M&D Ch. 14 - Sadomasochism, Temporal Insanity, and the Zero as Innocence

[Smoke Teff]

Ah, of course. Sloppy work there on my part. Thanks Jochen. I know the Christian iconography best, appreciate you pointing out the mistake. 

But surely the inability to avoid the forbidden temptation of looking back must be an archetypal kind of plot movement? 

Not that I can name more examples off the top of my head...

> On Feb 12, 2018, at 2:31 AM, Jochen Stremmel <jstremmel at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> “walked away from the Cape and successfully not looked back”
> 
> Another apparent reference to the biblical story of Lot’s wife, or at
> least the archetypal dangerous-look-back. If taken to be Lot, it’s the
> second or third such reference in the novel. (To my mind, kind of hard
> to see multiple Lot references in P and not think of Lot 49)
> 
> It's not the story of Lot's wife he's alluding to here but the one of Orpheus and 
> Eurydice as is revealed already in the same line with the Plutonian wife.
> 
> 2018-02-12 5:14 GMT+01:00 Smoke Teff <smoketeff at gmail.com>:
>> CHAPTER 14
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> p. 146
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> “wondering about Dixon”
>> 
>>  another escalation in their relationship, as Mason is now kind of
>> openly longing for Dixon’s company.
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> His affection for Dixon seems to grow stronger with absence. I wonder
>> how that relates to the general emotional orientation of a) grief
>> (love for someone not (able to be) next to you) and b) the novel’s
>> distant (coming, or fleeing?) God
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> “’Our daily lives to distant Stars attuned’”
>> 
>> Funny, M writing bad love poems to D
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> “He imagines Dixon learning to cook a Kari with orange leaves[…]”
>> 
>> Coming to have affection for Dixon’s sensuousness, things Mason
>> earlier found reason to criticize—so goeth love.
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> p. 147
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> “walked away from the Cape and successfully not looked back”
>> 
>> Another apparent reference to the biblical story of Lot’s wife, or at
>> least the archetypal dangerous-look-back. If taken to be Lot, it’s the
>> second or third such reference in the novel. (To my mind, kind of hard
>> to see multiple Lot references in P and not think of Lot 49)
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> “tho’ none of them is anyone’s Eurydice, he knows well enough who that
>> is,--or would be, were he Orpheus enough to carry a Tune in a Bucket”
>> 
>> More purple prose leftover from Mason’s abandoned love letter to Dixon
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> “whilst coiled behind all gazes the great Worm of Slavery”
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> Keep being surprised, on this read of M&D, just how foregrounded
>> slavery actually is in the novel.
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> I think the novel has a weird glimpsing orientation to the facts &
>> images of slavery—not quite looking headlong at the trauma in a
>> scenic/action way, but then acknowledging that very fact in its prose,
>> as if to suggest that even in real time there was hidden suffering and
>> damage beyond all ability to apprehend
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> “By the time Dixon arrives, a number of stories have long been
>> circulating[…]full knowledge that ev’ryone knows ev’ryone else’s
>> secrets”
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> Gossip moving like wind through the social fabric…we see a lot of
>> gossip and rumouring moving through M&D
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> “thrill of shame”
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> P has noted elsewhere here the conversion of psychic pain into sexual
>> gratification
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> “the Brass-bound mercilessness of Sunday”
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> Is Brass-bound referring to daylight or…to musical instruments? Either
>> way, noting the perverse mercilessness of the Christian day of worship
>> (unexpected/perverse in a way similar to the terrible gaze of the evil
>> hour, high noon, the brightest point of the day)
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> “the great South-East wind, the wig-snatching, flame-fanning,
>> judgment-warping Wind”
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> An invisible force that makes a mockery of the world of men, that
>> accelerates already-burning conflagration, and changes men’s actual
>> thinking.
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> I note here that this chapter has a lot of
>> classical/mythological/biblical references—I’m not sure if P is
>> working toward/according to some sort of schema for these references,
>> but it seems like he’s exploring divergent myth traditions as Mason &
>> Dixon (and their line) come to represent another such divergence—a
>> divergence of iconography, of identity, of language & storytelling
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> “Cornelius presently setting the Fork’d Support in the blowing dirt,
>> with some smoldering naval slow-match he carries in his teeth igniting
>> a giant full Dutch-ounce blast whose Ball ricochets off the rooftiles”
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> Cornelius here illustrating mercilessness/murderousness, almost as if
>> just in time to keep us from thinking P’s Cherrycoke was just being
>> euphemistic…except that the real threat of Cornelius’s bloodlust is
>> actually quite cartoonish and slapsticky
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> p. 148
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> “Slides of red fragments into the street a good ten feet wide and
>> short, windage calculations out here being matters more of Sentiment
>> than of Science.”
