M&D CH 7 Notes

[Smoke Teff]

CHAPTER 7





p. 58



“Trying to remember how they ever came to this place, both speak of
Passage as by a kind of flight.”



I believe ‘passage’ as designation for human travel (with connotations
of—temporary—sanctuary) happens in a few places across P’s work. GR in
partick.



Also, lots of foggy arrivals and departures in this novel. Dixon’s
sense of possibly arriving in America without realizing he’s actually
left England in (p. 244 “And just then, out there, like Hounds let
loose, the church bells of America all begin to toll, peculiarly lucid
in the fog”)



Or Mason’s escape from the mysteriously walled garden after visiting
with Jenkin’s Ear (p. 180):



“’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.’

“When Dixon hears this, at last, a few days out in their Passage back
to England[…]”



“tilted into the Light, as a geometer’s Globe might be pick’d up and
tilted for a look at this new Hemisphere, this haunted and other half
of ev’rything known, where spirit-powers run free among the green
abysses and the sudden mountain crests[…]”



More visions of man playing God (via the instruments of cartography,
ocean travel, miniaturization)



Also, playing as ever against this notion of the primitive, irrational
unknown. But positioning the “other” or uncivilized part of the world
as a kind of photonegative, anti-matter. Of course, the stratification
of the known and civilized and rational(ized beyond the influence of
spirit-powers) world follows these lines of verticality, segmented by
latitudes—the equator being one of these



“planted as upon another World by the sepia-shadow’d Herren XVII back
in Holland (and rul’d by the Eighteenth Lord, whose existence must
never be acknowledg’d in any way)”



More ineffability, especially the ineffability of power, authority



The “planted as upon another World” part—what does the transplantation
of worlds mean in P’s cosmology? I think it’s not merely as simple as
colonialism, cultural asphyxiation, genocidal oppression—you wonder if
these things follow almost inevitably from a kind of world-making that
proceeds in the interest of, what…capital?





p. 59



“As upon a ship at sea, we do things here in our own way,--we, the
officers, and you, the passengers.”



The complicated human arrangements of ocean travel Joseph noted are
seen here—the sea offers an apparent freedom from the power structures
that obtain on shore, but of course are at sea also built on clearly
delineated and apparently strictly enforced hierarchies of power,
social stratification, etc. And more arrangement of humans into a
binary (previously grape v. grain).



Also the notion that the people with more power always suggest the
maintenance of that status quo is necessary for the benefit of
everyone with less power.



“What seems a solid Continent[…]is in fact an Element with as little
mercy as the Sea to our Backs, in which, to be immers’d is just as
surely, and swiftly, to be lost, without hope of Salvation.”



Pynchon is going to great work in this book to defamiliarize our
conception of human spaces away from mere geographies, municipalities,
functions of technology and architecture and culture and politics—we
understand various land masses (in M&D) as elements, as engines—as
functions in a cosmology and consciousness much bigger than the
individual human.



Looking ahead to the definition of mercy to come on pp. 171-2 (“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[…]”)… Mercy seems to be used in a different sense here on p.
59—or, at least, mercy means something slightly different in the
actions of an individual than it does in the treatment of the
individual by the continental.



“[…]this isn’t a pretext? To ‘observe’ anything more Worldly,--Our
Fortifications, Our Slaves,--nothing like that, eh?”



Paranoia on the part of the Dutch here—though of course Mason and
Dixon, in the end, for the readers, ARE there to observe those
fortifications and slaves. The resistance of the oppressors (the
Dutch) to being witnessed. Are they suspecting M&D are working on
behalf of…the British East India Company? The British crown?



“’Surely, at the end of the day, we serve no master but Him that
regulates the movements of the Heav’ns, which taken together form a
cryptick Message[…]we are intended one day to solve, and read,’ Mason
smoaking belatedly that he may be taking his Trope too far[…]

“’Ja, Ja, precisely the sort of English Whiggery, acceptable among
yourselves, that here is much better left unexpress’d.’”



Socioeconomic implications here are complicated. Stargazing,
contemplating the mysteries—these are obviously counter to the
interests of capital (at least insofar as they are pursued for their
own ends, until they are coopted by power and capital) and so counter
to the obsession of the Dutch we see in this novel.



And yet, it’s criticized as being bourgeois and effete. This is where
we see how omnivorous and superhuman some of the anti-spiritual forces
at work in the world are.



