M&D Notes Ch. 1-3 (Take 2; Completed this time and in Plain Text)

[Smoke Teff]

CHAPTER 1





p. 5



“Arcs, starr’d” the language of the novel as ever expressing the
conceptual vocabulary of the novel and its characters.



(Cf. p. 172, Mason & Rebekah’s ghost reflecting on their respective
conceptions of the stars. “[Rebekah says,] ‘You believ’d, when you
were a Boy, that the Stars were Souls departed.’

“‘And you, that they were Ships at Anchor.’ She had, once,--as our
Sky, a Harbor to Travelers from Ev’rywhere.

“’Look to the Earth,’ she instructs him. ‘Belonging to her as I do, I
know she lives, and there here upon this Volcanoe in the Sea, close to
the Forces within, even you, Mopery, may learn of her, Tellurick
Secrets you could never guess.’”)







“the ringing Lids of various Boilers and Stewing-Pots” like bells, a
kind of innocent summoning, very church-like, to a sermon that, like
the Card Table, will offer “an illusion of Depth”





p. 6



The sense of remove from the world is continued: “the City today might
be an Isle upon an Ocean.”



“Nerve-Lines of concentrated Light” pre-figuring some of the
Tellurick, Ley Line type stuff to come.



Then of course we are introduced to the LeSpark family name.



“Sultan enough”



The novel is still building its thematic vocabulary—not that it will
stop. The vast majority of our view of the world comes through
Anglicized characters and speech, but we get these intrusions of less
occidental referents, which come with various connotations of
exoticism, opulence, mystery, savagery, chaos, irrationality





p. 7



“the old Pewter Coffee-Machine venting its Puffs of Vapor”



the confluence of coffee and ~wind—two things that get big treatment
in this novel. Wind will take on many different kinds of meaning, none
reducible or fully knowable—and of course that’s the point. Coffee is
given as a kind of superpotent instrument in human discourse. As a
chemical intermediary of the wind?



p. 8



“the eventless corridors of Syncope”



For me, pre-figuring the lost eleven days, and in general the novel’s
theme of meaning and meaningful events occurring outside time, or in
some atypical relation to the normal human conception of forward time.



p. 9



“Uncle Ives[…] but lately return’d from a Coffee-House Meeting[…]
feeling[…] alone, pedestrian, desiring to pass the time to some
Revenue, if not Profit.”



Possible complication of the apparent beneficence of the coffee drug,
Ives who will increasingly come to symbolize juridicism, low-level
governmental corruption, and here the profit motive, the inability to
be still and patient and idle, possibly to know something like peace
or God (in the way Dixon will advise Mason). Introducing the ubiquity
of the profit-hungry, quantifying mind that results from the Age of
Reason (explored in real full flower in Dutch Africa)



Rev: ’twas one of the least tolerable of Offenses in that era[…] the
Crime they styl’d “Anonymity.”’



p. 10 (cont’d from last quote)



Rev: ‘It took me till I was lying among the Rats and Vermin, upon the
freezing edge of a Future invisible, to understand that my name had
never been my own,--rather belonging, all this time, to the
Authorities, who forbade me to change it, or withhold it, as ‘twere a
Ring upon the Collar of a Beast, ever waiting for the Lead to be
fasten’d on… One of those moments Hindoos and Chinamen are ever said
to be having, entire loss of Self, perfect union with All, sort of
thing. Strange Lights, Fires, Voices indecipherable,--indeed,
Children, this is the part of the Tale where your old Uncle gets to go
insane.’



Lots happening here, as we come to a close of this first chapter.
First, an incredibly deep and dark catechism into the abuses of the
state from the Rev. Cherrycoke to his children, the notion that the
state employs your name as a kind of SLAVERY to your self/ego. An
introduction of oriental referents not purely for exoticism but for
their self-transcendent potentialities, what we might unironically
call wisdom. But what looks, in the occident, like (the privilege of
[“gets to”]) going insane.



