M&D and Genesissssss

[Smoke Teff]

I read that book Longitude, about the clockmaker who eventually got credit for solving the longitude problem, John Harrison. It suggests Maskelyne is an ambitious-first-ideological-close-second lunatic who went way out of his way to sabotage the poor tinkerman Harrison’s base solution to a lofty problem. 

I have only reread up to the pages you’re writing about here so can’t remember if that sense of him comes through in M&D

> On Jan 15, 2018, at 4:34 PM, Joseph Tracy <brook7 at sover.net> wrote:
> 
> Maskelyne is the perfect mouthpiece for Pyncon’s love of wacky theories. On pgs. 133-4  HM is discussing St. Helena as a plantation of the metropolitan “Home Planet”,  here alien but possibly also Corporate. Some inhabitants of the island claim to have traveled to this mysterious home planet. 
> 
> “What if ’twere so?” declares Maskelyne. “Ev’ry People have a story of how they were created. If one were heretickal enough, which I certainly am not, one might begin to entertain some notion of the Garden in Genesis, as an instance of extra-terrestrial Plantation.”
> 
> The idea of the garden of Eden as a plantation of an alien species is detailed in the fairly wacked out theories of Zecharia Sitchin. His books, starting with The 12th Planet ,1976, were very popular and his theories the obvious source of this passage.   Nevertheless  lack of linguistic or astronomic credibility aside, the idea of  Eden, with its talking reptiles, trees of knowledge,  or trees of life and early biological classification system( man gave names to all the animals)as a genetic research plantation  is not without creative merit and could explain all kinds of things I suppose.
> 
> Maskelyne picks up the Genesis reference on 135
> ….
> “The Serpent, being the obvious Answer.”
> “What Serpent?” 
> “The one dwelling within the Volcanoe, Mason, surely you are not ignorant upon the Topick?” “Regretfully, Sir— ” 
> “Serpent, Worm, or Dragon, ’tis all the same to It, for It speaketh no Tongue but its own. It Rules this Island, whose ancient Curse and secret Name, is Disobedience. In thoughtless Greed, within a few pitiably brief Generations, have these People devastated a Garden in which, once, anything might grow.
> 
> HM may be mad, but there is something in this bit that can be seen as a poetic wail for human  eco-devastation of our lush planet.
> 
> P returns often throughout his work to the western correlation between evil and the reptilian. But in M&D he seems to suggest that negative association can be inverted by bringing in the positive association Zhang  brings of the dragon forces in nature. And because the serpent/evil references are frequently the product of unstable and paranoid characters, it is tricky to tell how and why he is using this language. 
> 
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