M&D Ch. 8 Notes

[Smoke Teff]

CHAPTER 8



p. 77



“Dixon, assailed without mercy by his Sensorium, almost in a swoon,
finds himself, on Nights of Cloud, less and less able to forgo
emerging at dusk, cloaked against the Etesian wind, and making
directly for the prohibited parts of town.”



More possession by pleasure and desire. If Mercy is a reprieve
from//protest of the forces of death, what does that mean here? I
suppose it’s in line with the idea from CHAPTER 7 that hell—for Dixon
in partick—is an endless gala, and not exactly pleasureless.



Also, checked google’s ngram for Sensorium—because of its specificity
in conceptualizing the individual phenomenon of being—some
contemporary usage, rising until it hits a peak in 1800.



p. 78



“He is acquiring a nasal map of the Town.”



Lots of nose mentions here—also, the idea of olfactory cartography
gets repeated in Bleeding Edge



“In the distance the nightly curfew cannon barks, announcing Dixon’s
transition to the state of Outlaw.”



More Foucaultian kinds of thinking, the formal designation of a
criminal typology, as being systematically bestowed, or triggered by a
particular behavior.



“these Dutch carry on as if Judgment be near as the towering Seas and
nothing matter anymore, especially not good behavior, because there’s
no more time.”



How does this notion of the end of time fit into the book’s cosmology,
its ideas of both the metaphysics of time and the spiritual notion of
collective sin, Judgment, and redemption?



“the bets are in, ev’ry individual Fate decided, all cries taken by
the great Winds, and ‘tis done.”



More sense that Fate is a gambling proposition. Is this a consequence
of a certain more individualistic conception of the universe? As
codified into the ideology of capitalism. Or wagering as a means of
understanding fate is a step toward individual agency, away from the
idea of a God as being omnipotent or interventionist. When is ev’ry
individual Fate not decided, really? Aren’t we all going to die? Or
are we now denying that?



“Vapor of debauchery”



“Yet ‘tis difficult, if not impossible, for these Astronomers to get
down unto a Chat upon the Topick of Desire, given Dixon’s inability to
deny or divert the Gusts that sweep him, and Mason’s frequent failure,
in his Melancholy, even to recognize Desire, let alone to act upon it,
tho’ it run up calling Ahoy Charlie.”



A useful differentiation between the two—and perhaps again we see them
occupying (or being categorized into) two apparently binary ways of
being. Another grape and grain situation. These two relationships to
Desire feel like they fit somewhat with the pilgrim/ranger binary set
up later in the book: “The Pilgrim, however long or crooked his Road,
may keep ever before him the Holy Place he must by his Faith seek, as
the American Ranger, however indeterminate or unposted his Wilderness,
may enjoy, ever at his Back, the Impulse of Duty he must, by his
Honor, attend.”



“’You’ve no concept of Temptation. You came ashore here looking for
occasions to transgress. Some of us have more Backbone, I suppose….’”



This fits Mason perfectly—melancholick, accepting pleasure only after
it has tempted him beyond some threshold of resistance. Very
thanatos—also, he is rather puritanickally carving out a repressive
relationship to pleasure that almost coerces him into enjoying it
while paying the cost of his own salvation.



p. 79



Lots of tangling of different kinds of vapors and tensions on this
page: “smoldering, less predictable than an Italian Volcano[…]clouds
of aromatic pipe-smoke[…](puff)[…]Another volcanickal Emission[…]years
of ovine Flatulence[his blue tobacco Fumulus]”



These above kinds of vapors being apparent waste products or end results





p. 80



“a steady coming and going of black servants meant, as in the Theater
of the Japanese, to be read as invisible”



Repression, silence, ignorance—though works somewhat against the
out-of-time abandon mentioned on p 78



“Some Belles like to ‘boss’ their male Slaves about in front of the young men”



An instance of the abject and the painful being filtered through
performance, pleasure



“Over the Range of their Desires”



AtD resonance, obviously: The Light over the Ranges



“the only reason for anyone to endure church all day Sunday is to be
reminded of the Boundaries there to be o’erstepped”



Fitting in with Mason’s preferred temptation-transgression aesthetic—a
repression-unto-photonegativity of the normal operation of conscience
and its dictates



We see on this page the total aesthetic purity of sin as the way of
living of these Dutch-Africans





p. 81



“Yet no one in love is brave,/And even a Slave may fall…”



The first line here is interesting to me. In what ways might it be
true? Namely, that desire isn’t our own? For surely being in love
induces some to do things that appear brave—or does being in love
actually make you conservative, make you cling to that love like the
womb?



