M&D10 - Revelation & Visitation, Need & Desire

[Smoke Teff]

CHAPTER 10



P. 94



“’As Planets do the Sun, we orbit ‘round God according to Laws as
elegant as Kepler’s. God is as sensible to us, as a Sun to a Planet.”



Maybe doing some thematick work, correlating our apprehension of God
with the parallax?



“we know where in our Orbits we run[…]when in His light and when in
shadow of our own making”



More correlation of divinity with light, absence thereof with
darkness/shadow (as if we needed more of that in P by now). I find the
idea that the shadow is of our own making—especially in these
environments—most important here.



“Surely if a Planet be a living Creature, then it knows, by something
even more wondrous than Human Sight, where its Sun shines, however far
it lie.”



This vaguely paganistic, Gaian notion of the Planet as being alive,
mysteriously so, with its own (kind of) will, will continue being
developed through the book.



Also, if the planet knows, then why do we need the great compiler of
information mentioned on the previous page, who will understand the
Parallax? Does the earth understand itself through us?



“’Show us upon the Orrery’”



An abrupt mechanickal departure from the type of apprehension
advocated in the excerpt from Cherrycoke’s Unpublished Sermons



“Briefly he beholds the gray edge of a cloud of despair”



Cf. the excerpt from Cherrycoke just above: “shadow of our own
making.” Salvation and hell are both to be found internally—even in
(or through?) our emotions?



p. 95



“taut within their spidery Linkages back to the Crank-Shaft and the Crank”



Very parallactic, but with reference to a spiderweb—webs and nets will
continue to function as important symbolic images and rhetorical
devices throughout the book (perhaps trafficking pretty explicitly in
the rhetoric of the internet)



“Mappemondes of some intricacy, as if there were being reveal’d to
him, one Orrery at a time, a World with a History even longer than our
own a recognizable Creator, Oceans that had to be cross’d, lands that
had to be fought over, other Species to be conquer’d.”



A rich moment. On the one hand links the flow state with creativity
and thus revelation and thus divinity. The “World with a History even
longer than our own” is in accord with Pynchon’s trope of creating
spaces with apparently more internal space than their external volume
suggests is possible—consistent, I think, with the idea that salvation
(and hell) both are internal to the human. Also, the rhetoric of that
history: “Oceans that HAD to be cross’d[other Species TO BE conquer’d”
seems to imply by analogy a kind of fatalistic ambivalence to some of
the greatest accomplishments and catastrophes (“shadow[s] of our own
making”)—including those to come. Perhaps also links human-on-human
oppression to human-on-nonhuman oppression, which P is known to do
occasionally.



“The children have since pass’d many an hour, Lenses in hand, gazing
upon this new World, and becoming easy with it. They have imagin’s and
partly compos’d a Book, History of the New Planet, the Twins providing
the Wars[…]”



To what extent is our history already decided or guided by the forces
(innate capacities and learned models) of our own storytelling? Is
this the realest time travel of the novel?



“’as if the Telescope, in mysterious Wise, were transporting us safely
thro’ all the dangers of the awesome Gulf of Sky, out to the Object we
wish to examine.’

“’A Vector of Desire.’”



Desire as something that decouples from/leaves the body. This reminds
me of the psychoanalytic idea of the cathexis, which P would know all
about. A focus of libidinal energy toward something outside the self.
But also fits in with some of the previous attempts to decouple desire
from the self—if our desire can be detached from our self, so can our
self be attached from our desire. Or, put differently, the desire
inside us might not be us/our own.



“He has shown an early aptitude with Figures. God be merciful to him,
silently requests the Revd.”



Cf. again the definition of mercy 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[…]”



In other words, let God deliver him from acting on behalf of Death,
let him be an agent of mercy. More sense that quantifying, economic
brain is somehow unmerciful, prone to affiliation with/possession by
the forces & interests of Death.



A Vector of Desire also sounds like it could be used in this novel to
describe an erect or ejaculating cock (or maybe just the actual
projectile course of the cum through space).



“O Hesperus[…]you bring the Child back to her mother.”



More psychoanalytic imagery, the idea of Venus (maybe more generally a
regard for the cosmos) somehow satisfying thanatos, man’s desire to
return (be delivered) to the completion, connectedness, and bliss of
the womb.



p. 97



“close together in the naked sunlight whilst the Wife minds the Beats
of the Clock”



Again we see the notion that women—or perhaps wives in
partickular—often bear the brunt of the day’s burdens upon the body
and the spirit.