Also this gives a really interesting emotional component to
Cherrycoke’s (and Pynchon’s?) telling: the notion that he has been to
the brink of ego-death, or has seen some kind of ecstatic and painful
truth at the bottom of the world, but suffers the weight of his
name/self-collar in a way that, here and elsewhere, seems somewhat
exhausting…for what? To educate the children, likely. For the Moral of
the story. (Cf. Ch 3: “O children, I even dream’d in those Days,--but
only long after the waking Traverse was done.”)





But then of course Pynchon subverts this in the next paragraph on the
bottom of ten, as the reliability of the Reverend’s account is brought
into question.



p. 11



“I set sail upon an Engine of Destruction.”



Pre-figures the metaphor of America as such an engine.







CHAPTER 2



M&D get introduced. One of my favorite chapters. Largely an apparent
parody of the obsequiousness and absurd deferentiality of the day’s
rhetoric/correspondence. As if M&D are competing to be the more
servile. But of course it’s deeper than parody—they ARE compelled by
the style of the day to compete in expressing their own servility. Not
that, in the realm of public affairs, they will be immune from other
kinds of competition. But the insanity—the ubiquity of slavery, even
in the thoughts of the people who would seem to be invulnerable to
it—comes through in the language here.



Other thoughts: the formality provides an interesting launchpad to
what becomes an incredibly complex and intimate relationship. Very
satisfying to look back on this initial introduction.



I find comparing their sign-offs interesting. D: “Y’r obd’t s’v’t.” M:
“y’r obdt. Svt.,”



There’s still a bit of anarchy and senselessness to the formal
conventions of the day. Also, I can’t help but see the abbreviations
and the apostrophes through the lens of the “eventless corridors of
syncope” from ch. 1. Grammatical syncope. There are interstitial
spaces everywhere. Our awareness, even our apparently exhaustively
formal and precise communications, are full of assumptions and missing
information, just like the card table, just like…







CHAPTER 3



p. 14



“I was not there when they met,--or, not in the usual Way. I later
heard from them how they remember’d meeting.”



The Rev is outside time.



“O children, I even dream’d in those Days,--but only long after the
waking Traverse was done.”



Traverse obviously resonates with the family Traverse in AtD.





“’How can Yese dwell thah’ closely together, Day upon Day, without all
growing Murderous?’”



Two important things being introduced here. The inevitable effects of
human density—as if the natural laws of urbanism and population
density involve some limit that when moved toward/past leads to a kind
of chaos and violence. Also: murderousness. Maybe it’s just common
usage of the day, but it feels like murder in particular—the
willingness to take an individual life—comes in for a lot of focus in
this book.



“yet another Term in the Contract between the City and oneself” more
on laws of urbanism







p. 15



“’whilst in London, ‘tis the Paradise of the Quarrelsome, for fair…?’”



Working against any notions of the unique savagery of the orient.



“the Friday Hangings”



Murder on schedule, routinized, rationalized



“where he was soon chatting up Hangmen and their ‘Prentices”



Obviously recalls Pirate from GR





“’There’s nothing like it, it’s London at its purest,’ he cries. ‘You
must come out there with me, soon as we may.’”



Here we see the kind of perversely macabre state the novel finds the
semi-recently widowered Mason.



“So Dixon for the second time in two minutes finds himself laughing
without the Motrix of honest Mirth[…] feeling it his Duty to set them
at Ease.”



Dixon’s more homegrown, folksy gentility and manneredness—in addition
to learning about the two astronomers, do we start to see some of the
symbolic seeds of regional difference that will bloom into the north
and the land of Dixie?



Dixon’s mannered obsequiousness here also stands in stark contrast to
his outraged apotheosis with the slave-driver and whip toward novel’s
end. He comes a long way.







p. 16

“The two are staring, one at the other, each with a greatly mistaken
impression,--likewise in some Uncertainty as to how the power may come
to be sorted out betwixt ‘em.”



One of the many moments in the book where P is speaking beyond merely
this scene and outward to the future and all the novel’s
historico-thematic resonances.



p. 17



“Surveyors are runnin’ about numerous as Bed-bugs, and twice as cheap,
with work enough for all certainly in Durham at present, Enclosures
all over the County[…]”



Note here that in Kafka’s The Castle, K is a surveyor. Feels
semi-relevant given the increasing importance of The Castle in the
next ~150pp. Also, given some of the themes of the earth’s abiding and
mysterious potency, important to note the context of land enclosures
happening simultaneously—an important detail alongside the
commodification of enslaved human labor and the astonishing land
hunger that’s going to drive colonial—then American—politics, global
trade, war, etc.



