M&D CH. 17 - Splitting Timelines, Possibility Reducing to Certainty, Disembodied but Sentient Ears

[Smoke Teff]

CHAPTER 17



Didn’t point it out in any particular note, but this chapter is
important in that it gets us much closer to our astronomers’ fateful
departure for America—and mysteriously implicates Maskelyne in the
gig. Maskelyne’s motivations continue to be kind of mysterious, though
perhaps he seems less overtly sinister or competitive than he did
before, and more beset by paranoia, anxiety, fear, infected by his
proximity to forces so much more powerful than he is.





p. 175



“they can run before the Wind”

Seems like a somewhat dubious claim to open the action in this chapter.

“standing off from Man and Horse, Lines and Hooks drop over the side”

The phrasing here seems to set the organic/animal against the
geometrick/mechanickal



“they have lost the Wind. The Absence stuns him.”



Like GR’s sound shadow.



“He can smell the Town upon the Wind, the Smoke and Muck-Piles, long
before he sees it.”



Reminds me of something I read in one of the history books I flipped
through leading up to this—that the settlers to Jamestown (Virginia)
could smell the pine trees from something like fifteen miles off the
coast.



“the last unavoidable Object of Value”



The capitalization does so much work in certain phrases like this,
offering ironic elevation in status



p. 176



“Clearly there must be some other entry, tho’ Mason can find none”



More mysterious interior spaces, seemingly unreachable from the
outside. Like the Penetralia at the Company Lodge.



“Owing to a certain Corporate Surplus”



i.e. Mason has put on weight. Another common joke structure, using the
contemporary rhetoric and the language of the marketplace to dance
around an ultimately kind of base joke. The rhetorical structure is
actually often like this—an introduction by saying a “certain” or a
“particular”…then having the thing in question be expressed in
comically vague turns.



“Helen of Troy’s face may’ve launch’d a thousand ships,--this is but
one Ear, yet in its Time, it sent navies into combat ‘round the
Globe.”



This is a kind of timeless satirical gesture, reducing something much
grander than the individual to a body part, or elevating a body part
to this kind of grand status. Reminds me of Gogol’s nose.



“Fortune’s wheel is on the Rise or Fall where’er we go, but nowhere
does it turn quite as furiously as here, upon this unhappy
Mountain-Top in the Sea.”



Continuing this novel’s move of attaching supernatural/mythic power to
particular parts of the earth. Here, perhaps the maelstrom-like
demiurgical center of Fortune, luck, the randomness and volatility of
the human world.



p. 177



“the great Ruby in it.”



With echoes of the Ruby of Mogok mentioned in the opening pages of the novel.



“a-throb with unluckiness”



More physical presence of the energy spun by Fortune’s wheel



“’The Chronoscope’”



A device that allows you to look into time (prefiguring film, a/v
recording—or referring to art in general—as instruments for preserving
some bound system of time?)…sorta like Iceland Spar?



“sails the brig Rebecca”



The ship’s actual name—yet another lucky/useful coincidence of the
kind Pynchon has kind of made a career out of digging up, connectiong



“he has come to believe in a metaphysickal escape for the Seahorse,
back there off Brest, much like this very depiction,--the Event not
yet ‘reduc’d to certainty,’”



The Chronoscope allows him to look backward in time. To the moment of
the Seahorse’s mysterious salvation. Was there a ship that helped the
Seahorse? What about the one he sees in the Chronoscope, and which
bears the name of Mason’s dead wife, who visited him as a ghost and
has come to seem a potential guardian-angel figure.



“his last morning of Immortality”



Grammar is tricky here but I think it’s talking about Mason, and the
morning of the Seahorse’s attack? Why would this be his last morning
of Immortality? Because his fate was so coercively steered in the one
particular direction that has led to him, here, looking back on that
same morning? Because eventuality is a “[reduction] to certainty” and
because that kind of reduction is mortality—the end of possibility?



p. 178



“its Pickling-Jar of Swedish lead Crystal”



>From Wikipedia: Lead oxide added to the molten glass gives lead
crystal a much higher index of refraction than normal glass, and
consequently much greater "sparkle" by increasing specular reflection
and the range of angles of total internal reflection.



Another pre-figuring of Iceland Spar?



“somehow, the Ear has been a-glow”



More consciousness for the ear, which was earlier a-throb



“It is listening.”



Both a kind of visceral gut-drop moment and comic/slapsticky. The idea
of a brainless ear listening is kind of an inverse of the famous
tree-in-the-woods koan.



“one voracious Vessel,--can’t get enough of human speech, she’ll take
anything, in any language”



The language of pimping and sexual objectification/commodification,
but decoupled from genital sex. Genital identification (in opposition
to polymorphous perversity) is a focus of Pynchon favorite N.O. Brown.
Genital identification is arrested development, is a reduction (to a
certainty?) of the ego to one identification with one part of the
body. This is an alternate reduction.



“’What would you call her? “Nose”?’”



More pointing in the direction of Gogol’s nose?