“’tis a Fiji Islander’s Guitar, first introduc’d there two hundred
years ago by Portuguese Jesuits, according to the Malay that sold me
it.”



The Jesuit role in the globalization of music(kal instruments) is
interesting and mysterious to me here—though it makes me look ahead to
Cherrycoke et al’s discussion of the changes in the fashion of music
and their correlation with revolutionary politics in Chapter
26—preceding Dr. Franklin’s Armonica gig in Ch. 27



“Daughters of the Low Country[…]Girls in the Company Brothel at the
Slave Lodge,--two distinct Worlds, the Company maintaining their
separation, setting Prices, seeking as ever total control, over the
sex industry in Cape Town. Yet do there remain a few independents,
brave girls and boys who are young enough to enjoy the danger of going
up against the Compagnie. Sylphs of mixed race, mixed gender, who know
how to vanish into the foothills, and the Droster Net-work, even
finding safety beyond, in the land of the Hottentots.”



Lots here. First—the enforced social fragmentation (as a means of
further/total control) at the hands of the Company—more sense of the
artificiality (and profitability to/interestedness of some exterior
authority) of human stratification.



Second—the notion that sex provides a zone of transgression and even
deliverance from the control of the abiding authority. (Cf. the stuff
in GR about the state’s innate opposition to the willful power
exchanges of BDSM-type sexual practice.) Also one potential
manifestation of the aforementioned “routes of Escape, pockets of
Safety,--Markets that never answer to the Company, gatherings that
remain forever unknown, even down in Butter-Bag Castle.” This escape
happens not only geographically, but also sexually, internal to the
hearts and relations of actual humans.



Also, re: “brave girls and boys”—but of course, as we learned above,
“Yet no one in love is brave.” So one consequence of the social
stratification is the decoupling of sex and love? Or the
unsustainability of their coupling…



“Yet ‘tis difficult to leave the life in town, to give up that sudden
elation, when the ships appear ‘round the Headlands, Spanish Dollars
everywhere in golden Infestation”



Golden Infestation seems one way of poeticizing the
poison-in-the-brain that are the forces of capitalistic profit
motives, dominion, enforced individualism, etc…



p. 82



“all the Spices armies us’d to kill for”



Cf. p. 62 “his Belief that the Spices encourage Adolescents into ‘Sin’”



“the Malay quarter, a protruded tongue of little streets askew to the
Dutch grid”



Seems to fit into the apparent differences in rationality—though in
P’s cosmos, the Dutch seem to take their topographically precise
rationalism to insane lengths



“Windows and doorways open to Lives finite but overwhelming”



Cf. p. 72: “the Relief indescribable of shedding that Load, dumping
months, even years, of accumulated Resentment in one great” and p. 78
“the bets are in, ev’ry individual Fate decided”



“Curried wild Peacock and Springbok Ragout,/Bilimbi Pickles, and Tamarinds, too”



More culinary tourism—a theme throughout the book (and throughout
Pynchon, really). In addition to the need to eat enforcing some amount
of internal/individual assimilation (of and into culture), food is of
course a continuing enforced connection to things that live and
grow—which also makes food a potentially dangerous gateway and an
avenue for stratification and hierarchy and repression (cf. Cornelius
re: Ketjap on p. 81: “Girls, don’t even want you looking at it. Filthy
Asian stuff.”





p. 83



(cont’d from 82) “The pipe smoke, the Sheep-fat, the strange
Dinner-ware, everything, dishes, spoons, Yes even twinkling thorugh
the mutton broth at the bottom of one’s spoon, are these,--well,
stories,--Battles, religious Events, Personages with rapt Phizzes
standing about in Rays from above, pointing aloft at who knows what,
violent scenes of martyrdom from the religious wars of the previous
century, obscure moral instructions written in all-but-unreadable
lettering[, etc…]”



Here we get a fuller explanation, perhaps, of P’s emphasis on food.
Food as living palimpsest, as living history. Food is of course
culture, and culture is collective sublimation of repressed desires.
Food as a kind of material, living, organic continuity to parallel
other kinds of material, historical, cultural, spiritual continuities…



“’I believe in Vibrations,’ declares Mason, ‘—I believe, that
Vibrations from that horrid family get into their food”



Laying the foundation for us to see the workings of energies,
emotions, vibrations, both human and not, on scales we may not be
familiar seeing them—pre-figuring later stuff about ley lines, etc.



“’And?’

“’I’d rather be out here.’”



