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

[David Morris]

"Against the Day" usually refers to opposition to a future time or event,
and the phrase often is preceded by an action of preparation, a saving-up
of resources to be used to fight that future event,  I'm sure everyone
knows the King James usage of the phrase.

Proverbs 21:31
The horse is prepared against the day of battle: but safety is of the Lord.

 2 Timothy 1:12
“For the which cause I also suffer these things: nevertheless I am not
ashamed: for I know whom I have believed, and am persuaded that he is able
to keep that which I have committed unto him against that day.”

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On Thu, Feb 8, 2018 at 3:24 AM, Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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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