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> An important moment, as see here the wind—which is often an authorless
>> force only observable through its effects in the material world, and
>> which is also associated elsewhere with the incomprehensible
>> divine—working to confound reason and mechanism (and violence, though
>> that seems more coincidental than purposeful)
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> “as the hornetting sphere this time explodes a watermelon at a nearby
>> market stand, and the greengrocers head for cover.”
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> A destructive and uncontrolled hornetting sphere would fit in well as
>> a metaphor for the world-of-men-in-miniature in this novel.
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> “As the Dutchman, unhurried, stolid, probably insane”
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> The Dutch have been described as stolid before—though seldom
>> unhurried. Hence the insanity here? Because a “sane Dutchmn” is a
>> hurrying one? The qualifier probably is interesting in this
>> case—raises all kinds of questions about the book’s (& the narrator’s)
>> working definition of in/sanity (cf. again Cherrycoke’s “holy
>> insanity” in ch. 1). We will see, in a moment, that part of the
>> insanity involves the fact that he is acting in a kind of enslaved
>> obedience to a will that he does not understand as totally his own…
>> “’No! I am supposed to do this!’”
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> “White all ‘round Vroom’s irises”
>> 
>> Noting this strong image in case it comes to resonate later. At the
>> very least, seems somewhat eclipse/transit-like as an image, and plays
>> with the idea of focus-vs-negative space (which is related to things
>> the book is exploring in relation to apparent/dependent binaries,
>> matter-v-antimatter, etc)
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> “coaxing him along before the wind”
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> noting again the man-moving force that cannot itself be changes or
>> beaten, only worked with. I remember being astonished, in physics
>> class, to find that an airline pilot, for all his horsepower, has to
>> account for wind being just as influential a factor as the kid outside
>> playing Frisbee.
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> “the Tavern[…]’The World’s End’”
>> 
>> Not exactly an uncommon name for a drinking establishment. Now we have
>> this phrase used to refer to a part of the earth as well as the name
>> of an actual bar, and with the ever-present connotations of the end of
>> civilization, the biblical apocalypse, etc.
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> p. 149
>> 
>> “a fragrant Nebulosity[…]The wind hoots up and down the
>> alley-ways[…]The Smoke in the room, though chiefly from tobacco,
>> includes as well that of Opium, Hemp, and Cloves”
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> Smoke/smell/interiors as temporarily contained wind? Or temporarily
>> windless spaces—spaces where men appear to exert undue control, as
>> compared to the world outside?
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> We’ve seen the wind associated with men’s consciousness in intimate
>> ways. Here, we have other wind-borne substances that also alter men’s
>> minds.
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> I think we’re seeing, here, the elaboration of wind as being a) a
>> force of unknown (possibly no) authorship that nonetheless has real
>> effects in the worlds of material being and of men, and b) a force
>> that, in that latter world (of men), works sometimes in the form of
>> ideas. Men are possessed by different ideas that they respond to
>> different depending on the (metaphorical) aerodynamics of their
>> selves/egos. But ideas can also, in these shared interior spaces,
>> combine in complicated ways with other ideas—and the Nebulous mixture
>> can be shared & altered within & between the apprehensions of
>> different individuals.
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> “Cornelius now, gravely giddy”
>> 
>> Really wonderful—a totally believable and relatable (and poetically
>> expressed) encapsulation of a human affect that comes about in
>> response to a totally outsized, cartoonish scenario (Cornelius’s own
>> murderous hypnosis)
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> “the Company Lodge, where the women are of all races, sizes, and specialties.”
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> Really driving home the point of the corporate/capitalistic
>> commodification (and so degradation) of the body—especially the body
>> of the female and the other. The Dutch here will eroticize the
>> exotic—but not in a mutually human way, only in a one-directional,
>> objectifying/exploitative way.
