M&D11: Death, the Collective Unconscious, and a Non Sequitur Walk Into a Bar

[Smoke Teff]

CHAPTER 11



p. 105



“’The St. Helena of old had been as a Paradise[…]’

“’Gone before your Time, Euphie.’

“’Does that mean I am forbidden to mourn them? They are mine as much
as anyone’s, to mourn.’”



Memory is eternal. The past belongs to all of us. The collective
unconscious, also thanatos presenting as a kind of nostalgia-grief for
an Eden you never actually knew.



“’the Reverend Dr. Maskelyne, who has continued, even unto our Day, as
Astronomer Royal, publishing his Almanack and doing his bit for global
Trade.’

“’Something wrong with that, Wicks?’ inquires Mr. LeSpark.

“’Only insofar as it is global, and not Celestial,’ replies the Revd,
with a holy Smirk master’d in his first week of Curacy.’”



Maskelyne is presented to us here as a confluence of many forces—(the
institutions of) religion and science, relevant to matters of trade
and state. LeSpark semi-saucily (at least notably) uses the (our)
Reverend’s first name, sniffing out some semi-buried antagonism
between their sensibilities, which Cherrycoke spells out, positioning
the global in antagonism with the Celestial. Also compare the Revd’s
“holy Smirk” to his “holy insanity” in the beginning—and to the
mirthless smiles, and otherwise complicated, somewhat encoded
communications of face and body we see throughout the novel (I believe
there are at least a few other mentions of smiles or affects people
have learned in their trade or station to adopt).



“The Merchant of Purposeful Explosion”



A generous euphemism for an arms manufacturer. Purposeful—purpose in
the projectile. Will and direction. Cathexis: a Vector of Desire.



p. 106



The winds of the island coming into special focus here: “The idea[…]is
to keep to windward[…]and let the Trade Winds carry you to the
coast[…;]the oceanic Waves continue to beat without ceasing, the
Clamor wind-borne”



“across the Lines and the Parade, all being reduced to Geometry and
optical Illusion”



The distortion of the winds separates the world into Geometry and
Illusion—forms and perceptions.



“what is never to be nam’d directly”



Ad infinitum with this idea of the potency of the unknown, the always
about to emerge, the God and the horror.



“The floorboards of Taverns register its rhythmick Blows, as they have
the Years of Thumps from the swinging boots of Seamen whose destinies
were sometimes to include Homicide, as if keeping Faith with that same
Brutal Pulse, waiting upon a Moment, needing but the single
sighting,--sworn to, vanish’d,--the terrible Authorization.”



Again homicide presented in this most ego-identified of P’s novels as
the ultimate crime, requiring “terrible Authorization.” That
Authorization comes from the Brutal Pulse in which the murderers keep
their faith—and that pulse is the ceaseless ocean. This is the
sinister notion of our collective unconscious==that it is, in fact,
brutal, primitive, and devoid of Grace.



p. 107



“Tho’ the sun nightly does set below the Island’s stark horizon, what
Mason sees, from his first Nightfall there, is Darkness, rising up out
of the sea, where all the carelessly bright day it has lain, as in a
state of slumber…”



The Darkness as conscious. The darkness as being its own thing—the
photogenative logic of this underworld/fallenworld.



“In the Astrology of this island, the  Sun must be reckoned of less
importance than Darkness incorporated as some integral, anti-luminary
object[…]Black Sheep of the family of Planets, neither to be
sacrificed to Hades nor spoken of by Name….”



Furthering this motif of the opposition of light and darkness, white
and black (because obviously). The omnipresence of the dark’s real
impact is what must not be mentioned—because to look at it is to be
aware of it, and to apprehend the omnipresence of darkness is more
terrible than we can usually bear.



“the Apocrypha of Astrology”



The photonegativity/antimatter/black sheep motif applied to astrology,
the stars and their effects on/through the men born under them.



“an interior that must be reckoned part of the Other World.”



Collective unconscious, our understanding of the unapprehendable
inside as the root of heaven and hell (Lovejoy points out that beliefs
in heaven and hell seem otherworldly but actually emerge from a
worldview oriented to this-worldliness)



“The Wind, brutal and pure, is there for its own reasons, and human
life, any life, counts for close to nought.”



Is this what is so terrible about the dark we must not name—that the
world does not care at all about us, that our lives are meaningless,
and that we don’t even have a lick of control over them?



