M&D Ch. 15: Enclosure vs. Exposure, Guardianship and Ghosts

[Smoke Teff]

CHAPTER 15



p. 158



“Mason, convinc’d that he has been set upon a Pilgrimage by Forces
beyond his ability at present to reach”



Pilgrimage-ranger binary—coming from vs going to, complications in the
vectors of desire. The fallacy of free will, the way any individual is
incapable of really understanding the forces that move them through
the world.



“from enclosure to exposure”



Another kind of binary, one to keep in mind alongside the fact of the
enclosures sweeping across Europe



Also, want to note—wikipedia says St. Helena was unoccupied when
discovered by the Portuguese in 1502—maybe relevant as we try to
understand it through the enclosure-exposure lens





“If the Cape of Good Hope be a Parable about Slavery and Free Will he
fancies he has almost tho’ not quite grasp’d, then what of his
Translocation?”



Can we make sense of the parable? We’ve seen a lot of stuff
complicating or inverting our normal understanding of the vectors of
both power and desire (how can we say you’re controlling what you do
when you’re not even controlling what you want?). We’ve seen slave
owners be themselves vessels for forces much larger than they.



p. 159



“I see what the Wind does to ‘em”



Really embellishing the insane-making power of the wind here.



“’Ah, Neglect. Ah, Conscience.’”



Neglect : conscience :: free will : slavery?



“Flank’d by the D----l’s Garden and the Gates of Chaos, the Company
Fort at Sandy Bay”



Just noting the iconography here (also the censorship stands out,
maybe complicates the framing somewhat)



“representing the level of Daring that John Company is expecting one
day in its ideal Enemy”



The notion of an ideal Enemy is obviously complicated (possibly
oxymoronic), seems worth noting—we’ve seen some correlation of other
kinds of archetypal figures—mother, divinity. Things we attempt to go
toward and return to—or things, like some versions of the divinity,
and some enemies, we expect to come to us.



“The Discipline here, tho’ Military in name, is founded in fact upon a
Rip-Rap of Play-Acting, Superstitions, mortal Hatreds, and unnatural
Loves[…]”



Again reminds me of some of the Foucoultian thinking elsewhere in the
novel. Foucault famously tracks the advent of a unifying and
multifaceted human discipline as a technology of hegemonic power
inflicted on (even inside/by) the individual. And while discipline is
often enforced and justified through apparently rational means,
Pynchon here situates it in older kinds of magickal thinking.



“[…]of a solemnity appropriate to the unabating Wind, that first
Voice, not yet inflected,--the pure Whirl,--of the very Planet.”



The Wind as the first voice, the planet’s voice. Reminds me of the
sound-shadow from Gravity’s Rainbow—the Wind constantly roaring like
the sun, except we don’t unhear the wind as naturally.



>From GR: “Imagine this very elaborate scientific lie: that sound
cannot travel through outer space. Well, but suppose it  can.  Suppose
They don’t want us to know there is a medium there, what used to be
called an “aether,” which can carry sound to every part of the Earth.
The Soniferous Aether. For millions of years, the sun has been
roaring, a giant, furnace, 93 millionmile roar, so perfectly steady
that generations of men have been born into it and passed out of it
again, without ever hearing it. Unless it changed, how would anybody
know?

“Except  that  at  night  now  and  then,  in  some  part  of  the
dark  hemisphere, because of eddies in the Soniferous Aether, there
will come to pass a very shallow pocket of no-sound. For a few
seconds, in a particular place, nearly every night somewhere in the
World, sound-energy from Outside is shut off. The roaring of the sun
stops.  For its brief life, the point of sound-shadow may come to rest
a thousand feet above a desert, between floors in an empty office
building, or exactly around a seated individual in a working-class
restaurant where they hose the place out at 3 every morning . . . it’s
all white tile, the chairs and tables riveted solid into the floor,
food covered with rigid shrouds of clear plastic . . . soon, from
outside, rrrnnn! clank, drag, squeak of valve opening oh yes, ah yes,
Here Are The Men With The Hoses To Hose The Place Out—

“At which instant, with no warning, the arousing feather-point of the
SoundShadow has touched you”



“The Gunfire here is at Sunset, and aim’d full into the Wind, as if to
repel an Onslaught.”



What kind of Onslaught? At different times we’ve imagined the
approaching God and the approaching Enemy. What does it mean to fire
into the Wind indiscriminately, if either of those might be
approaching?



P is working on something here—the ways different instincts and
potentialities have become corrupted, frustrated, confused



“convert this Wind into Cash, as others might convert it to a Rotary
Impulse upon a Mill=Stone”



Sublimation is one of the psychoanalytic processes by which repressed
libidinal energy gets converted into behaviors and
products/consequences outside the body/self—all culture is the product
of sublimation (Norman Brown tells us), and money also. I may be
mixing some of this up, but I believe money is the sublimated product
of anality—the stage of development where the ego first becomes
obsessed with its own shit—and then with the possibility of
identification with objects outside the self.



Wind seems easily exchangeable for (collective forces influencing
individual) libidinal energies, in a lot of P’s usage.



