The Black Hole of Self//The Binary We-System

[Smoke Teff]

M&D p. 183…



“Void of Course, back with Senses Boggl’d from War, Slavery,
Successful Obs, the wind at St. Helena, unaccustom’d Respect from
their Peers, Mason and Dixon wander about London like Tops a-spin,
usually together, colliding from time to time and bouncing away
smartly[…] They address the Council of the Royal Society, and find
they have nothing but good to say of all they have met at St. Helena
and the Cape.”



Why do they have nothing but good to say?



Have they had their senses boggl’d beyond remembering anything bad to
report? Or are they too suspicious of the Royal Society to allow them
the intimacy of reporting what they encountered? Are they empowered by
their love for each other? They seek refuge in their affection, driven
there under the constant pressure of panoptic power.





M&D, being so unprecedentedly character-driven, for Pynchon, is more
conceptually (and plainspokenly) concerned with the metaphysical
nature of ego identification. Just as this book focus more
specifically on the idea of The One of ego/self, it also focuses—in
that matter/anti-matter way—more closely on human relationships, those
massive in scale (the hierarchal power of state-corporate hegemony),
those collective and encompassing (racial categories, geographic
classes), those microscopic (the binary system of one-on-one
relationships, romantic love, friendship, enmity).



The binary character of human love/affection, transmitted so much more
easily between two than any other number (because of mutuality and the
world-making power of human attention; whereas the metaphysics of
attention are such that the spirit of war can spread so much more
virally than the purely benevolent half of the ultimately-ambivalent
allness of being, as manifest in humans)…



What are these bonds of affection worth? Are they not merely the
hidden and speculative and minority history of the world? An
invention, even, of workaday fabulists? Are these one-to-one bonds of
love not, being binary and made of selves that are themselves
reductions to a Certainty, perpetuations of the reduction of being?



One-on-one intimacy is what we turn to in times of emergency and
threat especially. The compression of the pair bond is the consequence
of the omnipresent threat of hegemonic, panoptic, top-down power. The
diamond made out of the oppressive weight of all that coal, and
gravity.





GR: “For every They  there  ought  to  be  a  We.  In  our  case
there  is.  Creative  paranoia  means developing at least as thorough
a We-system as a They-system—“



Is the one-to-one bond the largest possible We-system that’s as
thorough as a They-system? It is the human family shrunk to its
smallest possible size. The smallest little nugget of We System.

Even our idyllic Cherrycoke family is not totally thorough, full of
minor enmities and frayed affections.



Does this make the pair—the actual ground zero of the event of human
love (that is, of the man-made perception-and-so-reality of the
benevolent component of being, the We against the They, the spirit
against the War)—does this make the loving pair a zero point? A Black
Hole? Or is Black Hole how we would describe the next step-down,
beneath the family-category threshold, to the individual? The isolated
self. The alone (melancholick?) ego. The product and exile of urban
density.

GR: "There is time, if you need the comfort, to touch the person next
to you, or to reach between your own cold legs . . . "
-
Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l