“’Be advis’d, I am empower’d to use Violence, I’ve a Warrant from the
Company,--‘”



Sounds like a cowardly James Bond—the idea of the corporation or
nation state having the (exclusive/monopolistic) right to violence



p. 179



“only Dutch money, isn’t it, no more real than the Cape be, and that
terrible Dream that has seiz’d and will not release them”



Anyone’s guess as to what exactly constitutes the terrible Dream
here—there’s been a lot of hypnosis and apparent possession by the
ideas of money, of capitalism, of dominion, of enslavement, of
obsessive usefulness/pragmatism, etc. In addition to the other
dream-like elements, the wind, its insanity. The Dream of the terrible
eruption of retribution that the Black Hole of Calcutta portends.



“’You’re not altogether well,’ Mason points out.

“’And more of us on the Leeward Side than you’d ever suspect….’”



There’s more at work here than just the wind.



“who’ve cried their own desires into the Great Insatiable.”



The grand repository for unfulfilled human hopes and desires. In
psychodynamics, this must be the collective unconscious?



“A speedy and safe passage for Mr. Dixon”



Mason transferring some of his hopes (and thus identification) to
Dixon here, in another escalation of the intimacy between them. Also
perhaps transitioning out of grief by transferring some of his
affection for Rebekah to Dixon?



“Till now, he has never properly understood the phrase Calling into a
Void,--having imagin’d it said by Wives of Husbands, or Teachers of
Students.”



Tracking this as ideas of voids and black holes accumulate resonance.
Also, the idea that the void is a void of understanding or response,
and is found in other people (void as internal ignorance, as
foolishness—as what fills the qlippoth and but also regular people?



“Here[…]is the Void, and the very anti-Oracle—revealing nothing, as it
absorbs ev’rything. One kneels and begs, one is humiliated, one crawls
on.”



The void against reason, the void as chaos. The void as what the
mighty windy spirit of God acts upon to create all being. The void as
absence of reason? Cf. 168: “Velvets whose grasp of incident light was
so predatory and absolute that one moved closer to compensate for what
was not being reflected, till it felt like being drawn, oneself,
inside the unthinkable contours of an invisible surface.”



p. 180



“whose ev’ry audible Nuance now comes clear to him”


Mason absorbing the ear’s power—also reminiscent of the scent-powered
detective in Bleeding Edge.



“near and far, all of equal Loudness, from ev’ry part of the Town”



He the center and sound the spokes of the wheel? The feeling of
connectedness, centeredness—familiar to experiences of revelation (the
specific audio effect is also very psychedelic). Also paranoiac
feelings of revelation (e.g. Oedipa in CoL49)



“In its suggestion of Transition between Two Worlds, the space offers
an invitation to look into his Soul for a moment, before passing back
to the Port-Town he has stepp’d from”

More transitional, liminal, syncopic spaces. Where truth is glimpsed
in passage (like the important moments of the Transit)



“brighter indeed than the Day really allows”



Impossible sensation



“no door-ways of any kind”



Tracking this, as the idea of un-enterable/exitable spaces will
continue to build resonance



“’I was in a State. I must have found the way out. Unless the real
Mason is yet there captive in that exitless Patch, and I but his
Representative.”



More on human representatives—even of one’s own self, of the self
bifurcated by the differences of fortune and eventuality and time?
This is yet another moment in the novel where the idea of alternate
timeless, or influential moments of our story’s departure from
hypothetical alternate timelines that are mysterious or arbitrary,
like the Seahorse’s escape. Narrative structure as seen through
Iceland Spar, or the Chronoscope



“as near as I can calculate, at exactly the instant you spoke into
this Object, I heard, as out of a speaking-trumpet, your message[…]the
Wind outside dropp’d for just long enough for me to hear.”



Mason and Dixon supernaturally connected as Dixon experiences a moment
of sound shadow, just like in GR.



“Only come up to Wearside some time, we’ll teach thee how to wait.”



Connecting Dixon’s Quaker-influenced meditation practice of patience
and quiet to fishing.



p. 181



“’aye, so fast you’d never feel a thing…?’”



Mason is, perhaps unconsciously, uptalking, mimicking Dixon’s speech patterns.



“beneath the Great Dog”



Referring to Sirius, also recalling the LED and likely Mason’s
dog-like behavior on the previous page: “He begins, like a Dog, to
explore the Walls, proceeding about the stone Perimeter.” This moment
comes amid Mason’s Moment of Clarity—perhaps contributing somewhat to
the question raised earlier of whether a dog can be said to possess
the Buddha nature?



p. 182



“Has he in the Strangeness of his Solitude, reach’d a Compact with the
Island, as if ‘twere sentient, has he in some way come to belong to it
in Perpetuity?”



We’ve seen a lot on the magical power of thinking to make the world.
Here, coming to terms with a place leads to ownership by the place.
Also, cf. p. 14 and elsewhere on contracts with place—the city, etc.
And more on the awareness of place—those man-made and not.



“’tis ar from a Reduction to Certainty.’”



Second use of this phrasing this chapter. Doing a lot of work on the
idea of expanding and reducing timelines.



“’Mine was lucky,--the Sector practickally did the Work,--but yours was good.’”



Subtly nodding toward the idea of place moving through (the ideas and
science of) men, but also, Mason expressing genuine admiration for
Dixon’s craft (which he has disparaged and will do so again)
-
Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l