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> “what the Dutch must reckon Sanity”
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> Answering the question from before—an unhurried Dutchman (attacking
>> another white person?) is probably insane, a gravely giddy Dutchman
>> planning to join another white person in enslaved sex trafficking is
>> sane.
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> “Dixon, for whom the Scene before them has begun to break up into
>> small swarming Bits of Color”
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> Is he getting stoned off the fumes, or is he just having a moment of
>> religious clarity (upon seeing what sanity for the Dutch means)?
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> p. 150
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> “Barometer in the ebony case upon the Wall cannot be read, the
>> Lettering too intricate, the Numerals possibly in some System other
>> than the Arabic.”
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> A mysterious source of power, arcane knowledge/awareness, too
>> intricate to be understood (reduced?) by man’s analysis… A source of
>> awareness too esoteric, too beautiful, too…culturally/temporally
>> removed to be of use? I’m trying to connect with some of the book’s
>> elaborations on God/divinity in the Age of Reason. A barometer is
>> simply a way of apprehending pressure—it is not the pressure itself.
>> The idea of God, as understood before, is no longer sufficient for
>> apprehending the source of being?
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> “Yet Pressure may be read by the Adept, remaining invisible until sought for….”
>> 
>> Cf. Dixon on encountering the spirit, 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…?’”
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> “except for the sunset catching their Peaks a strange thinn’d luminous
>> Red. And there. In the Shadows, all but painted over,--“
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> If you wanted a primer for how to identify the workings of grace in
>> P’s work, you could do worse than this.
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> “There is enough time for [Austra] to recognize [Dixon], and know that
>> he will not help her, either, before she passes into another Room, not
>> looking back, to continue this slavery within Slavery….”
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> Another really important moment. We see here, I think, the pain of
>> Dixon’s complicity (which we also feel). The pain of individual
>> responsibility/conscience against (the pain of the knowledge of)
>> individual helplessness against a system much bigger and more powerful
>> than any one person, the system apparently resistant to even
>> individual acts of mercy.
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> It is through Dixon that we confront this kind of pain throughout the
>> novel, I think—and this is a crucial component of his development as a
>> character, which will eventually see him becoming climactically unable
>> to accept this kind of complicity any longer.
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> “tho’ who could have avoided some Overspill from Mason’s obsession?”
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> There is definitely some more intimacy here in the continuity of
>> attention that makes the membrane between Mason’s & Dixon’s individual
>> selves somewhat permeable, fallacious. But also expanding on the theme
>> of this inter-individual continuity of consciousness, in line with the
>> idea of men’s thoughts being made of the vapors that are collectively
>> made from everyone’s own kind of tobacco (or hemp or opium or…)
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> “’Let no one say that we cannot have Fun, when we must’”
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> Excellent—very economical expression of a complex and probably insane
>> relationship to pleasure (and will). Shows the absurdity & neurosis of
>> the ego that does not properly want what it actually wants (relates,
>> in some way, to the psychodynamics of guilt)
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> “Something a bit too Churchlike for Dixon however,--a devotion to
>> ritual and timing, the Space under-lit, what light there is as White
>> as Wig-Powder, flowing from pure white candles, burning smoothly in
>> the still air, and from bowls of incense close by, white Smoke in the
>> same unwavering Ascent.”
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> More unexpectedly sinister light, ritual, and purity—not unprecedented
>> territory for Pynchon (see whiteness, the evil hour, etc., in
>> Gravity’s Rainbow). The discrepancy between the world and men’s
>> perceptions of/intentions for it—that rituals of
>> worshipping/apprehending the divine could somehow become sterile,
>> empty, even evil in their own way. True divinity happens outside time,
>> and religion/religious ritual is an attempt to cultivate its
>> apprehension in time. The counterproductivity/impossibility of fixed,
>> unentropic systems?
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> p. 151
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> “over in a flash, long as Church, enclos’d in hopeless desire for,
>> revenge on, escape from some Woman, somewhere along these befabl’d and
>> dolorous Company Lanes, someone said, some Woman….”
