>
>
>
> p. 136
>
>
>
> “’Kepler said that Astrology is Astronomy’s wanton little sister, who
> goes out and sells herself that Astronomy may keep her Virtue”
>
>
>
> Unwinding the Age of Reason back to its sources, we see some unlikely
> convergences like this, as Maskelyne and Mason bond over their old
> astrology days. Astronomy and astrology being positioned according to
> some of the same belly/underbelly schema we’ve seen so far.
>
>
>
> “Star-Gazing's ever a Whore's profession,—/(Isn't it?)/Some in a
> Palace, all Marble and Brick,/Some behind Hedges for less than a kick,
> tell me/What's it matter,/The Stars will say, /We've been ga-zing,
> back at ye,/Many a Day,/And there's nothing we haven't seen/More than
> one way”
>
>
>
> After another comment on the debased status of the stargazer, we get
> an inversion of that particular gaze, with the stars looking back and,
> seeing everything “more than one way,” becoming ambivalent. All
> differences (and meanings?) are obliterated by the totality of…
> time/creation?
>
>
>
> p. 137
>
>
>
> “[…]Maskelyne flush’d with Song, ‘what say I do yours now, and you do
> mine later?’”
>
>
>
> I read a little bit of cheerful homoeroticism into this.
>
>
>
> p.138
>
>
>
> “’First of all, doesn’t it seem odd, that you and Mr. Dixon, with your
> natal signs rul’d by Venus and the Sun respectively, should have
> lately, as partners, observ’d the conjunction of those very two
> bodies,--the Event occurring, as well, in the Sign of the Twins?’”
>
>
>
> M&D are astrologically tied together—here we see a slightly more
> mystical offering of the paranoiac speculation on what brought them
> together.
>
>
>
> This moment reminds me of the extent to which twinness is a recurring
> theme in the novel (fits with the construction & codification of the
> system of binaries)
>
>
>
> 138/139
>
>
>
> “Tho' it takes Mason a while to recognize it, Maskelyne has been
> trying to convey the Dimensions of his Curiosity. As a man of
> Religion, he has often enough sought among the smaller Probabilities
> for proofs of God's recent Attendance, has practis'd Epsilonics for
> the sake of stronger Faith, as what deep-dyed Newtonian would not? One
> in seventy-  two, or point zero one four, is not a figure he can be
> quite comfortable with. Tis not quite Miraculous enough, there's the
> very Deuce of it. And if not quite a clear Intervention by the
> Creator, not quite from Heaven, then what Power is this an Act of?”
>
>
>
> Here we see the complicated ways Faith and Reason work
> interdependently—perhaps convergently, confusedly—inside one person.
> “’Tis not quite Miraculous enough,” to me seems like a kind of warm
> representation of the absurdity of trying to bring Reason to Faith. Of
> course, this absurdity (where there is no meaning) leads to paranoia
> (where the mind supplies meaning).
>
>
>
> p. 139
>
>
>
> “a common Acquaintance but lately withdrawn”
>
>
>
> As if God has departed—a deistic view. A kind of temporal reverse of
> the Rilkean view of the coming (but not yet arrived) God.
>
>
>
> “you make [Dixon] a truculent and wary neighbor.”
>
>
>
> More exposition on the danger-in-proximity of things that might
> otherwise have bonds of affection
>
>
>
> “His shiny-eyed, vixenish Phiz peering out of all that loose Hair.
>
> “’You take a deep Interest in Mr. Dixon?’”
>
>
>
> More homoeroticism here, to my reading.
>
>
>
> “’Shallow curiosity, Sir[…]have there been others, who…have taken an
> Interest in him?’”
>
>
>
> Maskelyne deflects this toward the apparently credible suspicion that
> Dixon has drawn the interest of many outside players (thinking here
> about the Jesuits primarily).
>
>
>
> “’As much as you. There being the fitful Rumor that your Mr. Peach
> will be nam’d a Director.’”
>
>
>
> Each speculating on the other’s power and relationship to the East
> India Company (another God-like power of questionable proximity).
>
>
>
> p. 140
>
>
>
> “We are[…]both Subjects of the same Invisible Power? No? What is it,
> think ye? Something richer than many a Nation, yet with no
> Boundaries,— which, tho' never part of any Coalition, yet maintains
> its own great Army and Navy,— able to pay for the last War, as the
> next, with no more bother than finding the Key to a certain iron Box,—
> yet which allows the Bri-tannick Governance that gave it Charter, to
> sink beneath oceanick Waves of Ink incarnadine.”
>
>
>
> Referring here to the East India Company. Though the idea of the
> Panoptick Invisible Power suggests it’s in some competition with God.
> Of course the real danger explicated here isn’t exactly the EIC itself
> so much as the form of the corporation as a superhuman power.
>
>
>
> “’He’s not yet ready to make use of me, that’s all. Someday he
> must…I’ve been paid for…it shan’t cost him anything.’”
>
>
>
> No wonder Maskelyne is so apocalyptick—he understands his own fate to
> be, essentially, doomed. He is a living preterite.