“He must therefore be enter’d in the Records as a Person of Interest,
thereby taking up residence, in a pen-and-paper way, in the Castle of
the Compagnie.”



The inevitability in combination with the subjectless passive
voice—very sinister.



Also, this is where I really start seeing Kafka everywhere, in the
astronomers’ (K in THE CASTLE was a surveyor) relationship to the
panoptickal Castle, their inability to really penetrate it or escape
it.



“pending the Day when one may have to be set against the other.”



Insofar as M&D are not merely human characters but stand-ins for
apparently different and antagonistic currents in the human-American
populace, here we see P doing some mythmaking, providing some
structure for understanding the quarrels of the populace as ultimately
benefitting some unseen operator



“Under the Table-cloth, in a separate spatial domain such as Elves are
said to inhabit”



Continuing the theme of spatial domains (are they eternally separate,
or is their separation magnified in the age of Reason and Enclosure?,
where spirits are banished from some spaces where they were once
ubiquitous), different spaces comprising phenomenologically different
realms, striated by lines of latitude. You might say the
stratification of actual space, so magnified in the Age of Reason,
finds its origins in Plato and Aristotle—or AO Lovejoy might say that—
but maybe it ends in Gravity’s Rainbow: “Will we have to stop watching
the sky?”



“Vroom is a bottomless archive of epic adventures”



Kind of a dark-matter Cherrycoke



“the Clock having misinform’d him of the Hour”



The treachery of mechanickal time



(cont’d p. 61)

“Mason only just avoids a collision with Johanna Vroom, that would
have scrambl’d her apron-load of fresh-gather’d eggs”



One way of summarizing M’s dealings with the three-to-seven blond
nubile Daughters Vroom





p. 61



“How can this be?”



Mason’s melancholy and, we see here, self-loathing



“Coefficient of Mercy,--term it μ,--none, among those into which he
has ever gaz’d[…]”



This is an important and loaded line, I think. Partly, it complicates
our notion of what mercy is in the cosmos of the novel—mercy belongs
to the world of forms (perhaps is a glimpse of the eternal world of
ideas into the world of forms), and this moment emphasizes the merely
imagistic nature of even the world to which mercy applies.



Also this greek character that represents the (rationalization of)
Mercy, also written mu, is of course the answer to the LED’s koan.



“over whose Horizon he can sometimes not observe his Penis.”



Every time I read this it makes me laugh. The timing is perfect, a
whole paragraph’s worth of abstruse body metaphors using the language
of astronomy, to end so perfectly blunt.



“the women of the Colony unanimously avoid [Dixon…]the Dutch have
sifted Dixon as unreliable in any white affairs here. They have noted
his unconceal’d attraction to the Malays and the black slaves,--their
Food, their Appearance, their Music, and so, it must be obvious, their
desires to be deliver’d out of oppression.”



Discrimination in matters of mate choice is one of the most powerful
ways social codes and status quos get reinforced—and here of course
the normally-successful-enough-with-women Dixon is exiled because he
is…insufficiently racist? Also because he doesn’t smell good, or at
least like more expensive food…



Also, the slaves desire DELIVERANCE. They are far from the only people
to desire something that might be called deliverance in this book.



p. 62



“None of this has appear’d to him in any mirror he’s consulted.”



M’s inability to see anything desirable inside himself, really
developed strongly in this chapter.



“Many nights in that Season proving to be stormy or clouded over,
there will be plenty of time for Mischief to shake her Curls, pinch
some color into her Cheeks, and, assuming ev’ryone ‘round here is not
yet dead, feel free to make a few Suggestions.”



In the cosmology of this novel, Mischief is a god/dess, just like the
Fates. (The absence of an ambivalent trickster deity is, to my mind,
one of the starkest features of most Christian traditions.) Mischief
as a spirit/force that a) thrives in idleness and b) is anti-death. So
of course she doesn’t gain much healthy traction—only occasional
eruptions that only perpetuate human suffering, like the miniature
Black Hole of Calcutta—in this part of the world.