More personality differences noted here as expressed in fashion: M’s
almost puritanical solemnity with all things sartorial, D’s
flamboyance, Edenic abundance of bad taste (reminiscent of Slothrop,
Sportello, etc.). This one of many instances of the tendency of humans
to tend toward extreme binaries—or at least of people (readers) to
interpret human behavior according to binary categories. But this is
important because this will eventually lead to the American civil war
that will give such weight to the line our astronomers—and then
massive-scale surveyors—will oversee the drawing of.







p. 18



“the two sorts of drinking Folk this implies, thah’ is, Grape People
and Grain People.”



Another binary



“chimney-smoke perambulates into the Christmastide air”



This brings me back to the Christmas evensong section in the first
~200pp. of GR. That section is full of different kinds of…material
continuity. Toothpaste tubes being reused for aluminum, yes, but also
kinds of continuity that exist outside the realm of the human, outside
the War.



There, as here, there is a continuity in the movement of water, snow,
vapor, air, wind…

This kind of continuity will also be important in M&D—and of course
there is continuity between the two books in these and other ways.





p. 19



“With no appetite for the giant Mutton Chop cooling in front of him,
Mason mopishly now wraps it and stows it in his Coat. Looking up, he
notes Dixon, mouth cheerfully stuff’d, beaming too tolerantly for his
Comfort.”



M’s ironic melancholy, D’s earnestness



“’Why mayn’t there be Oracles, for us, in our time? Gate-ways to
Futurity? That can’t all have died with the ancient Peoples. Isn’t it
worth looking ridiculous, at least to investigate this English Dog,
for its obvious bearing upon Metempsychosis if nought else,--’”



Pre-figuring a lot of the irrationality to come.



Also, to my mind, “Metempsychosis” rings of Joyce’s Ulysses. Another
parallel is that the telling of this novel is somewhat occasioned by
Mason’s funeral, as Ulysses action is precipitated by Poor Dignan’s
funeral.



p. 20



“There is something else in progress,--something Mason cannot quite
confide. Happen he’s lost someone close? and recently enough to
matter, aye,--for he’s a way of pitching ever into the Hour, heedless,
as Dixon remembers himself, after his father passed on….”



Right after Mason mentions modern oracles, Dixon is able to read into
Mason’s heart. How much of the novel’s magick is the workings of the
human mind, human affection, human intimacy, in ways we don’t know how
to rationalize?



“upstart Chapels”



The Great Awakening is part of the background and occasional foreground



-The miraculous dog stopping to piss—Pynchon ever subverting his
loftiest themes, bringing the heavens back to the grotesque body





p. 21



“’I’ve been out more than once to the Indies,--there’s a million
islands out there, each more likely than the last, and I tell you a
handful of Sailors with their wits about them, and that talking Dog to
keep the Savages amused, why, we could be kings.’”



Important to note that amid the apparent onslaught of the Age of
Reason, there is also this background emphasis on paranormality,
religious revivalism, harebrained schemes, travelling sideshows,
etc.—all of which feed deeply into the American character



p. 22



“’are you a human Spirit, re-incarnate as a Dog?’”



More continuity; Death is not the end. Or is it?



“holy Insanity”



cf. Cherrycoke’s holy insanity in Ch. 1—are all insanities holy in the
Age of Reason?



“’I may be praeternatural, but I am not supernatural. ‘Tis the Age of
Reason, rrrf?’”



Setting up preternaturality vs supernaturality—does this book contain
examples of both? Or only the former?



Also, interesting to position this kind of personal self-consciousness
alongside temporal/epochal self-consciousness



“’Talking Dogs belong with Dragons and Unicorns. What there are,
however, are Provisions for Survival in a World less fantastick.’”