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> An unspecified woman, with an unconscious combination of attachment
>> and antagonism toward her, that drives the actions of men…more
>> Freudian psychodynamics, to my reading, the “some woman” mother
>> resonating with the ways the novel has explored God elsewhere
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> “producing a vertiginous Swoon, such as might require most of an
>> evening of drinking spirits to obtain, it seems to promise a great
>> savings in time and cash”
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> Interesting to relate the ultimate incentive of swooning (fleeing
>> consciousness, at least temporarily) to the psychoanalytically-fertile
>> quotation listed just above it. Desire to swoon—to fall in love, to
>> intoxicate—as short-term manifestation of death wish, as desire to
>> flee consciousness, as misunderstood desire to connect with
>> unconscious divinity, as related to natural desire to reconnect with
>> the state of being inside the mother’s womb?
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> “Before this Surrender to Sloth, however, Lust is schedul’d”
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> More unhealthy/perverted attitudes toward fun, hedonism, pleasure, any
>> possibility of healthy perversion.
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> “Slave Women[…]dreamy, pliant shadows, Baths of Flesh darker than
>> Dutch, the dangerously beautiful Extrusion of everything these white
>> brothers, seeking Communion, cannot afford to contain,--“
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> A striking but somewhat mysterious passage, for me.
>> 
>> 
>> 
>>  “After they are gone passes a silent period, an enshadowment which,
>> prolonged past a certain point upon the Clock-Face, begins to rouse
>> apprehension among the filles[…]”
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> So begins one of the most haunting passages of the book, for me. I
>> wrote a lot about this in my notes to p. 23, which I won’t repeat
>> here.
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> In addition to more elaboration on the sinister insanity of
>> clock-time, this here connects (rather sickeningly) to the Pavlovian
>> conditioning so present in Gravity’s Rainbows. Silence as stimulus
>> here; how does this relate to Slothrop’s conditioning?; there is some
>> kind of silence/absence to his extinguished-beyond-the-zero
>> relationship to the rocket…in that his stimulus is ultimately the
>> absence(/prematureness) of stimulus
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> “[…]for they know their Night has begun, and who is coming for them
>> now, and some of what will be done to them.”
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> More unarticulated (because too terrible to allow or require
>> articulation) knowledge. “Their” night…there are different nights.
>> Nights are a construct, an idea that infects multiple people but is
>> apprehended locally/subjectively, possessed/experienced unique to each
>> person. One person’s night is not perfectly synchronized to another
>> (hence/because the insanity of standardized clock-time). This is part
>> of the thematic resonance of Against the Day’s title—a credo, against
>> the very idea of “The Day”—that it can be standardized and enforced,
>> and used as a tool of oppression and control.
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> But also, this fits in with some of P’s
>> human-mind-as-being-the-cause-and-product-of-magic, the realm-making,
>> time-making power of the mind.
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> “Many who have been to Rooms forbidden the others, report seeing,
>> inside these, a Door to at least one Room further, which may not be
>> opened.”
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> Reminds me of the concept of antechambers in GR (perhaps obviously,
>> for those who’ve read GR). The notion of there being ever some secret
>> inner core—plays interestingly with some of the novel’s other threads
>> exploring the (proximity/attainability of the) divine, gnosis, and
>> (man-made) realms. You can even connect this ubiquitous but
>> not-quite-seen dark heart of the building to a) the novel’s
>> explorations of the psyche/self (as a route toward apprehending the
>> divine, which may be within) and b) inherent vice (the tendency toward
>> destruction at the heart of all being), c) the Qlippoth (true vacuums
>> of mercy/goodness/the spirit)
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> “The Penetralia of the Lodge are thus, even to those employed there, a
>> region without a map. Anything may be there.”
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> This motif is explored elsewhere—but also P reminding us that the
>> arcane or the unknowable is not only the deistic God or anything we
>> might conceive of as benign/beneficial. The unknown also has a heart
>> of darkness, of mercilessness.
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> “Perhaps miracles are still possible,--both evil miracles, such as
>> occur when excesses of Ill Treatment are transform’d to Joy,--quite
>> common in this Era,--and the reverse, when excesses of Well-being at
>> length bring an Anguish no less painful for being metaphysickal,--Good
>> Miracles.”
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> Really complicated, hard to see if one of these is actually more good
>> or evil than the other. But both play off the idea of a fundamental
>> unknowability (or/therefore mutability) at the heart of all
>> experience. (Also, relates, to me, to the way certain “classes” of
>> human experience can be converted to others, such as the way the Dutch
>> can exploit and transform a kind of human experience that might in one
>> context be joyful or spiritually positive (sex) to something
>> commodified, oppressive, incredibly violent, seemingly irredeemably
>> negative). A really somewhat horrifying spiritual vision—that the
>> fundamental goodness or badness of any/all experience (or, even, of
>> all creation) is unknowable, arbitrary, meaningless, illusory (but
>> relates therefore to the magic-making power of the human mind).