“No change here is gradual[…]After Rain-Storms, the water rushes
downhill, in Eagres and Riffles and Cataracts, thro’ the town, rooftop
to rooftop, in and out of Windows”



Some ideas in tension here. The water cycle as continuity. Continuity
as distinct from incrementality (not-graduality). Lovejoy notes
Aristotle’s work and his attempt to wrestle with the competing notions
of continuity and incrementality. The Great Chain of Being is one
expression of this tension. It is continuous in that it includes all
things—but eminently incremental (and thus hierarchal).



“the more the sea appears to lie above the Island,--as if suspended,
and kept from falling fatally upon it, thro’ the operations of
Mysterion impenetrable on the part of a Guardian”



This notion of the sea being/seeming above the island is mentioned
with regards to the Cape here several times. But this notion of there
being some untraceable, aether-like substance is new. The idea of
Guardians have been mentioned by now, though seldom working on such a
large/collective scale as to keep a landmass from being flooded.



p. 108



“spray whose odor and taste are the life of the sea”



The life of the apparently unliving world exists in the
human/animate/sensual apprehension of it?



“a Company of Giant rob’d Beings, risen incalculably far away over the
Horizon, bound this way upon matters forever unexplain’d, moving blind
and remorseless across the Sea, as if the Island did not exist”



The M&D wiki notes the rob’d figures in GR—I note also the moment on
p. 43: “Out in the hall they keep running into each other, Wraiths in
night-clothes” and the moment in Ch. 10 with the mysterious White
Horsemen. Figures who move invisibly through the world. “blind and
remorseless[;]” more fearsome indifference to human affairs.



“the only Choices within one’s Control, those between Persistence and Surrender”

Reduction of human agency to a terrible binary. No choice offers any
reprieve from suffering.



“for Commerce without Slavery is unthinkable, whilst Slavery must ever
include, as an essential Term, the Gallows,--Slavery without the
Gallows being as hollow and Waste a Proceeding, as a Crusade without
the Cross.”



The form implies its terminus. More Foucault here, I think—the
essentialness of public punishment to upholding the authority and
sovereignty of the Prince, whose body is the state, the ultimate
master. Commerce—a state made of profit-seeking. Slavery—a populace
made only of labor. Without the public spectacle of the gallows,
slavery is impossible.



How much P speaks through Cherrycoke here is debatable, though it
still stands as an argument against LeSpark’s defense of global Trade
on the first page of this chapter. “Commerce without Slavery is
unthinkable.” Commerce is ever profit-seeking, and therefore must
exploit.



p. 109



“the Birds of passage”



Just noting this phrasing, as P is ever focused on flight,
departures—but also generally on movement. Passage as sanctuary. But
the passage here takes “convicts” on “steps in their Purgatory.” A
Christian model of sanctuary—salvation through (both within and on the
other side of) punishment.





p. 110



“In lower-situated imitations of the Hellfire Club, he hurtl’d
carelessly along some of Lust’s less-frequented footpaths, ever
further, he did not escape noting, from Pleasure”



Mason has earlier mentioned his religious aversion to pleasure, so as
to set up for the greater pleasure pay-off of yielding to temptation
(essentially cultivating taboo, breaking taboo or yielding to
temptation as deliverance). Here, in grief, he goes to pleasure to get
away from it, and into suffering. His is a deeply wounded and
entangled psyche, very perverse relationship to his own libido.



“a licentious night-world of Rakes and Whores, surviving only in
memories of pleasure, small darting winged beings, untrustworthy as
remembrancers…”



A kind of horrifying erotic vision, which even Cherrycoke can’t help
but get swept along by a little (the abrupt ending of Cherrycoke’s
flight—“’Uncle!, Uncle!’ ‘Hum, hum, howbeit,--‘”—is very funny).



“yet its infected, fragrant, soiled encounters ‘neath the Moon were as
worthy as any,--an evil-in-innocence.”



More notion of equality beneath the heavenly bodies.



What is the “evil-in-innocence”? Is it Mason’s perversity? He is
ironically led by pleasure away from pleasure—and flight from pleasure
is a perverted kind of innocence. But actually this is evil?



“’Twas then that Mason began his Practice, each Friday, of going out
to the hangings at Tyburn, expressly to chat up women, upon a number
of assumptions, many of which would not widely be regarded as sane.”