>
>
>
> pp. 140-141
>
>
>
> “’Englishmen in the bloom of Sanity, being snatch'd away, one by one,
> high and low, ev'ryday, like some population of distraught Malays
> waiting for the call of Amok,— going along, at what we style Peace
> with the Day,— all at once, Bang-o! another 'un out in the Street
> waving the old Krees,— being British of course, more likely a
> butter-knife or something,— yet with no Place, no  Link upon the Great
> Chain, at all safe,— none however exalted[…]’”
>
>
>
> Amok as a call that people wait upon (as if some are already chosen
> for it—for insanity). The idea of being “snatch’d away” resonates both
> with the chosenness of the elect/preterite binary, and with the
> language of rapture (Cherrycoke’s holy insanity) and with the language
> of extraterrestrial abduction. But also: the particular insanity
> referred to here has no reverence for the stratification or hierarchy
> of the Great Chain.
>
>
>
> p. 141
>
>
>
> “[…]Maskelyne has ever presented an Enigma. Long before they met,
> Mason felt his sidling Advent, cloak’d as by Thames-side Leagues of
> Smoke and Mists.”
>
>
>
> The city—home—are increasingly coming to be seen, to Mason, as
> themselves sources of mysterious power, of subterranean and superhuman
> influence & obfuscation.
>
>
>
> “Since the Longitude Act”
>
>
>
> Dana Sobel’s book Longitude talks about Maskelyne in great detail—he
> apparently went to great lengths to discredit Harrison’s (ultimately
> prize-winning) clock, and even to sabotage its functioning, and
> Harrison’s claim to the prize money & recognition.
>
>
>
> “For many, it was at least a chance to Rattle at length to a World
> that was ignoring them.”
>
>
>
> This kind of angry quackery reminds me a lot of the alienation on
> display in 2018, actually. Are the people mentioned in the book being
> ignored because…the forces of power are becoming increasingly
> centralized, increasingly disdainful of the human? Because…the Age of
> Reason has stratified humans into hierarchies of sense-making, some of
> which no longer find any public purchase? Or have most people
> basically always been ignored by the centers of power?
>
>
>
> “Many[…]claim’d to’ve ben told the Secrets of the Longitude by God”
>
>
>
> Introducing here some more parageography (with deeply spiritual inflection)
>
>
>
> p. 142
>
>
>
> “Others told of Rapture by creatures not precisely Angels, nor yet
> Demons,--styl’d ‘Agents of Altitude.’”
>
>
>
> With obvious connotations of extraterrestrial abduction. The name
> Agents of Altitude feels of a cloth with Chums of Chance.
>
>
>
> “[…]More than happy to share details of this toilsome Conversion, upon
> duly authorized request.—  Yet, as there now exists no further need
> for a foreign expedition to obtain the Earth's Solar Parallax from the
> Transit of Venus, You would oblige me by recalling your own Parties
> and using what influence you can with Astronomers of other
> Principalities, as well as among the Jesuits &c."
>
>
>
> This is a really mysterious passage to me—it gets a lot of page-space
> for a kind of throwaway reference to some threads that don’t really
> require extrapolation here, which makes me think it’s more purposeful,
> as if we can almost deduce the intentions (if not the actual identity)
> behind this correspondence. Though I haven’t really figured it out
> myself.
>
>
>
> “an invisible Grain built into Creation”
>
>
>
> Love this—quintessential P, for me, weaving wonder, spirituality, and
> scientific curiosity into cosmic-quantum mythmaking.
>
>
>
> “my Zero Meridian not upon Greenwich, nor Paris, but a certain
> Himalayan Observatory, in Tibet”
>
>
>
> More hinting toward the Sino-Jesuit connection.
>
>
>
> “the very slow Progress of what is undoubtedly a Planet, though no one
> else claims to’ve seen it, near ŋ Geminorum"
>
>
>
> The first part reminds me a lot of many different kinds of invisible
> forces extrapolated thus far. As to what the significance of this
> particular planet might be, I leave the Wikipedia page as my
> contribution, for anyone who can make more sense of it.
>
>
>
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eta_Geminorum
>
>
>
> p. 143
>
>
>
> “some kind of blur…a greenish blue.”
>
>
>
> Sounds Earth-like.
>
>
>
> “make sure you fix it with your Lady, they don’t like it when you’re
> up at night you know…prowling about…believe in their Hearts that men
> are Were-wolves”
>
>
>
> Were-wolves are a conflation of the lupine and the human. We’ve had a
> conflation of the canine and human before (the LED). There’s a lot
> more on were-wolves in ch. 23, including one suffering from the
> condition becoming generally more civilized and erudite as he becomes
> more lupine/canine.
>
>
>
> “Was that Oinking upon the Rooftop?”
>
>
>
> Funny, kind of absurd line, amid M’s fixation on Susannah Peach/Bradley.
>
>
>
> p. 145
>
>
>
> “Mason understands that he may if he wishes see himself thro’ Duty at
> St. Helena by baiting Maskelyne thus, any time he has a Velleity to.
> He also understands how quickly the amusement value of this will fade.
> ‘Usually,’ he feels nonetheless impell’d to suggest, ‘a Messenger
> going the other way is returning, after having deliver’d his Message
> someplace else.’”
>
>
>
> Mason practicing interpretive mercy unto Maskelyne with his star chart.
> -
> Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?listpynchon-l
>
>
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