This is a fairly mysterious line, in my reading. Does preternaturality
emerge/obtain in the world as a means of shepherding the spirit
through this Age of Reason?



“’So we know how to evoke from you, Man, one day at a time, at least
enough Mercy for one day more of Life.”



This is a beautiful reading of the man-pet relationship, I think, and
suggests maybe that anything that evokes human mercy is itself kind of
preternatural in the sense I mention just above. Dogs also as
Scherehazades of Mercy—that is, using Mercy to keep themselves alive,
using themselves to keep Mercy alive (in the human), using Mercy to
keep the human alive (in the human). Cf. the definition of Mercy given
pp. 171-2, speaking of Rebekah Mason’s ghost: “those refusals, among
the Living, to act on behalf of Death or its ev’ryday
Coercions,--Wages too low to live upon, Laws written by Owners,
Infantry, Bailiffs, Prison, Death’s thousand Metaphors in the
World[…]”









“Algernon”



Flowers for Algernon reference seems obvious—should note that the
intellectual leap forward in that novel is temporary and precarious,
comes with new kinds of dangers for those who experience it (cf. The
Age of Reason)





p. 23



The dog threatening the humans with his own allegedly rabid bite.
Then: “Immediately ‘round the Dog develops a circle of Absence, of
about a fathom’s radius, later recall’d by both Astronomers as
remarkably regular in shape.”



This feels important in ways that are somewhat beyond my grasp. Maybe
good for conversation. Is it that humans of the age, in their moments
of fear, are operating according to these rational laws of arrangement
(related to the Age of Reason, enclosures, etc.)?





“’I am a British Dog, Sir. No one owns me.’”



Reflects the thinking among the British that they were some progenitor
of human freedom on the planet, and not the opposite. Magna Carta and
all that. Sounds especially absurd—as does all the emphasis on Reason,
etc—coming out of the mouth of a dog.



Here I think we see that the dog exists in the novel at least in part
to parody men’s conception of their own specialness and progress.



Also just reflects the theme of slavery vs. freedom (and, in a more
cosmic sense, slavery/destiny vs. free will) that will only expand
over the course of the novel.





“The Fabulous Jellows”

My brain hears an anachronistic Jell-O reference but happy to be
illuminated if there’s another reference entangled here.



“The Pearl of Sumatra”



Is this a reference I don’t know? Google suggests there’s some lake in
Indonesia called the Pearl of Sumatra (Lake Toba).



“How about a slug into y’r Breadroom, there, Fido?”



Again, I don’t exactly know what this means—seems like some kind of
slang suggesting there’s sex to be had for the LED, based on his
response. Breadroom/bedroom?



“a great ever-stirring Knot of Smoke”



Another entry in the smoke/vapor/wind class. We find lots of smoke in
these kind of haunts in Pynchon. Seems to suggest mystery, a place
where typical rules and authorities, expectations and ideas, don’t
apply. And yet, to “smoak” something comes to also mean to discern (or
to conceptualize or to divine) something.



“How is he supposed to ignore this pure Edge of blood-love?”



If the hyper-civilized LED is also a slave to his body and
occasionally to his passions, then what hope is there for us to be any
different? Do we even want to hope to be different?



ALSO: “Edge of blood-love” has obvious resonance with Bleeding Edge—a
space where our deeper nature meets the farthest progress of our more
collectively constructed selves?



This fits in with the notion of Edges (and borderlands, boundaries,
transitional/interstitial spaces) as places, in Pynchon, with
unpredictable potentialities. This can be good and generative or bad,
horrifically violent.



“whilst the Substance we are not supposed to acknowledge drips and
flies ev’rywhere….”



Seems weird to think this would refer to blood, given that blood was
just acknowledged—and continues to be acknowledged. Could it maybe be
something else? The life force or spirit or dignity of the
corrupted-unto-savagery fighting birds? Or that of the humans? Or is
it just blood?



In any event, lots of hinting about things that can’t or won’t or
oughtn’t be acknowledged, something just over the mountains, or just
behind the smoke. These varieties of syncope in our understanding.



Another example a few lines above: “a rickety Labyrinth of Rooms for
sleeping or debauchery, all receding like headlands into a mist.”