“’We are the Doings of Global Trade in miniature!’”



More miniaturization, microcosm



“careful to include [the Wind] in each daily Prayer, as if ‘twere a
Deity in itself, infinitely in Need, ever demanding…”



Just tracking this elaboration of the Wind and of one kind of deity



“Maskelyne nevertheless plucks from the Wind his Meaning”



One way to understand the Wind is as this vast, swirling, ultimately
incomprehensible system of energy. We have seen the ways it
metaphorically and actually influences men’s wills/selves. This quote
reinforces how chaotic and swirling the wind actually is, and how our
wills/interpretations/selves at any given moment are simply a kind of
temporal snapshot. Self as ship—always driven by winds, by some winds
feel different than others, no single(d) wind definitive.



p. 160



“’Tis said those who learn to endure it, are wond’rously Transform’d.’”



Endurance as submission as conversion



“the Windward [side], where, against such helpless Exposure as this, a
vigilant Folly must be the only Defense”



Exposure vs enclosure. This is the flip side of enclosure (of the
Line), of securing private property, of claiming ownership, of drawing
borders and erecting (protective and exclusive) walls—walls enclose
you to one direction, and expose you to the other.



Also speaks to the ways geography, weather—all kinds of Wind—can have
profound impacts on the thoughts and affairs of men.



“two distinct nations, in a state of mutual mistrust, within ten
Miles’ Compass, and the Wind never relenting, as if causing to
accumulate in the Island yet another Influence that must be corrected
for.”



Proximity—boundary—opposition—influence—unknowability—all
foreshadowing The Line.





“as celebrated as the Aberration of Light.”



>From Wikipedia’s intro on the Aberration of Light: “The aberration of
light (also referred to as astronomical aberration, stellar
aberration, or velocity aberration) is an astronomical phenomenon
which produces an apparent motion of celestial objects about their
true positions, dependent on the velocity of the observer. Aberration
causes objects to appear to be displaced towards the direction of
motion of the observer compared to when the observer is stationary[…]

“Aberration is historically significant because of its role in the
development of the theories of light, electromagnetism and,
ultimately, the theory of special relativity. It was first observed in
the late 1600s by astronomers searching for stellar parallax in order
to confirm the heliocentric model of the Solar System. However, it was
not understood at the time to be a different phenomenon.[2] In 1727,
James Bradleyprovided a classical explanation for it in terms of the
finite speed of light relative to the motion of the Earth in its orbit
around the Sun,[3][4] which he used to make one of the earliest
measurements of the speed of light. However, Bradley's theory was
incompatible with 19th century theories of light, and aberration
became a major motivation for the aether drag theories of Augustin
Fresnel (in 1818) and G. G. Stokes (in 1845), and for Hendrik
Lorentz's aether theory of electromagnetism in 1892. The aberration of
light, together with Lorentz's elaboration of Maxwell's
electrodynamics, the moving magnet and conductor problem, the negative
aether drift experiments, as well as the Fizeau experiment, led Albert
Einstein to develop the theory of special relativity in 1905, which
presents a general form of the equation for aberration in terms of
such theory.[5]”



“The German had stood there, in the late Sunlight, his Eyes enormous
and magnetick”



Sounds like Cornelius’s murderous eyes from the previous chapter



p. 161



“in the Wind, Stock-ends, Kerchievs, Queue-Ribands, all coming undone
and fluttering like so many Tell-tales.”



The Wind unsingles—remakes—lines.



“’what do your Hosts over there at James’s Fort expect to see, coming
down out of their Ravine? What last unfaceable enemy?’”



Stands in contrast to the idea of shooting indiscriminately to an
ideal enemy you expect to come from the sea?



p. 162



“he has been lock’d in a struggle with Mr. Sullivan for the Soul of the Company”



The “Soul of the Company” language seems deliberately ironic—anyone
have any elaboration on the politics here?



“Sobald das Geld[…]”



Looked this up: “Once the money in the box sounds, the soul from
purgatory springs.”



“Does Maskelyne mean more, when he speaks of ‘The Wind’? May he be
thinking of his own obligations to the East India Cmpany, and the
unlikelihood that anyone would ever ransom him? ‘We may sail with the
Wind[…]at the same speed, working all its nuances,--or we may stand
still, and feel its full true Course and Speed upon us, with all finer
Motions lost in that Simplicity.’”



Wind as (un)free will as slavery. Standing still—is this resisting the
wind? Is this unhearing the sound-shadow? Is this having a moment of
clarity, revelation? Or is it the opposite—for when you don’t go at
the same speed of the wind, you are resisting it, hearing the full
roar of its chaos?



“the visible and torn Remnant of a Sub-History unwitness’d”



Feels like a valuable phrase to take forward into the book







p. 163



“None of the words need ever be spoken,--tho’ given the Wind, and its
properties of transformation, there are no guarantees they will not
be.”



Surely you must relate to this feeling—that you are not in control
over the things that happen in your own life, even whether you end up
saying the things you’ve told yourself not to say.