“his Belief that the Spices encourage Adolescents into ‘Sin’”



Add spices to the list of sin-inducing circumstances, maybe just after idleness



ALSO—this kind of asceticism, self-abnegation, and probably
thinly-veiled racial superiority continue to obtain in some parts of
the west, cf. the French arguments that the excessive spices of foods
from the Muslim world are threatening the lineage of the French
palate. Anti-spicism also has connotations of classism to me—spices
were bourgeois luxuries in the west for a while, obviously, but also
most spicy cuisines emerge alongside conditions of relative poverty



p. 63



“the Great Struggle at the End of the World”



Every repetition of this designation—which sounds temporal but is
ultimately (apparently) geographic) confuses time and space, to my
reading brain. (And each one reminds me of the Douglas Adams novel,
The Restaurant at the End of the Universe)



“the hour when nothing is lawfully a-stir but the Rattle-Watch and the wind”



The day, as obedient to clock-time, as obedient to the law (we have
already seen the limits and fallibilities of clock-time by this point)



“no Release from the coming Armageddon of the races”



This kind of apocalyptic racial thinking seems to be primarily
propagated in the era of rampant colonialism by white people who are
themselves the beneficiaries of this system of racial stratification
and oppression—an unholy insanity. ALSO—this kind of thinking gained a
huge amount of traction in the slavery politics of colonial America.
White farmers essentially arguing that the system of slavery had to be
maintained as a means of preventing free blacks from overthrowing
white civilization.



Also, can’t read this without thinking of old Charlie Manson, obviously.



“his anxious meditations[…]this European settlement so precarious,
facing an unknown Interior with the sea at their backs, forced, step
after step, by the steadfast Gravity of all Africa, down into it at
last”



The notion that the Europeans are somehow compelled to continue
colonizing Africa is kind of historically rich, and would make sense
only in the most zoomed-out cosmology



p. 64



“Els continues meanwhile to reposition her nether Orbs”



Further use of astronomickal metaphor for the human body, linking the
scales of human events and bodies to cosmologickal ones—also
developing psychic specificity of our astronomers.



“’in here it begins to smell like the Slaves’ Chambers.’”



I’m appreciating how potent scent is as a rhetorical weapon for
asserting hierarchal superiority.



“The three maidens immediately snap to Attention, lining up in order of Height.”



This happens after the mention of the Slaves’ Chambers’ smell—here we
are seeing how (effectively) hierarchies work to uphold themselves,
the compared-to-slaves daughters immediately falling into line, lining
up according to height (more vertical organization) without needing to
be told to do so, hyperefficient.



“He feels a sudden rush of Exemption. It does not matter what he says.”



Exemption—here deliverance from the pressure to make an ego-level
decision, taking refuge within because of the obviousness of the lack
of stakes in the external world (reminded of the Epictetus quote about
the internal vs external worlds that Joseph sent around a few days
ago)



p. 65



“’All that the Mistress prizes of you is your Whiteness,
understand?[…]The baby, being fairer than its mother, will fetch more
upon the Market.’”



The novel continues illustrating the ways that the system of racial
classification and taxonomy rigidified to market law by the Dutch,
here, ultimately reduces the humanity of everyone involved, oppressors
included



Also the notion that extra whiteness increases (and doesn’t inhibit)
marketability/profitability tells us something of P’s notion of the
actual roots of what eventually gets codified as a system of beliefs
in racial superiority



“’Oh, hark yourself,--how is English Marriage any different from the
Service I’m already in?’”



More subversion of the notion of English liberty, as consequent to
English Enlightenment values





“’the Mother will set her three Cubs upon ye without Mercy, and make
her own assaults as well, all of it intended to keep this rigid with
your Desire’[…]



Your Desire is not even your own—the idea that forces larger than you
can enter your own thoughts and use them to incentivize you toward
their preferred ends. (This fact alone should give us some sense of
the limits, in this novel in particular, of the validity of one’s ego
and will as the definitive expression and understanding of their
being.)



More (continuing on p. 66): “Only slowly does it dawn on [Mason] that
[he is…]here for a while and then gone, just enough time for ev’ryone,
barring some unnanounc’d bolt of Passion finding a Target, to make use
of him[…]”



USE(/utility/efficiency/purpose) as being increasingly endemic to
human relations in a capitalistic context



“So Mason prays for clear nights and perfect seeing,--nonetheless, his
throat closes and dries, his heart’s rhythm picks up whenever the
Clouds cover the Sunset, and the Fog rolls swiftly all the way up to
the Observatory[…]”



Fog here being conflated with desire, manipulation—which can enter us
from outside, can confuse us just like fog—all threats to clarity of
Obs, earthly and heavenly



“the field having shifted from Motives of Pleasure to Motives of
Reproduction and Commerce. Its being for them a given that nothing of
a Romantick nature will occur,--nothing does.”