“Observers lie, they sit, they kneel,--and witness something in the Sky.”



Together with the psychoanalytic work being done on the previous page,
this reminds us of P’s general notion that regard for the cosmos—the
distant but approaching—is one of the most important ways of
apprehending God. (Cf. again GR, where the horror of the Infectious
Death Cult that is the war can be summed up: “Will we have to stop
watching the sky?”)



“the moment of first contact produces a collective brain-pang, as if
for something lost and already unclaimable,— after the Years of
preparation, the long and at best queasy voyaging, the Station arriv'd
at, the Latitude and Longitude well secur'd,— the Week of the
Transit,— the Day,— the Hour,— the Minute,— and at last 'tis, ‘Eh?
where am I?’”



God is something apprehended as being distant/detached but
approaching, ever on the other side of the mountains/horizon—but when
we glimpse God, when we get the occasional contackt, it results in a
loss of awareness proceeding inward from the environment all the way
to the self.



Also, note that the notion of spatial dislocation as being connected
to thanatos and an apprehension of the divine exists in some tension
with the notion of parallax—attempts to fix location and distance.



“And then eight more years till the next, and for this Generation
last, Opportunity,--as if the Creation’s Dark Engineer had purposedly
arrang’d the Intervals thus, to provoke a certain Instruction, upon
the limits to human grandeur impos’d by Mortality.”



THIS phrase, Dark Engineer, gets repeated later in an initial
elaboration of the Sino-Jesuit conspiracy in the new world. Cf. Doctor
Franklin on p. 288: “’If we could but capture one Machine intact, we
might take it apart to see how it works— Yet, what use? They'll only
invent another twice as fiendish,— for here are conjoin'd the two most
powerful sources of Brain-Power on Earth, the one as closely harness'd
to its Disciplin'd Rage for Jesus, as the other to that Escape into
the Void, which is the very Asian Mystery. Together, they make up a
small Army of DARK ENGINEERS who could run the World. The Sino-Jesuit
conjunction may prove a greater threat to Christendom than ever the
Mongols or the Moors. Pray that more than the Quarrel over Feng Shui
divides them.’”



I’m not sure what to make of this. Is the idea of a Dark Engineer just
a logickal contemporary manifestation of someone—human or divine—who
moves forces beyond those readily anticipated by the human Sensorium,
who puts the scientifick insights of the Age of Reason to unnatural
effect? Is there some actual connection in the reality of the novel
suggested here by the shared phrasing? Adding a conspiratorial
resonance to the divinity of the Transit (in the way P often links
quasi-spiritual awareness with paranoia), by connecting it to events
larger than human conception… Is he positioning the conspiratorial
powers governing human commerce as kinds of dark-matter Gods in their
intervention in human affairs, replacement for what’s missing in the
Deist God?



Also…to the extent the conspiring forces of the world (be they divine
or man-made) are at work in the timing of the Transit here, why would
those interested parties want to “provoke a certain Instruction, upon
the limits to human grandeur impos’d by Mortality”? This seems, on the
one hand, spiritually positive—but also seems spiritually
authoritarian, panoptickal and Prince-like—which
spiritual-authoritarian language often seems sinister in this novel.
(Also this fits with the Instruction Mason and his fescue are
providing in the previous chapter.) But what would be the motivation
for revealing the limits of human grandeur? Instilling them with a
greater regard for/apprehension of the divine?



The “Asian Mystery” (p. 288): “harness’d [to] Escape into the Void.”



The Void of recognizing your own finitude, limits, mortality? Via the
cosmos? Or, if this does have to do with the Sino-Jesuit conspiracy,
perhaps to limit the imagination of those the hegemonic force wishes
to subdue?



p. 98



“Somehow, ev’ryone is awake at first Light.”



Reminds me of the beetles joining together in song from the previous chapter.



“This, Dixon understands, is what Galileo was risking so much
for,--this majestick Dawn Heresy.”



