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

[Mark Kohut]

 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_of_Jenkins%27_Ear
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_of_Jenkins%27_Ear>

"beneath the Great Dog.....   "an Aberration"......hoping to find but
therefore doesn't.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aberration_of_light  .....

The stars don't reveal...what hopes to see.....

Aberration of Starlight is a good novel by Gilbert Sorrentino...


On Sun, Feb 18, 2018 at 8:41 PM, Smoke Teff <smoketeff at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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/?listpynchon-l
>
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