The rub.



“Mason is usually left with an inflexible Object, which[…]is more or
less visible to the Publick”



Well at least his dick is visible again? Even if not to himself still…



p. 67



“’They are not as happy, nor as childlike, as they seem,’ he tells
Mason. ‘It may content us, as unhappy grown Englishmen, to think that
somewhere in the World, Innocence may yet abide,--yet ‘tis not among
these people. All is struggle,--and all but occasionally in vain.’”



Cf. p. 37: “One reason Humans remain young so long, compar’d to other
Creatures, is that the young are useful in many ways, among them in
providing daily, by way of the evil Creatures and Slaughter they love,
a Denial of Mortality clamorous enough to allow their Elders release,
if only for moments at a time, from Its Claims upon the Attention.”



Innocence (which is associated with youth) is deliverance from…the
knowledge of mortality. For Dixon, here on p. 67, it is an antidote to
age and unhappiness—and to struggle?



“Mason cocks his head, trying to suppress a certain Quiver that also
gives him away when at Cards,--a bodily Desire to risk all upon a
single Trick.”



Obvious melancholick-emergent thanatos for Mason, here. A more overt
conflation of the death impulse with the (theme of the) desire for
Deliverance that runs through the book.



Also, again, the notion of gambling being a fundamental component of
the mystery and human phenomenon of being—or at least as the mystery
gets construed through human systems of meaning in this Age (cf. p.
40: “the Invisible Gamesters who wager daily upon the doings of
Commerce and Government”)







p. 68




"As the Company seeks to confine all the Dutch of the Cape Colony
behind a Boundary it has drawn, and to rule them radially from a
single Point, the least immoderate of Feelings, in such a clos'd
Volume, may prove lethal."



Essentially describing the Panopticon. Also, add immoderation to
idleness and spices as excesses (or deficiencies, or deviations) that
prove untenable to the central authority. Cf. p. 64: “’As a man of
Science, you understand the role of Humors in adolescent behavior, and
will not respond, I hope, too passionately. Is that the word,
“Passionately”?’” Passions—like humors (are we still talking about
these, isn’t it the Age of Reason?)—are now confined to an incomplete
stage of development, something to be eliminated in the fully formed
human.



“Though he usually departs with an Erection, it is possible that he is
feeling the pain of an ineptly shot Beast. But his Expression doesn’t
change. He sucks upon his Pipe, removes it from his mouth to cough,
and, continuing to cough, ambles away.”



Funny Freudian declension from a relatively surprising blunt awareness
(Erection) to metaphorical identification (ineptly shot Beast) to
repressive assimilation (Expression doesn’t change) to canonical
parapraxis (sucks upon his Pipe)



“’tis the Slavery, not any form of Desire, that is of the essence.
Dixon, out of these particular meshes, can see it,--Mason cannot.”



Again negating our conception of individual desire. Also this line
suggests that proximity (to power and injustice) inhibits
awareness—forest v. trees. And begins the motif of a mesh
(alternatively a web) as a system of power that is apparently
hierarchal in its division of status, power, and spiritual capital,
but is actually architecturally rhizomatic, upheld by all, the
spiderweb whose ensnared flies are weight-bearing flies.



“Indifferent to Visibility, wrapt in the melancholy Winds that choir
all night long, persists an Obsession or Siege by something much older
than anyone here, an injustice that will not cancel out.”



A kind of untraceable original sin. Also the conflation of obsession
and siege is interesting—the notion that force is somehow a
translation of awareness (are ley lines coincidences of force and
circumstance, or can they be understood as vectors of will, a
planetary consciousness?).



p. 68/69



“Men of Reason will define a Ghost as nothing more otherworldly than a
wrong unrighted, which like an uneasy spirit cannot move on,— needing
help we cannot usually give,— nor always find the people it needs to
see,— or who need to see it. But here is a Collective Ghost of more
than household Scale,— the Wrongs committed Daily against the Slaves,
petty and grave ones alike, going unrecorded, charm'd invisible to
history, invisible yet possessing Mass, and Velocity, able not only to
rattle Chains but to break them as well. The precariousness to Life
here, the need to keep the Ghost propitiated, Day to Day, via the
Company's merciless Priesthoods and many-Volum'd Codes, brings all but
the hardiest souls sooner or later to consider the Primary Questions
more or less undiluted. Slaves here commit suicide at a frightening
Rate,— but so do the Whites, for no reason, or for a Reason ubiquitous
and unaddress'd, which may bear Acquaintance but a Moment at a Time.
Mason, as he comes to recognize the sorrowful Nakedness of the
Arrangements here, grows morose, whilst Dixon makes a point of
treating Slaves with the Courtesy he is never quite able to summon for
their Masters.”



