M&D straight lines and black holes

[Keith Davis]

That’s a good connection.

Www.innergroovemusic.com

> On Jan 14, 2018, at 6:25 AM, Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> The black hole of Calcutta, which for some reason haunted me a bit in high school when I first learned about it---became a cliched metaphor quickly from me---
> now also reminds me of the dark web after the existence of Bleeding Edge. 
> 
>> On Sat, Jan 13, 2018 at 12:08 PM, Joseph Tracy <brook7 at sover.net> wrote:
>> M&D straight lines and black holes
>> 
>> Interesting reference to the black hole of Calcutta, both in CH 11 and on page 665 in the lead up to the quote  Monte mentioned on page 666.  (Did this phrase also appear earlier in M&D?).  At least 3 layers I think: 1) the colonizer’s terror of brutal retribution by the colonized, 2) astrophysical black holes which point to fundamental mysteries that occupy us as we occupy them  and 3) dark spiritual energies, those desires that humans seem destined to watch and ‘share’ as they spiral out of control into genocidal or bio-cidal madness. .   On pg 666 Dixon wonders if the bad energies which the geomantic chinaman referred to as generated by the line and which seemed to put chickens to sleep was actually feeding the powers of the mechanical duck.   A pretty loaded conjecture  Do certain actions or anti-natural  forces put the timid or cowardly to sleep while energizing the frantic grasp of the machinery of  desire and ambition?  The odd thing is that it is the Duck who asks them not just to wonder , but to care.  Is caring enough to redirect a dangerous service, rendered honestly and without seeming violence, enough to change behavior?  Is Pynchon looking into the origins of this dark vortex to converse with the long dead surveyors  via duck or to converse with us?
>> 
>> The incident that delivered this phrase, the black hole of Calcutta, into common use was not that far back in history for M&D . 1756 the British East India Company was driven out of  Calcutta by a local Bengali ruler and between 60 and 123 British captives died in a dungeon, which through reports by a survivor became known as the black hole of Calcutta.   By M&D’s time Calcutta was the capital of British India,.  The British called it the city of palaces. This dual role, black hole and city of palaces seems to epitomize the  dual mind of the colonizer.  Here is oriental splendor, but it must be brought under control, mapped and located in space, tranquilized with opium, made to ’do its bit for global trade’. To treat dark people as equals even after ending the slave trade seems rarely to enter the mind.
>> 
>> The St Helena Chapter( 11),  takes a distinctly poetic turn on page 107.  Despite the port-of-call-bawdiness the description is one of a lonely  windswept island in open forboding seas, all distances vast under unfamiliar stars”, watched over by “the baleful thing”, sirius the dog star, yellow in the sky..
>> P develops the idea that the sun seems to sink into darkness in the seas,  and darkness becomes an anti-luminary and unnameable object in the solar system.  Later we get a riff on wives traveling through this bleakness to or from India hearing tales of the black hole of Calcutta.
>> 
>>   A contemplation of inner and outer worlds to match any poet. Unsparingly dark,  light becomes  an island easily swallowed  into the depths, a ship that is sinkable. Perhaps that is where the thought might have gone. Until one goes beneath the surface, the ocean seems a desert.  But the meditation moves  to the gallows, that black hole for those who have crossed the wrong line, handmaid to slavery and trade, and we see that this meditation is preamble to Mason’s troubled memories of his wife’s  death and his subsequent debauch . But though Mason is not done grieving, Florinda changes his tune.  There is nothing like a public hanging to cheer one up, apparently, meeting old acquaintances and speculating on whether the hanged will have an erection as he heads to Calcutta.-
>> Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?listpynchon-l
> 
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