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> You might call this a kind of ecstatic ambivalence.
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> p. 152
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> “the town Madmen are kept as a responsibility of the Company”
>> 
>> Why would this be the case? Is the Company inclined to be charitable?
>> Or do they/all somehow (perhaps unconsciously) sense that the Company
>> is responsible for—or at least inextricably related to—the dangerous
>> varieties of madness? Or is it just that it’s ultimately in the
>> Company’s best interest to eradicate madness (and whatever spiritual
>> utility it might have for the world of egos and psyches) from the
>> populace? Madness as civil/commercial unrest.
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> “from the amiably delusionary to the remorselessly homicidal”
>> 
>> More ambivalence of experience, with more positioning of
>> homicide/murder as the extreme expression of one end of a
>> spiritual-ethical continuum.
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> “some know hate and desire as but minor aspects of a greater, Oceanick Impulse”
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> The idea of an oceanic pulse—and a greater global consciousness—has
>> come up before this.
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> Also, the idea that human perceptions/morality are simply
>> interpretations/expressions (“minor aspects”) of a fundamental
>> ambivalence that includes both/neither of the divine/benevolent and
>> the sinister/malevolent. The ambivalence of all being.
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> Connects to the line earlier in this chapter: “enclos’d in hopeless
>> desire for, revenge on, escape from some Woman, somewhere along these
>> befabl’d and dolorous Company Lanes, someone said, some Woman….”
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> “hate and desire” in one, “hopeless desire for, revenge on, escape
>> from” in another
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> Escape from is the outlier. Is that the death wish? The alternative to
>> the endless binary and cycle of hate and desire, push and pull, etc?
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> I think what I take away from this is that there is something
>> fundamental about being that is ultimately ambivalent, at least
>> insofar as man’s mind apprehends its intentions & nature. Instead of
>> ambivalent, you might say that the
>> world-of-all-that-is-greater-than-man is whole, and man’s apprehension
>> reduces it, singles it to one line/interpretation. The novel goes to
>> great lengths to explore and erect binary systems—M&D, the twins,
>> belly/underbelly, matter/anti-matter, coming/going, hate/desire, etc.
>> I think it’s suggesting that the human mind is an engine that, through
>> (and in) its own thinking, fragments the wholeness(/ambivalence) of
>> being into binaries (perhaps because of the binary of
>> self-vs-not-self). These binaries create (and in fact are?), e.g.,
>> both suffering and happiness. The binaries—fragmentations—elaborated
>> in this novel then are seen as incomplete, as contingent on the nature
>> of man’s mind, as ultimately somewhat arbitrary and meaningless except
>> insofar as they exist in (and perpetuate in the world of) man’s
>> thoughts & affairs. Man’s mind is the Iceland spar of being. It makes
>> the categories of good and bad out of a universe that fundamentally
>> includes neither (or both, depending on how you look at it)
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> “The Night of the ‘Black Hole,’ some Zero-Point of history”
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> Have written about this extensively elsewhere, so withholding most of
>> what I’ve already said about it.
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> This event itself is put forward and suggested to have a special
>> spatio-temporal/historical gravity. Will be interesting to track to
>> what extent that is true—or if other candidates are put forth for this
>> special historical gravity—over the course of the novel.
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> Seems also to track with P’s general interest in original sin—the
>> original sin of (modern) history?
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> Norman Brown, in Life Against Death, suggests that man is defined by
>> his history-making abilities/tendencies. This ability to make history
>> is, for Brown, both the cause/dawn of man, and also the cause of man’s
>> suffering (i.e. original sin). So what does that mean for the
>> zero-point of history?
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> Insofar as P is always probing for original sin, this reflects
>> interestingly on GR’s Beyond The Zero stuff, in ways I’m not currently
>> equipped to fully grapple with. Thoughts?