Pynchon always walks a tight line between apparently earnest (within
the worldview of the novel, I should qualify) endorsement of certain
spiritual conceptions (the soul, the spirit, ghosts, original sin, to
name some nodded at here) versus the acknowledgment that, to the
extent these things are real, they are the product and feature of
human consciousness. Perhaps it’s a distinction without a difference,
ultimately. Many have commented on the collective, eons-long project
of constructing some of these ideas (love, the spirit, God, salvation,
the soul, redemption; cf. Nietzsche’s GoM and BGaE) but what feels
novel to me here is the acknowledgement of that notion alongside the
idea that we also, perhaps in some earlier or simultaneous moment of
our collective subconscious, create these things as a means of
addressing the reservoir of original sin and unacknowledged suffering
we are all recording



p. 69



“’Astronomy in a Realm where Slavery prevails…!’[…]One might lie,
supine, Zenith-Star position, all Night,…being fann’d, fed,
amus’d,--ev’ryone else oblig’d to remain upon their Feet[…]

“’Mason, why thah’ is dis-gusting…?”



A really complicated moment. Simultaneously a certain kind of death
wish from Mason, combined with an at least hypothetical indulgence in
the fruits of slavery. We get to see some early character differences
in the two—Dixon’s earnestness, his inability to politely abide real
injustice…In retrospect, considering this moment in light of Dixon’s
apotheotic moment with the riding crop toward novel’s end, I see this
moment as a crucial early collision between our two astronomers, one
where we might what wonder how they’ll influence each other going
forward.



We should pay attention to the moment where one of our heroes
entertains complicity with slavery, even hypothetically, even kind of
in jest. It feels to me like, in this one moment (and with Pynchon I
think we’re always trying to sniff out, among other things, original
sin), we see the master-oppressor impulse being born out of the death
wish—to be served, perhaps as if we might be served by a mother, by
the amniotic environment, but also so as to be static, to be dead,
spared the pain of breaking connection with the heavens



“’the Dutch Company which is ev’rywhere, and Ev’rything.

“’Somewhat like the Deists’ God, do tha mean?’”



The simultaneity of the birth of capitalism (at least as a formalized
system) and the prominence of Deism (and the birth of the US, whose
founders) is brought into attention here…



My understanding of deism was always that it seemed to be a kind of
compromise between the mysteries and power of monotheism on the one
hand and the age of reason—and ultimately a kind of faith in reason—on
the other. I suppose we might be understanding this compromise as
being related to—if not exactly cause or consequence of—the
translation of international hegemonic power from the church to the
synergetic workings of vast corporate agents and capitalist
nation-states. But is the move from a more active monotheistic God to
the less interventionist God-force of Deism a step-down that coincides
with some general disenchantment of the world—which creates a
God-vacuum that is then filled by these new global corporate powers?



“Mason, of Mathematickal Necessity there do remain, beyond the Reach
of the V.O.C., routes of Escape, pockets of Safety,--Markets that
never answer to the Company, gatherings that remain forever unknown,
even down in Butter-Bag Castle. I’d be much oblig’d if we might roam
‘round together[…]yet do I make an effort to keep the Margins close as
I may.”



Dixon is drawn to boundary spaces, edges, spaces of overlap—and to
flights from the reach of The Company (even given their interactions
with it thus far they sense it is a thing to be escaped from; thus the
way with any apparently panoptickal and omnipotent authority?)



More emphasis on flight and passage with connotations of sanctuary



Also: The Castle is everywhere, but can maybe be hid from everywhere?



p. 70



“’And I’m making no Effort, is that it, you’re accusing me of
Servility? Sloth?’”