And cf. one of the book’s most haunting passages, pp. 151ff, when
Cornelius and Dixon make amends by D accompanying C to, in C’s words,
“the Company Lodge, where the women are of all races, sizes, and
specialties” on the dime of the Royal Society: “After they are gone
passes a silent period, an enshadowment which, prolonged past a
certain point upon the Clock-Face, begins to rouse apprehension among
the filles, for they know their Night has begun, and who is coming for
them now, and some of what will be done to them. Many who have been to
ROOMS FORBIDDEN THE OTHERS, REPORT SEEING, INSIDE THESE, A DOOR TO AT
LEAST ONE ROOM FURTHER, WHICH MAY NOT BE OPENED. The Penetralia of the
Lodge are thus, even to those employed there, A REGION WITHOUT A MAP.
ANYTHING MAY BE THERE. Perhaps miracles are still possible,--both evil
miracles, such as occur when excesses of Ill Treatment are transform’d
to Joy,--quite common in this Era,--and the reverse, when excesses of
Well-being at length bring an Anguish no less painful for being
metaphysickal,--Good Miracles[…]WHEN THEY ARE TOO DANGEROUS TO ROAM
FREE, THE TOWN MADMEN ARE KEPT AS A RESPONSIBILITY OF THE COMPANY,
CONFIN'D IN PADDED ROOMS in the Slave Lodge. Sometimes for their
amusement the Herren will escort a particularly disobedient employee
to a Madman's cell, push her inside, and lock the door. Next to each
cell is a Viewing Room where the gentlemen may then observe, through a
wall of Glass disguis'd as a great Mirror, the often quite unviewable
Rencontre. The Madmen are of every race, condition, and degree of
Affliction, from the amiably delusionary to the remorselessly
homicidal. Some of them hate women, some desire them, some know hate
and desire as but minor aspects of a greater, Oceanick Impulse, in
which, report those who survive, IT IS UNQUESTIONABLY BETTER NOT TO BE
INCLUDED. Again, some do not survive. When the Herren cannot return
their Remains to their villages, they dispose of them by sea, that the
Jackals may not have them.



“WHAT SO FAR THERE HAVE BEEN ONLY RUMORS OF, IS A ROOM NINE BY SEVEN
FEET AND FIVE INCHES, being with Dutch parsimony reduc'd to a
quarter-size replica of the cell at Fort William, Calcutta, in which
146 Europeans were oblig'd to spend the night of 20—21 June 1756.
There persists ALONG THE COMPANY NERVE-LINES A TERRIBLE SIMPLE
NEARNESS TO THE NIGHT OF THE "BLACK HOLE," SOME ZERO-POINT OF HISTORY,
RECKONING WHENCE, ALL THE MARVELS TO FOLLOW,— Quebec, Dr. Halley's
Comet, the Battle of Quiberon Bay, aye and the Transit of Venus, too,—
would elapse as fugitive as Opium dreams, and mattering less.... TO
FIND THE BLACK HOLE IN A MENU OF EROTIC SCENARIOS SURPRIZES NO ONE AT
THIS PARTICULAR END OF THE WORLD,— Residents, visitors, even a few
Seamen of elevated sensibility have return'd, whenever possible, to be
urg'd along by graceful Lodge-Nymphs in indigo Dhotis and Turbans,
dainty scimitars a-flash, commanding their naked "Captives" to squeeze
together more and more tightly into the scale-model cell with as many
Slaves,— impersonating Europeans,— as will make up the complement,
calculated at thirty-six, best able to afford visitors an authentick
Sense of the Black Hole of Calcutta Experience.



"’IF ONE DID NOT WISH TO SUFFER HORROR DIRECTLY,’ COMMENTS THE REVD IN
HIS DAY-BOOK, ‘ONE MIGHT EITHER TRANSCEND IT SPIRITUALLY, OR EROTICIZE
IT CARNALLY,— the sex Entrepreneurs reasoning that the combination of
Equatorial heat, sweat, and the flesh of strangers in enforc'd
intimacy might be Pleasurable,— that therefore might some dramatiz'd
approach to death under such circumstances be pleasurable as well,
with all squirming together in a serpent's Nest of Limbs and Apertures
and penises, immobiliz'd in a bondage of similarly bound bodies,
lubricated with a gleaming mixture of their own shar'd sweat, piss,
and feces, nothing to breathe but one another's exhausted breaths,
moving toward some single slow warm Explosion—‘



“(Tho' he does not of course read any of this aloud,— choosing rather
to skim ahead to the Moral.)”



