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

[Joseph Tracy]

Continuing to enjoy these notes as a review with a different emphasis of what I just read.  I found another reference to Against the Day in the first chapter of the America section of M&D. will post.   
> On Feb 7, 2018, at 1:40 PM, Smoke Teff <smoketeff at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> 
> “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
> cnical 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.
> 
Such a simple and profound ob. Astronomers pass through the day in the same way that others pass through the night. What is dream time to some is the slow predictable universe occasonally punctured by meteors and comets to others.
> 
> 
> 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?
Perhaps the Dutch see profit related more to labor and the English more to chance and seizing the opportune moment. 
> 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)

The concept of sin derives from Sin, the Babylonian god of the moon.   
> 
> 
> 
> “’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.
> “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.
> 
> “’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
> 
I see this section as a map of Maskelyne’s mind, even his interst in astronomy via contract shaped by social climbing within a culture. Here on St Helena he is on the outskirts of that culture and feels the vast powers of other non-civilized realities, the moon, the sun, the ocean, the earth as a being. Here the distractions and passions of civilization are thin and insufficient to obscure something he sees mostly as fearful and ominous. He wants to transcend, but to transcend on his own terms, to become famous and enter the pantheon of important astronomers.  

> 
> “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.”

The similarities are striking, an Island whose life is partly internal and isolated and partly connected to ships and the sea. A colonizer who is virtually unable to see and feel and interact respectfully with local cultures. Intresting that many remaining British colonies are islands.
> 
> 
> 
> 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.
> -
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