Interesting succession of guesses here. As if servility and sloth were
related. At first glance, they would seem to be almost the opposite of
one another. Except, in the puritanickal-capitalistick context,
servility and sloth are both at an opposite extreme from
producktivity-usefulness



“Mason[…]losing consciousness face-first into a Variety of food and
Drink, including more than one of the most exquisite karis this side
of Sumatra,--that is, proving a difficult carousing partner, block’d
from simple enjoyment in too many directions for Dixon to be at all
anger’d,--rather marveling at him, as a Fair-goer might at some
Curiosity of Nature.”



First, re: kari: I think food is so important in Pynchon because, for
all of his travellers who go forward carrying old ideas and ways in
their heads, food is one of the things you must absorb from our
environment—unless you’ve brought provisions for all your travels, or
unless you find a place that makes the same food you ate where you
came from (unlikely, out in these parts), it’s an inevitable
introduction of the new world around you to your system. And of course
some foods, like the (spices in the) karis, likely lead to all kinds
of hedonism and licentiousness.



Also wrapped up in this passage: Mason’s melancholick anhedonia, the
unnaturalness of such a pan=directional inability to experience
pleasure or excitement or fun



“a Malay tribe call’d the Senoi. It is their belief that the world
they inhabit in their Dreams is as real as their waking one.”



Definitely not the first moment in Pynchon where we see a reappraisal
of the apparent distinction in validity and value of the
normal/earthly (and timebound) material world and the world of dreams,
or visions, or alternate timelines.



p. 71



“the Astronomers agree to share the Data of their Dreams whenever possible.”



Mild quantifying-brain conditioning to filter the dream world through
the language of scientifick data—but still an important escalation in
intimacy between the Astronomers—each participating in a shared world
among each other that no other (living person) has access to.





“’Heaven help me,’ Mason muttering sourly, ‘my Dreams reveal this Town
to be one of the colonies of Hell, with the Dutch Company acting as
but a sort of Caretaker for another…Embodying of Power’”



But what is that other Embodying of Power? Who does the company serve?
Is this the ultimate question whose answer may or not be revealed
after some of the un/tangling of the book?



Also, another suggestion—this will get repeated and developed over
time with the novel—that the actual agents and power structures of the
material world are essentially formal representations of something
even more actual, but less apparent



“’Why[…]my own dreams are very like, tho’ without the Dutch Company,
more like a Gala that never stops….’”



We all get (visions of) the hell we deserve. And for pleasure-seeking
Dixon, here, we see how hell is directly related to our earthly
pleasures, in one possible manifestation, anyway.



“’Keep your Face down,’ Mason tells the Adversary. ‘I do not wish to
see your Face’”



Will Mason be able to resist seeing the terrible Face forever? What
does it mean to see the Face? Can the Face be seen—and come back from?



“certain Gloucestershire shin-kicking Arts”



Very funny. Also, almost without fail, whenever the M&D narrator
introduces something by calling it “a certain” it ends up being
something relatively low/base rhetorically elevated in this way. E.g.
getting fatter gets called elsewhere “a certain corporate surplus.”



71/72



“When he wakes, there it is, the Point lying nearly within the Portal
of one Nostril,--a wrong turn in his Sleep might have been the End”



More inexplicable flights, exits, departures, this time Mason PLUS
knife from nightmare—like Mason’s flight from the garden outside where
he saw Jenkin’s Ear (where a Nose also gets mentioned as here)



Also the notion that the kind of mortality or danger you encounter in
Sleep is transmittable to the actual world.



“’tis not a Virgin Blade,--tiny Scratches, uncleansable Stains,
overlie one the other in a Palimpsest running deep into the Dimensions
of Time”



The vision of our present material world as a kind of palimpsest—whose
depth we can only glimpse—runs throughout the book, gets explicitly
articulated in a few moments, e.g.: “Over Wearside, here at Nightfall,
exactly upon this Edge between sunlight too bright to see much by and
moonlight providing another reading in coal-blue or luminous bone,—
when spirits also are said in these parts to come out,— so beneath
them now do the Dark-Age Maps, the long, dogged Roman Palimpsest, the
earlier contours of Brigantum itself, emerge at a certain combination
of low Sun-angle and Scholarly Altitude above the Fell”



The eleven days are themselves a kind of spatial and constant palimpsest



“’Aahhrr! The most intimate of acts, the trustful sharing of a Dream,
taken and us’d against the Master, by his own sly ‘Prentice!’”