Dixon, via his sensuality, has acted as a kind of coyote, or guide,
helping to lead Mason away from the controlled worlds of Dutch Africa
and the Compagnie



“the night Fog creeping like quicksilver, all but surrounded by a
Waste where the Seas might grow higher than either Astronomer can
imagine without Fear, set up and waiting for a Southern Star, Lumina
of a shapely Constellation unnam’d, forever below any British Horizon,
to culminate.”



Conflation of underbelly and sanctuary—departure, flight from the
known world, necessary ingredients to salvation.



“They have come upon a Queue forming up a dark street, and decide to join it.”



They wait for something without knowing what it is, are swept along by
the desire (and the collective organization) of others.



“A man in a Sarong cooks as though possessed[…]”



Cooking as flow state as shamanic



p. 84



“the Krees, which they have seen fly, heard sing, and, in the presence
of a pure well, felt a-tremble, there being an odd number of waves to
its Blade, signifying Alliance with the orrect Forces[…]

“’In my country, near my Home, since the Mills came, our pure Wells
have been well hidden’”



Seems like a negative development that predates the rush to
enclosure—perhaps moving the line of original sin’s scrimmage back
to…mechanized agriculture?



“Yet out of something like Duty ow’d his Senses, he finds himself
shambling down to the Market, yawning in the sun, there to behold
Mountains of the Fruit apparently all come to Ripeness at the same
Moment”



We’ve seen so many moments already of individuals yearning for
salvation and deliverance—just as so many monotheists continue to do
collectively. Though this kind of collective deliverance is
experienced by the mangoes.



Also: “Duty ow’d his Senses[…]” Is this an acceptable, inevitable,
possibly even redeeming manifestation of duty and obedience? Or is it
a perversion of how we ought relate to our body?”



“’One feels as Adam felt,--even better, as Eve.”



Interesting to read as we’ve both explored the notion of original sin
and as we’ve seen the historical case of women presented as perhaps
the most counterargument to notions of English/western/enlightened
notions of liberty.



“The Aroma captures Mason’s Attention. ‘Aye, tha’d better eat thah’
one now thy Nose has been all over it.”



Noses again—also, are we witnessing the beginnings of a kind of
sensual therapy for Mason? Re-learning to access his body and its
ability to experience pleasure?



p. 85



“They are soon retir’d to a nearby Stoep, where they sit eating
Mangoes. Neighboring Stoeps are similarly occupied.”



The importance of the stoep in Dutch Africa has popped up in the novel
by now. This has some anachronistic ringing of New York life, to me
(who does not know much of the social importance of the stoop to the
Dutch—especially Dutch Africans—but who also acknowledges the cultural
and architectural legacy the Dutch of this era leave in NYC)—though
what I think is really important is the idea that the harvest has
enforced a kind of human synchrony.



“East of the Cape, Captain Grant was pleas’d to iform me, men of
Christ are not desir’d”



I associate (an apparent embrace of) Christianity with colonialism and
imperialism but here we see the limits to that relationship.



“’Tha could pretend to be an Astronomer,’ Dixon says, ‘—all tha need
to know, I can teach thee in five minutes.’

“’Surveying won’t even take that long,’ snaps Mason.”



More binaries between the two men: astronomy and surveying, stargazing
versus terrestriality. (In AO Lovejoy’s book about the Great Chain of
Being, he traces that hierarchal worldview to Plato’s differentiation
between this-worldliness and otherworldliness)



p. 86



“the very nasal Patina that met me here, upon entering my first Dutch
house, of Mutton-fat vaporiz’d and recondens’d”



More continuity: material, culinary, olfactory, vaporous. Here, as a
kind of hell (cf. Dixon’s vision of hell as a “Gala that never
stops”). Christianity apparently promises eternity—but perhaps what it
really promises is death?



“Then eating Malay food seems a cheap enough Deliverance”



More food as deliverance, tying a tidy bow on it in this chapter



“bearing in mind that the cuisine of a people whose recreations
include running Amok is necessarily magickal in purpose and effect,
and no one is altogether exempt.”



Continuity between people and the food they eat, the mutual exchange
of vibes—the vibes of the Vrooms poison their food, the vibes of the
Malay food affects the Malay people.



“what Mr. Mason could not bear, were the very odors of Blood-Sacrifice
and Transsubstantiation, the constant element in all being the Oven,
the Altar wherebefore his Father presided.”



With obvious resonance with the oven in GR. Also—hell as olfactorily
signified, in Mason’s experience (also cf. Nietzsche’s trope of bad or
dirty air).



But what does it mean for an apparent man of Christ and a man in
search of deliverance, like Mason, to have such a sensory aversion to
the technology designed to deliver those things to him? Is he totally
doomed? Or is his nose just acting as a kind of compass here?
-
Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l