Majestick Heresy eminds me of Cherrycoke’s holy insanity.
Juxtaposition of at-first-glance-but-not-actually-contradictory ideas.
What’s the heresy here? Apprehension of the universe through natural
law? Dixon: “’Twas seeing not only our Creator about his Work[…]but
Newton and Kepler, too, confirm’d in theirs.’” There is a certain
level of idolatry here (wasn’t the event supposed to limit the sense
of human grandeur?), worshiping (the work of) human beings—the
Catholic church (who were the persecutors of Galileo), of course,
allows saints, whereas a lot of Protestantism does not. The heresy,
perhaps, is in the notion that man can and ought to comprehend/predict
the world?



“The Arrival, perfectly as calculated, the three bodies sliding into a
single Line.” Harmony, reduction—also mirrors some other things that
slide into place (and in threes), e.g. the daughters Vroom (p. 64:
“The three maidens immediately snap to Attention, lining up in order
of Height.”) and Mason, Dixon, and GW (p. 275: “Col° Washington turns
out to be taller than Dixon, by about as much as Dixon rises over
Mason. ‘Enable us quite nicely to stand in a Shed if we keep a
straight line,’ he greets them, ‘though Ah wonder why?’”)



“Whatever the cause, the times he records are two to four seconds
ahead of Mason’s.”



A really small disjuncture in the two timelines. Perhaps the Transit
occasions this? The Zero-Point of their departure from one another?





p. 99



“the last of the Black Filament”



Cf. GR: “He slept in a bunk next to a wall of dynamited stone painted
white, with a bulb over his head burning all night long. He dreamed
that the bulb was a representative of Weissmann, a creature whose
bright filament was its soul.” Also: “The pattern gathers in his soul
(Seek, as the core of the earlier carbon filament was known in
Germany), and the grander and clearer it grows, the more desperate
Byron gets.”



“dimm’d by the Lenses to a fierce Moon”



More photonegative/underbelly/dark matter type imagery. Marking this
part of the earth—perhaps marking this whole long adventure of our two
astronomers, the forces of power and death for which this part of the
world serves as a kind of focus.



“By which time, ev’ryone is more than ready for a change of Company.”



I read there as being some kind of resonance here between the use of
this word to mean human beings/personalities/conversations immediately
around you and the use of this word to mean a profit-seeking endeavor.
But that tension is also loaded into every use of this word (one of
the benefits of the capitalization scheme especially)



“The North-West Rains have well possess’d the Town,--all Intrigue lies
under Moratorium, as if the Goddess of Love in her Visitation had
admonish’d all who would invoke her, to search their Hearts, and try
not to betray her quite so much.”



Just beautiful. Essential P.



Weaves in the historical complexity, a coherence of the natural
forces, the man-made events, the vocabulary/system of iconography
necessary to bridge the language of the day with the language of the
ancient world and our own (time moving in both directions outward from
that zero-point, like a telescope, a Vector of Desire)



Also supports what I am increasingly starting to appreciate, that

One of the many things THIS NOVEL (chapter) IS ABOUT is: (to use as
the novel often does the language of Catholicism, in combination with
some psychoanalysis, little physics, filtered through historical
context) Original Sin, and the always circular relationship of
Conscience to it, Conscience as a manifestation of / explanation for
the death wish, a Vector of Desire—to return to the past and
innocence, also to repent, also to die, to die for grief and redress
of our actual inability to return and uncommit our sins, unsew this
chaos, unfall. And the ways our egos—the time-making
instruments—create the story and the suffering, and also preserve that
history, and so make the fall unfallable.



Also, looking back over this now, Visitation has a whiff of the
language of the extraterrestrial and also the divine (very like
Revelation, in its way).



“In the Mountains, the Bull’s Eye is sovereign.”



Continuing the seemingly sinister panoptickal gaze over the interior
of the continent.



“All over Town, Impulse, chasten’d, increasingly defers to Stolidity.”



More evidence of people’s wills, even their workaday
will-orientations, being not composed of some overriding
self-generated desire, but being shaped by their environment (which
includes all the people around them).



Appreciating the extent to which M&D’s zoomed-out historical and
planetary consciousness works against the notion of free will, even as
it invest(igate)s in the egos of its main characters.



“Visiting Indian Mystics go into Trances they once believ’d mindless
enough, which here prove Ridottoes of Excess, beside the purpos’d
Rainy-day Inanation of the Dutch.”