(((Penetralia feels like a kind of sick and perfectly-punned usage.
Defined: the innermost parts of a building; a secret or hidden place.
mid 17th century: from Latin, literally ‘innermost things,’ neuter
plural of penetralis ‘interior.’)))





SO: what is it that we can’t look at? And can’t name? Is it the dark
center of the universe, the “Zero-point of history,” the absolute most
unimaginable suffering? (Note also the Black Hole experience is the
extreme Expression of the laws of
suffering-as-proportionate-to-human-density suggested earlier, just as
the LED is the “extreme Expression” of the process of dogs acting
human to evoke man’s Mercy.)



Or is the unmentionable, the unimaginable, the space inside us, where
our own suffering gets turned into eroticism, into pleasure, into a
kind of will to slavery? The absolute soul-vacuum inside the Qlippoth?



But also let’s look back/ahead at Mason’s reunion with Rebekah’s
ghost. “her plainly visible Phantom[…]representing Rebekah at her most
vital and belov’d. Is this, like the Bread and Wine, a kindness of the
Almighty, sparing him a sight he could not have abided? What might
that be, too merciless to bear? At times he believes he has almost
seen black Fumes welling from the Surface of her Apparition, heard her
Voice thickening to the timbres of the Beasts…the serpents of Hell,
real and swift, lying just the other side of her Shadow…the smell of
them in their long, cold Waiting….He gazes, at such moments, feeling
pleasurably helpless.”



Then comes the definition of Mercy, which is revealed to Mason, sorta,
via this experience and her death.



Our ignorance of death is our innocence is our Mercy. But is death
actually the end? Rebekah does, after all, pass over—and does now
belong to the earth, at least as she (or Mason’s insane image of her)
says.









p. 25



“greater and lesser Ecstasy”



Seems sort of oxymoronic. How can there be degrees of ecstasy? Unless
it’s like, as gets mentioned above, evil miracles v good miracles



“laughter more and less feign’d”

As with Dixon’s false laughter earlier. More instances of the
treachery and precariousness of human feeling, human pleasure (which I
think the different magnitudes of ecstasy idea calls into question
also)



“the shadow’d Wilderness of Rooms”



Conflation of architecture/design and the unknown, the
civilized/constructed world and the most uncivilized parts of the
world—which of course happen where men don’t allow mercy to reach.
Whole Qlippoth realms.



“the movements deeper with at least one more Grade of Intent”



What does this mean? What is supplying this extra intent? Is it that
there is some evil force moving through the will of men?



“Mason is nonetheless eager to be aboard a ship, bound somewhere
impossible,--long Voyages by sea being thought to help his condition,
describ’d to him as Hyperthrenia, or ‘Excess in Mourning.’”

We see M’s depressiveness, his death wish, wish for deliverance.



Hyperthrenia an apparent neologism. Threnody is (sez Wikipedia) a
wailing ode, song, hymn or poem of mourning composed or performed as a
memorial to a dead person. The term originates from the Greek word
θρηνῳδία (threnoidia), from θρῆνος (threnos, "wailing") and ᾠδή (oide,
"ode"),



Threnia is a genus in the Asilidae family--The Asilidae are the robber
fly family, also called assassin flies. They are powerfully built,
bristly flies with a short, stout proboscisenclosing the sharp,
sucking hypopharynx.[1][2] The name "robber flies" reflects their
notoriously aggressive predatory habits; they feed mainly or
exclusively on other insects and as a rule they wait in ambush and
catch their prey in flight.