Mason’s language’s overtones of slavery



“’we shall certainly miss the culmination f Shaula, that Sting e’er
pois’d above the Pates of this unhappy People, to strike which, and
which not, who can say…?”



More about the unknowability of cosmic fortune, here getting a more
classic cosmological/mythological costume



“’Whom better to bore with the unabridg’d tale of your woeful
treatment by the World you so desperately wish to be lov’d by, aye,
unto Ravishment, than this unreflective Geordie here?’”



Mason seems only able to offer true intimacy, now, through cruelty (he
is, as we have seen, somewhat infected with the perversity of human
dynamics that is slavery). But still, this is a rather naked offering
of some actual inner feelings, unhappinesses, hopes, fears. The “unto
Ravishment” bit is an interesting spin on Mason’s death wish which
seemed, elsewhere, purely to come out of grief and melancholy.



“all the weight of Leadership, which crusheth a man even as it
bloateth his Pride….”



More reminding that imbalanced, oppressive, hierarchal human relations
don’t only diminish the people who seem to be at the bottom of those
hierarchies.



“the Relief indescribable of shedding that Load, dumping months, even
years, of accumulated Resentment in one great[…]’Tis but our
uninhibited Earthinesss, we of lower degree, we’re forever speaking of
shit, you see”



Death wish as filtered through anality, purging.



Also, this is the second mention of resentment on this page—in
combination with the omnipresence of slavery it makes me think of
Nietzsche (whose own breakdown may be resonating in Dixon’s eventual
outburst toward novel’s end)





p. 73



“’I am not a fucking Jesuit, Mason. If Jesuits are manipulating me,
then are we two Punches in a Droll-booth, Friend,--for as certainly
would it be the East India Company who keep thee ever in Motion.”



Here we understand our two Astronomers as being to some extent
instruments of and stand-ins for two enormous competing (right?)
forces for international hegemonic power—that is, the Church and the
nationalistic-corporate—which has been alluded to elsewhere in this
chapter



“Or are we being us’d, by Forces invisible even to thy Invisible College?”



Ever the depressive’s and the paranoiac’s fear—the sense that one can
only be chosen/elect (allowed to climb the great chain of being?) if
the purposes are sinister



“without influence, nothing may come of a Life”



Mason’s ambitions, his inability not to read the world through the
lens of power, conflation of power and
meaning/consequence/beneficence/chosenness



p. 74



“’What am I to make of this? We scarcely know Maskelyne. Who is Robert
Waddington, anyway?’”



The prominent players in our astronomers’ network of favors that have
secured their positions are also the primary persons of interest in
the conspiracy we’re not yet close to understanding the true size and
nature of



p. 75



“’Yes, yes, upon the face of it, quite straightforward, isn’t
it?...And yet, d’ye not feel sometimes that ev’rything since the Fight
at sea has been,00not a Dream, yet…’

“’Aye. As if we’re Lodgers inside someone else’s Fate, whilst
belonging quite someplace else…?’

“’Nothing’s as immediate as it was….We might have died then, after
all, and gone on as Ghosts.’”



We will get many occasions not only of people escaping their apparent
worlds, but also of accidentally crossing over into times, realms,
worlds, and fates that weren’t intended for them. Alternate paths,
alternate future histories.



“the Despair at the Core of History,--and the Hope. As Savages
commemorate their great Hunts with Dancing, so History is the Dance of
our Hunt for Christ, and how we have far’d.”



Very Nietzschean.



75/76



“If it is undeniably so that he rose from the Dead, then the Event is
taken into History, and History is redeem’d from the service of
Darkness,--with all the secular Consequences, flowing from that one
Event, design’d and will’d to occur.”



Further trafficking in Nietzschean ideas about resentment and
Christ—though with a much more optimistic spin. Kind of bizarrely and
almost perversely optimistic—do we really want to believe the last two
millennia of history have been on purpose and in service of The Good?
Is it not possible that, as suggested before, even the potentially
benevolent consequnces in the secular realm have been distorted by
confusions, tanglings of fate, failures of design (or execution)—has
our new history been corrupted? Is there a second original sin? Were
we never redeemed in the first place?



The final lines of this chapter illustrate the failure of many
Christians to ask difficult questions of their moral and historical
imaginations about the consequences of Christ’s apparent redemption
and what they mean for the world of men and history that remains.

-
Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l