“’one good Volcanick Eruption, why ‘twould solve ev’rything….’”



Even Mason’s fantasy must account for this kind of horror and death wish.



“The stiff cream Object approaching Mason’s Hand…”



The envelope he dreams of—of course also kind of homoerotic and
racialized. His fantasy depends on his...jerking off some white dude
with power? “Thus[…]all Honor Mason might take in the Moment is
drain’d away, as even his Daydreams turn upon him”



“dejectedly mindful, like any moral Tumbler, that when Murder is too
inconvenient, Self-sacrifice must do”



We’ve seen murder advanced as the capitol human crime, and have seen
both suicidality and other transmutations of the death wish explored.
Here they are somewhat conflated.



“[…]Reveries, more and more elaborate, of Mishaps for Maskelyne, many
of them Vertical in Nature.”



Seems like this paragraph is basically suggesting that Mason is
imagining his own profit from his relationship with Maskelyne and,
through him, Robert Clive, of John Company. But that in fantasizing
about it he is also (perhaps logically, perhaps competitively)
compelled to construct his fantasy of ingredients that involve
Maskelyne’s suffering, in a sort of zero-sum arrangement. Any other
takes on what’s happening here?



But it also seems like Mason is suffering his inability to imagine
better outcomes for Maskelyne—like he is suffering under the weight of
his pity for Maskelyne, who is kind of like a melancholick Colonel
Kurtz.



“And here it is, upon the Windward Side, where no ship ever comes
willingly, that her visits begin.”



Rebekah. Out of the wind, in one of the hidden (exposed?) parts of the world.



p. 164



“now wrapt in what should be the silence of her grave, has begun to
speak to him, as if free to do so at last, all she couldn’t even have
whispered at Greenwich, not with the heavens so close, with the
light-handed trickery of God so on display.”



A really mysterious passage, to me. Greenwich/the heavens—Mason’s
observations?, the proximity of royal (and apparently divine)
authority—prevented their closeness and communication before. Whatever
things we think divide us in life are obliterated by death?



“Isn’t this suppos’d to be the Age of Reason? To believe in the cold
light of this all-business world that Rebekah haunts him is to slip,
to stagger in a crowd, into the embrace of the Painted Italian Whore
herself, and the Air to fill with suffocating incense, and the radiant
Deity to go dim forever. But if Reason be also Permission at last to
believe in the evidence of our Earthly Senses, then how can he not
concede to her some Resurrection?—to deny her, how cruel!”



Reason and belief are not a very good binary, as this passage
suggests, as it also expounds on the problem of (threats to?) belief
in the age of Reason. The Painted Italian Whore…is that…the Church? Or
the Madonna? Mason’s spiritual confusion is on display here, as to
“believe” makes “the radiant Deity[…]dim forever.” The radian Deity
that goes dim, then, is…reason? His faith in reason?



“He understands early that she must come, that something is important
enough o risk frightening him too much, driving him further from the
World than he has already gone.”



More about Rebekah as a protector, a kind of guardian angel. Bonds of
human affection persisting beyond death.



“a ruin’d ebony forest, where among fog-wisps and ancient black
logging debris polish’d by the Wind, she accosts him shiv’ring in his
Cloak.”



Backdrop of man-made devastation, the historical palimpsest of ruins



“Her eyes have broken into white”



Again, like Cornelius and Dieter



p. 165



“’I must do as others direct.’

“’But wait till you’re over here, Mopery.’”



Really haunting, and mysterious. Is she suggesting that there’s
something kind of laughable about him feeling…enslaved, alive as he
is? And that there will be much less freedom in the afterlife she now
occupies? Or the reverse? That he suffers constraints in life but will
be given more liberty after death? Do we have any indication which she
might mean? “She nods, her smile not, so far, terrible.”



“Telling Maskelyne is out of the question[…]But when at last Dixon
does come up the Sea-Steps at James’s Town, Mason will seize his Arm
and whisk him off to his local, The Ruin’d Officer, to tell him as
soon as he can.”



Maskelyne is useful as a foil for the relationship that continues to
grow between Mason & Dixon.



Also, interesting pub name, given the ruin’d forest we saw the page before.



Also we should note that Rebekah’s appearance (which we are led to
believe has some mysterious purpose) thus effectively brings Mason
closer to Dixon (and farther from Maskelyne, the Royal Society, the
Company?).



“There is a Countryside in my Thoughts, populated with agreeable
Company, mapped with Romantick scenery, Standing-Stones and broken
Archways, cedar and Yew, shaded Streams, and meadows a-riot with
wild-flowers”



The Eden in Mason’s mind. Here life is abundant, chaotic, a-riot…amok?
(Very William Blake here)



“You expect me to live in the eternal Present, like some Hindoo?”



Hindoo appears about a half-dozen times in M&D, often with some
character bringing incredulity to something that seems, to me, quite
spiritually reasonable. Perhaps reminding us that the highest
spiritual ideas still pass through the world like wind, or not even
like wind—like all the new kinds of food that the adolescent
globalization is shuttling around the world in this book.
-
Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l