The Dutch, chasten’d of their (decidedly unchaste) Impulses, become
totally mindless, and inanitious (dictionary has it: exhaustion caused
by lack of nourishment; lack of mental or spiritual vigor and
enthusiasm)—but still purposeful. The obsession with PURPOSE is a
possession of the self as detached from the true nature of the self as
Desire/Impulse—and one that finds a kind of zero-point among these
people, it seems. Also note that in P’s cosmology purpose is
oppositional to/detached from mind(fulness), spiritual vigor. Is
Purpose always a consequence of the world, or of some hypnotizing
force that moves through the world? Moving through the world like the
forces of death seem to do, in P. In opposition to Idleness, and all
the human things that express in the idle hours of the day.



“The Slaves, as if to preserve a secret Invariance, grow more visible
and distinct, their Voices stronger, and their Musick more pervasive,
as if the Rain were carrying these from distant parts of Town.”



This has, on first glance, some of the peasant/underclass-nobility of
Tolstoy—the Dutch’s purposeful STOLIDITY is also an effort to preserve
Invariance, really, only for the Dutch it expresses as mindless
Inanition, whereas for the Slaves it expresses as, well, human
expression, and musick.



p. 100



“and withal, what a Heaven-sent Source of White Blood are these Lads!
Johanna can almost see those Babies now, up on the Block, adorable
enough to sell themselves, kicking their feet in the air and
squealing”



Lots going on here—first, the application of the logic of
manufacturing, commodification, profit to human beings—to babies, to
blood. Of course, this is obvious (cf. slavery). But what’s slightly
surprising is to see a white woman having this pleasurable,
“mono-maniackal” fantasy about white people. Here we see the absolute
devastation of historical contingency—race, as a factor that leads to
the Africans being slaves and the Dutch not, is both totally arbitrary
(she would sell the Lads) and everything (at the end of the day, the
Dutch are not enslaving the Dutch).



“predatory Hens”



continuing this from the last chapter



“when Wesley came to preach at Newcastle”



The Great Awakening persists just off-stage in this novel, getting an
amount of attention that’s somewhere between M&D’s slavery and the
concentration camps in GR. But it feels almost as central as those, in
its way. The Great Awakening as one particular kind of counterreaction
to the Age of Reason?



“It lasted for Weeks after,--tho’ it may have been months, for all I
knew of Time in those Days,--I was a Lad, but I could make it out.”



More on the relativity of time. And on the fact that something like
the Spirit can emerge in the world in great bursts, just as death can.



“Nothing like it again, that I’ve noatic’d…? Until this Transit of
Venus…this turning of Soul, have tha felt it,--they’re beginning to
talk to their Slaves? Few, if any, beatings,--tho’ best to whisper,
not to jeopardize it too much…?”



Drawing humans’ attention to the stars, to forces greater than them,
perhaps forcing them to confront the limits of their own grandeur,
enacts a kind of carnivalesque dissolution of social strata. Though
perhaps this is not a shift away from but a re-orientation to
hierarchy, but to humans’ subordinate place on the Great Chain of
Being to…God, and all other forces bigger than man’s ability to
comprehend or control.



Also, it feels like the word JINX could be swapped in for JEOPARDIZE
to my American ear—Google tells me that word doesn’t come into much
currency until 1915, though there are a few…hiccups where it appears
in the corpus English, the first coming in 1771, plateauing through
1777, dropping back to 0 in 1778



“’The Dutch are afraid,’ Mason is able to contribute, ‘unto Death.’

“’Why, Aye. SO do I recollect myself, the first time it happen’d to me…?’”



The fear of seeing God, confronting Revelation, perhaps of suddenly
seeing the world clearly. More elaboration on the fearful side of
Revelation, the underbelly of God’s grace.



p. 101



THIS PAGE is one of the most important in the book, in my opinion. An
explication on our characters experiences trying to access the
spirit—also an elaboration on P’s cosmology, how the divine operates
in tension (or a hard-to-see harmony) with the world of men and
nature.



One question this page invites us to carry forward: whether, how, and
how much our two Astronomers will encounter the spirit inside
themselves and in the world going forward.



“’Aye, the Spirit ever fancies a bonny Hat,--but the fairly principal
thing, is to sit quietly…?’”



We will hold onto stillness, quiet, receptivity as strategies for
apprehending God as we go forward in the novel.



“’Yet then, you say, it passes….’”



We only glimpse Revelation.