“Somehow the Learnèd Dog has led him to presume there exist
safe-conduct Procedures for the realm of Death,--that through this
Dog-reveald Crone, he will be allow’d at last to pass over, and find,
and visit her, and come back, his Faith resurrected. At the same time,
he smoaks that the Learnèd English D.[…] in introducing them thus, is
pursuing an entirely personal End.”





The notion of “safe-conduct Procedures for the realm of Death” reminds
me of the kaballic antechambers to the Throne stuff from GR. Also fits
in with all the notion of these labyrinthine, dark, secret penetralia
to the buildings of men. Also, Mason does eventually reunite with
Rebekah’s ghost on St. Helena 100+ pages later. What are the
procedures that take him there? The wind, the whims of the Royal
Society, Maskelyne, the demands of the cosmos and man’s need to
observe and record them.



We learn a lot about the apparent metaphysics of the life-death
boundary in that section (pp. 171-172). As suggested earlier, we learn
about the notion of Man’s ignorance to mortality as being Man’s
mercy—or as also suggested, man’s own refusal to abide by the dictates
of the forces of death as being the definition of mercy.



That definition of mercy is revealed to him BECAUSE she died. “[…]as
if, the instant of her passing over having acted as a Lens, the rays
of her Soul have undergone moral Refraction.”



Our morality and all of our better/eternal potentialities come from
our ability to conceive of the ones we love after they’ve died? This
is how we transcend the limit of our own ignorance of/and our own
mortality.





BUT why does Mason perceive that the LED “is pursuing an entirely
personal End”? Is it the innate suspicion of the depressive
Mason—suspicion about his own lovability, perhaps, after the one who
loved him has died? Or is the LED somehow in on some of the smoaky
conspiratorial winds that gain steam throughout the book?



This page is also the first usage of “smoak” in the sense of
understanding, deducing, divining.









p. 26



“Thus does your Captain Smith disrespect Christ, Fate, Saint Peter,
and the god Neptune”

Lots of traditions being apparently disrespected here, in the Age of
Reason, at sea.



p. 27



“Boats wait with muffl’d Oars to ferry them against their will over to
a Life they may not return from.”



Seems obviously like boats taking them to an underworld, a world of
death—especially given this boundary is so prevalent in the novel.
There are a lot of unknowable boundaries in this novel that, once
traversed, may not be returned from. The mountains separating Dutch
Africa from the interior. The ocean. Various boundaries of time. And
then every step forward in surveying The Line.





“—Since last year, the Year of Marvels, when Hawke drove Conflans upon
that lee shore at Quiberon Bay”



QB a hugely important victory for the British over the French in the
Seven Years’ War.



Also, the Year of Marvels (an interesting thing to happen in the Age
of Reason). And looking ahead again, the novel later suggests the
Black Hole of Calcutta was a “Zero-point of history” that occasioned
“all the Marvels to follow”



Why would this be the case? The BHoC is suggested, in that later
passage, as involving an absolute maximum of both human density and
human suffering. And also, the later passage suggests, represented a
kind of inverse and extreme concentration of the horrible abuses being
exerted by the British against the Indians. As if the forward march of
civilization in the occident, with its attendant increases in human
density, occasioned this miniature and mirroring in the BHoC—and
perhaps it is this translation and reflection of cruelty that creates
some epochal shift that earns the name “Zero-point of history.”



This translation and miniaturization of the British-on-Indian
oppression that results in the BHoC is again translated and
miniaturized (and transformed) into the erotic, sado-masochistic
impulse that occasions the formalization/infrastructure of the BHoC
replica at the Company Lodge. The translation of pain into pleasure is
a recurrent theme in Pynchon’s work. Is this where it really begins,
at this Zero point? (Note that the Marquis de Sade was just coming
into sexual maturity at the time of the BHoC and this zero point,
somewhat downwind of the Hole itself)







“’Mason, pray You,--‘tis the Age of Reason,’ Dixon reminds him, ‘we’re
Men of Science. To huz must all days run alike, the same number of
identical Seconds, each proceeding in but one Direction,
irreclaimable…?’”



Encapsulating some of the central notions of the novel and the age
(namely the standard forward march of time and its
rationality/quantifiability/unstoppability and the ultimately rational
nature of the world)
-
Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l