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> The ZERO is associated, in P’s oeuvre-wide vision (as I understand it
>> from this vantage point) with original sin (or maybe, less biblically,
>> with the inherent vice of all man-made systems, all man’s endeavors,
>> etc), with the dawn of man, with the beginning of history/modernity,
>> and with (the innocence of?) the period before (Slothrop’s)
>> conditioning…
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> “this particular end of the World”
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> Now used as a kind of one-size-fits-all cowboy/frontiersman
>> colloquialism that happens to be pretty geographically apt
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> “the scale-model cell with as many Slaves,--impersonating
>> Europeans,--as will make up the complement, calculated at thirty-six,
>> best able to afford visitors an authentick Sense of the Black Hole of
>> Calcutta Experience.
>> 
>> “’If one did not wish to suffer Horror directly,’ comments the Revd in
>> his Day-book, ‘one might either transcend it spiritually, or eroticize
>> it carnally’”
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> More miniaturization. Culture as erotic (specifically
>> sadomasochistic?) reproduction/return to of the collective
>> unconscious, of the zero-point—the demiurge of truly neurotic
>> perversity. Cherrycoke referring to the Evil variety of miracle
>> described above—enough agony that it converts to pleasure. To the
>> extent you might think this relates to guilt, this brings up
>> Nietzsche, to my mind—the perverse attraction to self-abnegation as a
>> consequence of guilt/collective ressentiment (the slave morality of
>> Judeo-Christian morality?)
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> p. 153
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> “moving toward some single slow warm Explosion….”
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> Collective/trance-like transcendence, a collectively rapturous and
>> death-wishy experience, a collective orgasm, a collective volcanic
>> eruption, a singling of the lines of everyone’s rising
>> suffering-arousal complex.
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> To continue Nietzsche’s slave morality/collective ressentiment
>> cosmology stumbled through above, I believe the Christ is this
>> collective explosion-sublimation of the repressed self-hatred,
>> self-abnegation of the slave morality
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> “(Tho’ he does not of course read any of this aloud,--choosing rather
>> to skim ahead to the Moral.)”
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> Really funny and also complicates our notion of reality/trust/identity
>> when it comes to this narrator.
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> “Small numbers of people go on telling much larger numbers what to do
>> with their precious Lives,--among these Multitudes, all but a few go
>> on allowing them to do so.”
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> Seems like a noteworthily blunt encapsulation/perspective of the
>> ongoing history of problems in power relations.
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> “The British in India encourage the teeming populations they rule to
>> teem as much as they like, whilst taking their land for themselves,
>> and then restricting the parts of it the People will be permitted to
>> teem upon.”
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> Relating to the land Enclosures going on in the background, and also
>> some of the laws of violence and human density/urbanity explored
>> elsewhere.
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> “’Yet hear the Cry, O Lord, when even a small Metaphor of this
>> continental Coercion is practis’d in Reverse, as ‘twas in the old B.H.
>> of C.’”
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> A remarkably radical and globalized perspective, really.
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> “the overnight Harvest of Death[…]in Calcutta[…]in Streets that few
>> could even tell you how to get to”
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> More labyrinthine civilization/urbanity, unmapped places, etc.
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> “’Let’s go, Simba.’”
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> Google’s ngram says Simba doesn’t appear in the body English before 1784.
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> “finding a secret Tunnel to the Castle”
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> Lots more Kafka’s-Castle resonance for me here
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> p. 154
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> “Out of the reach of the Company, who desire total Control over ev’ry
>> moment of ev’ry Life here.”
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> If you’re interested in original sin—as I am, hence a lot of my
>> affinity for P—you might wonder when, exactly, the truly sinister and
>> authoritarian cartel instincts came into the world of capitalism.
>> Answer here suggested to be basically the beginning.
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> “The more the Company exerted itself[…]the more Farmers up-country
>> felt press’d to move North, away from the Castle.”
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> Just noting this, the idea of migration as flight, corporate refugeeism
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> “the amount of Surveillance alone they wish’d”
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> For those of us who grew up associating abuses of surveillance (like
>> authoritarianism in general) with 20th century technologies (incl
>> political), this sort of thing might stand out for attention—seeing
>> the panoptic ubiquity of the corporation from over two hundred years
>> ago
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> Maybe the private detective (with whom P is so narratively attracted)
>> is the sort of the miniaturization, the individualized response to the
>> surveillance state, the pupil that looks inward.