“’It abides,--‘tis we who are ever recall’d from it, to tend to our
various mortal Requirements…? and so another such Visit soon becomes
necessary,--another great Turning, and so forth…? Howbeit, ‘tis all
Desire,--and Desire, but Embodiment, in the World, of what Quakers
have understood as Grace…?’”



We’ve seen a lot of complicated explorations of desire—as a
vector/cathectic force. As a possession by/response to the world. But
here Dixon suggests it’s an embodiment of Grace. How can that be?
Hasn’t desire led men to commit all kinds of banalities and
atrocities? But then, the good things man does may also be understood
in terms of man’s desire to do them. So desire, then, is like the
gasoline, and man the engine, for the spirit working through humans
and into the world—and can take us to good or bad outcomes. Perhaps
the Graceful Desire Dixon is referring to here is, specifically, the
Desire for “another such Visit” to meditation/the divine.



Also, again, the rhetoric of Visitation with regards to man’s
encounters with the Spirit.



“Starting about then, rain-bound, whenever he may, Mason contrives to
sit in some shutter’d room, as quietly as he knows how, waiting for a
direct experience of Christ. But he keeps jumping up, to run and
interrupt Dixon, who is trying to do the same, with news of his
Progress,--

“’Jere! I think it almost happen,d! D’ye get a kind of rum sensation
here,’—touching the center of his Forehead,--‘is that it?’

“’Mason, first tha must sit,--not jump up and down like thah’…? And
then, sit quietly. Quietly….’ Back they go, till Mason in his Chair,
falling asleep, topples with a great Crash, or Dixon decides he’ll
step out after all, nip down to The World’s End, and see what the Cape
Outlawry may be up to.”



Very funny and astute passage—anyone who has any experience meditating
will recognize themselves in both M&D here.



“Little by little, as weeks pass, the turn of Spirit Mason and Dixon
imagine they have witness’d is reclaim’d by the Colony, and by
whatever haunts it. Any fear that things might ever change is abated
Masters and Mistresses resume the abuse of their slaves, who reply in
Bush tongues, to which, soon enough hoarse with Despair, with no hope
of being understood, they return, as to childhood homes….”



More elaboration of this idea that the divine is somehow otherworldly,
something that men briefly visit—or that briefly thrusts itself on the
mind of man. The forces of the worldly//Worldliness work against the
spirit.



Also, the slaves using language (the root of magick) to attempt to
return “to childhood homes”—very psychoanalytic, and also
Norman-Brownian in connecting our thanatic desire for return to
childhood with our belief in/yearning for the divine.



Despair is, in Catholic dogma, the loss of faith—the belief that you
are beyond even God’s help.

Also, anyone who has had the sensation of revelation, insight, or
connectedness will recognize the frustration at feeling like the world
is absorbing you from the spirit.



“Riding in and out of Town now may often be observ’d White Horsemen,
carrying long Rifles styl’d ‘Sterloops,’ each with an inverted Silver
Star upon the Cheek-Piece.”



White Horsemen with satanic iconography on their weapons. A kind of
photonegative of the dark wraith types I’m guessing we normally read
about, and so imagine.



p. 102



“For the first and final time they see him laugh, and glimpse an
entire Life apart from the Castle.”



The limits of our perceptions of people—and how our perceptions
actually create some boundaries for the ways those people are able to
be. We perpetuate the Castle in our minds first, and then in the
actual world of men.



“’What made them leve home and set sail upon dangerous seas[…]was
not[…]the Heavenly Event by itself, but rather that unshining Assembly
of Human Needs[…]including certainly the Royal Society’s need for the
Solar Parallax.”



Human Needs as one kind of wind moving through the world.



“’[…]but what of the Astronomers’ own Desires, which may have been
less philosophical?’

“’Love,--I knew it,’ Tenebrae all but sighs. ‘’Twas Love for the
Planet Herself.’”



In this passage P conflates wind, need, desire, and love. All forces
that move men. Cathexes—libido and will leading human behavior. Love,
a Vector of Desire, a desire to apprehend the God that is always on
His way.



p. 103/4



“’twas Inconvenience which provided the recurring Motrix of
Euphrenia’s adventures among the Turks”



Need, desire, love—these act as wind. Inconvenience likewise acts as
motrix (one way of understanding this word is the feminine form of
motor).
-
Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l