Mason’s conflation of the gallows and the erotic. Evil-in-innocence.
Or innocence-in-evil. He is a wounded man.



“’Hallo, d’you think he’ll get much of a hard-on, then?’[…]

“’In my experience,’ he might say, ‘’tis usually the Innocent who get
them, and the Guilty who fail to.’

“[…]’Could Remorse ever really unman any of you?’

“’Why no.—‘Tis rather that Surprize invigorates us.’”



The exchange is dark and funny. I want to hold onto this idea of
invigorating surprise (unknown). Depressiveness often feels like this,
in my opinion—your hard-on, your kingdom for a surprise.



Also maybe a moment of reconsidering, in case we needed to, the
attachment of guilt to the erotick. And certainly makes me think of
Slothrop, and his extinguished-beyond-the-zero hard-on response. Is
the zero Innocence? Or is Innocence just beyond the zero, that thing
we sense just beyond—or before—the horizon of our consciousness?



p. 112



“’consider that the Murderer cannot, in the Moment, know the ecstatic
surprise of the Innocent.”



So it’s ecstatic all of a sudden. To be suddenly, and Innocently,
confronted with the final inescapability of your own mortality—but
wasn’t this notion a terrible insight just a few pages earlier? Maybe,
whether the insight of the universe’s indifference to you, as well as
the promise of certain death…whether this insight strikes you as
terrible or ecstatic is dependent on what burdens you carry with you
in your heart as you enter death’s antechambers.



p. 113



“Wind from the Gallows bringing ev’ry sigh, groan, and Ejaculation
over the heads of the crowd to settle upon their hearing like Ash upon
the Hats of spectators at a Fire, the Day wraps and fondles them”



Further erotics of the gallows. Also, the wind as a kind of collective
vibe—perhaps the wind compiles the human vibe parallax as the human
compiles the Earth’s parallax (p. 93). The idea of Ejaculation soaring
over people’s heads, and scattering ash, reminds me of the ejaculating
fireworks in Ulysses (at least as I remember them—haven’t read it in
seven or eight years).



“’These frightful Machines!’ she pretends to lament, ‘—shall our
Deaths now, as well as our Lives, be rul’d by the Philosophers, and
their Army of Mechanicks?’”



She’s pretending here, but it’s not hard to imagine some
Luddite-sympathizer actually lamenting such. Remember the children’s
first response to Wicks’s waxing on the cosmos (p. 94): “Show us upon
the Orrery!” The explicit conflation of the mechanickal and the
military here—as the machines are positioned as forces of death, which
fits the idea of any army. Also, there’s a weird finality to the
lament. Philosophers ALREADY rule our Lives. Mechanicks too. Our
deaths are all that’s left to us—our deliverance from the world of our
lives, where we are never free. GR asks: “Will we have to stop
watching the sky?” M&D asks: “Is there no escape even in death?”



p. 114



“I have envied your Friend the honesty of his Life. Tho’ being an Earl
help’d, of course—“



A particular kind of grass-is-greenerism. Nobility makes it easier to
be a good person—or would, if I had it.



“The town is for a Moment an unlit riot of spices, pastry, fish and shellfish.”



Unlit riot, an un-run AMOK. We know these kinds of boundaryland
admixtures of cuisine are sites of generation for P. I think here he’s
leaning a bit toward the notion of some kind of generation, perhaps
holy insanity, in the riot, in the amok.



p. 114/5



“Upon the swiftly darkening sea-prospect, in outline now appears a
Figure that lacks but a Scythe in its Grasp, to turn all thoughts upon
the Brevity of Life.”



The grim reaper of our consciousness, bringing us not just to the
experience of death in the moment we pass into it, but bringing us
into an apprehension of death ahead of time. This figure has been
present everywhere—or is this the figure that’s been promised to us
but never named? Is it merely awareness and thought that we’ve been
keeping away? For this scytheless reaper doesn’t actually kill
you—simply brings death into your awareness.



“’A Chinaman, a Jesuit, and a Corsican are riding up to Bath…’”



As an ending following the final emergence, in this chapter, of the
full awareness of death—Dixon, like all of us, uses the
familiarity-novelty, expectation-surprize complex of humor to cut the
pain of the awareness of death—for the surprise of the joke, and our
laughter, is a kind of emergence of death-grace into a
universe-in-miniature.
-
Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l