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> p. 155
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> “What enchanted Mason about these Girls, Dixon comes to realize, with
>> some consternation, is their readiness to seek the Shadow, avoid the
>> light, believe in what haunts these shores exactly to the Atom,—
>> ghosts ev'rywhere,— Slaves, Hottentots driven into exile, animals
>> remorselessly Savage,— a Reservoir of Sin, whose Weight, like that of
>> the atmosphere, is borne day after day unnotic'd, adverted to only
>> when some Vacuum is encounter'd,— a Stranger in Town, a Malay
>> publickly distraught, an hour at the Lodge,— into which its Contents
>> might rush with a Turbulence felt and wonder'd at by all.”
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> This whole thing bears quotation. Mason’s melancholick attraction to
>> others’ photophobia. The atmosphere collapsing to fill a vacuum when
>> one arises—we see here the ways that “sin” (and its consequences,
>> human-caused-and-human-felt suffering) works in P’s psychic
>> metaphysics—(probably exacerbated with urbanism/density) there is a
>> build-up of collective psychic vibes (here, of sin) until some
>> threshold is exceeded whereby those properties replicate
>> inside//collapse toward a psychic vacuum. Are the girls’ young brains
>> psychic vacuums, hence their attunement to the Shadow?
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> “Daughters of the End of the World”
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> Evokes, to my mind, the Daughters of Liberty
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> “smiling more than they ought[…]alert to each instant of the long Day”
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> more disingenuously happy affect—just a minute ago we were told they
>> were ready to seek the Shadow; here we learn they’re alert (properly
>> sane Dutch girls) to “each instant of the long Day”
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> “their Dreams[…]the Stillness of certain Corridors”
>> 
>> either intended to be evocative or referring to the idea that there
>> are crucial depths of their psyche that are unplumbed?
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> “the unchallengeable Love of a Tyrant”
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> Their dreams as vacuums filled by “Sin”
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> “a living Creature, conscious of itself, and of them, too, with its
>> hooded Face, its heartbeat, the bearing of a solemn Messenger.”
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> Another hooded Messenger figure to go along with the Reaper-like
>> personifications of death, and the wraiths from GR—here, a
>> personification of Time. Makes sense, given the system of meaning P is
>> building around the notion of the day, clock-time, insanity.
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> The clock, of course, is very important to the Longitude Problem—which
>> is one way time intersects meaningfully with geography, cartography,
>> astronomy, surveying.
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> “It stands deep in the House, in a passageway between the Front and
>> the Back,--the two Worlds”
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> With psychoanalytic implications I won’t belabor again, except to note
>> that Time/the clock is aligned in this description with the innermost
>> Penetralia of the Company Lodge—and the Black Hole of Calcutta
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> “Errorless Time at Sea,--a British State Secret”
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> Errorless time at sea offering obvious military (but especially
>> commercial?) advantages.
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> “an unpremeditated wave of Enthusiasm for two-handed Clocks currently
>> sweeping over the Dutch, both here and back in Holland.”
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> Reminds me of the famous Dutch Tulip market bubble. This kind of
>> bubble, this “unpremeditated wave of Enthusiasm” among the Dutch seems
>> somewhat at odds with their apparent rationalism and practicality—I
>> think there’s something in here analogous to the workings of Amok.
>> Market bubbles as a kind of commercial amok. A market threshold beyond
>> which is collective economic irrationality—economic insanity—economic
>> amok.
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> “to intimidate the subject with the most advanc’d mechanical Device of
>> its time, certainly because Minute-Scal’d Accuracy is possible by now”
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> Preying on people’s Luddite instincts? (Using Luddite here not in its
>> properest historical sense but to mean general skepticism or fear
>> related to technological advances)
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> “Dixon’s connection with Christopher Le Maire”
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> The Jesuitical connection coming up right after the description of
>> using a clock for intimidation in an interrogation links Time and the
>> Inquisition in some way that I expect to become more developed over
>> the course of the book.
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> “Dixon[…]running before any wind of Sensory delight”
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> Interesting, seemingly deliberate conflation of push and pull, of
>> desire/cathexis as propulsive vs attractive vs projectile force. Is
>> the prospect of sensory delight not pulling him? Does he not run
>> toward the delight that’s ahead of him? The desire is behind him—so is
>> the promise of its fulfillment on which action is based.
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> How does wind move us individually? There are many different kinds of
>> wind, and the ones we all respond to are different.
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> Seems somehow in opposition to the idea of free will.
>> -
>> Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?listpynchon-l
> 
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