BE CH 34, Halloween and 9-11

[Joseph Tracy]

More thoughts questions in brief essay form on Halloween and 9-11

> On Aug 3, 2022, at 8:41 PM, Joseph Tracy <brook7 at sover.net> wrote:
> 
> Chapter ends with Heidi returning to the company of her friends in Maxis household
> AFTER HER HALLOWE’EN ANTHRO EXPEDITION, Heidi has come back a changed person. “Children of all ages enacting the comprehensive pop-cultural moment. Everything collapsed into the single present tense, all in parallel. Mimesis and enactment.” She may’ve been having a little incoherence after a while. Nowhere did she see a perfect copy of anything. Not even people who said, “Oh, I’m just going as myself” were authentic replicas of themselves. 
>     “It’s depressing. I thought Comic-Con was peculiar, but this was Truth. Everything out there just a mouseclick away. Imitation is no longer possible. Hallowe’en is over. I never thought people could get too wised up. What’ll happen to us all?” 
> “And because you tend to be a blamer . . .” 
> “Oh I blame the fuckin Internet. No question.”

My original half formed thought about Heidi’s halloween musings, followed by 3 question marks to indicate my tentativeness,  was  that" Heidi seems to feel real horror has eclipsed imaginary, or something like that???”
I am OK with the thought itself of real horror eclipsing imaginary horror, which seems to have some presence in the destruction of the towers and so many people, the appearance of ghosts and Pynchon’s musing on the inability of NewYorkers to purge the darkness of the 9-11 event despite increasingly weird attempts at exorcism, public anger, heroizing cops and grieving. Real horror is always more confusing and scary than even the most artful work of the imagination.  But I am actually still confused about Heidi’s own take on what she sees and attempts to catch on video. So I intend to probe at the question since others did not. ( Please respond with your own take)

Why am I confused? I would argue that for one thing  her language is a bit too grandiose: " Children of all ages enacting the comprehensive pop-cultural moment. Everything collapsed into the single present tense, all in parallel. Mimesis and enactment." Pycnhon observes that she may be incoherent, that the mimesis was imperfect, which she then repeats in what seems to my limited mind to be a reversal of her earlier claim when she says "Imitation is no longer possible”. Maybe this is the difference between what she had scripted for the evening and what she actually felt.  But mostly it is Pynchon who is providing the balancing skepticism: "Nowhere did she see a perfect copy of anything. Not even people who said, “Oh, I’m just going as myself” were authentic replicas of themselves."  
 
The second thought she expresses is fairly easy to understand:   "Everything out there( halloween in NYC) just a mouseclick away. Imitation is no longer possible.”  I would not use the word imitation here. It seems to me that what is missing is imagination, occupation of a different self, the reification of something dreamy and distant. But was there ever that much imagination in halloween? In one sense yes, to kids of my generation you might go as a princess, knight, ghost or bum( though I never worked to hard at playing a role as my object was the collection of candy), but one was far less likely to go forth as a movie version of a specific character, as a reference to a mass marketed objectification of a hollywoodized myth with universal access  to all the details via the internet.  Again as in GR  we have Pynchon bringing movie/video culture into question. How do we inhabit ourselves if we are trying to enact high production drama with screen icons and their style, and replacing one's  personal mythology,  and lived experience, unable to be comfortable in one’s own skin?  Also I would argue that one must go back further into the origins of Allhallowtide and all Hallows’Eve and Samhain to find pure imagination responding to our human relation to the dead, to spirits, to inhabiting the nether world or letting it inhabit us. The church wanted it to be about ritualized  communion with the souls of the holy saints and faithful departed, but the badass elements of society turned it back into halloween as Samhain with trickster revenge, monsters, badasses and saints abroad in the night,  token extortion, and exocism of fears. Still for many decades halloween has been neutered, and genuine badass imagination purged, the poisoned apples of suburban legend carefully replaced by plastic wrapped candy and parents accompanying children. But the boundary region between life and death is not so easily banished.  In Bleeding Edge the dark web has become the liminal zone between worlds, and avatars have become the means of entering that world  without getting lost in it .   Perhaps one can see open source code as the language of the rebels of this zone, many of the same tools but a return to tribal gift exchanges rather than the pursuit of monopoly control.  

One of the things about the internet that is emphasized in Bleeding Edge is that it is like real estate in a certain sense, and there is fierce competition to occupy the status of rentier class, the bigger your holdings the richer you become, buying up servers and promising apps.  The winners of the game are even able to use it to participate in imperial warfare and psyops and cash in on government’s  vast defense industry spending and its interest in controlling surveillance and online influence. This again is a thematic comparison P has been developing since COL 49 and Vineland with specific references to the internet's DARPA origins and political influence. It also parallels his increasingly undisguised use of the detective motif which has always contained the idea that if a detective is smart enough he will expose the true criminal behind the crime and some form of justice or karmic accounting will ensue. This idea appeals to people who live in a society whose mythology has to do with  the “ THE LAW” as neutral arbiter.  We have some of that detective novel comeuppance for criminality  in Vineland and Inherent Vice but the big players remain untouched as in real life: Colson and others do time while Nixon simply retires and Kissinger becomes a billionaire business person/deal maker.  Several Reagan cabinet members also went down but not the actual Ray Gun.  

“Children of all ages”,  says Heidi of those “enacting the cultural moment";  herself so easily misled by costumes, posturing liars, and the desire to be who she is not: by cops, nazi perfume seekers,  the imaginary wife of her best friend’s husband. Still she is getting at something real in a time when so many are shaped by roles and belief systems carefully contrived by myth masters who would treat us all as children. This process leaves little room for the balancing forces of emptiness, spirit, wordless nature, badass peasant resistance,  personal experience and intelligent  testing of personal ideas and public propaganda . In the world of wall street economics, for example, there are no insects, fungi, cyanobacteria; only manipulable numbers matter. In literate culture and written media the screeds increase, the probing essays recede. The culture endlessly repeats the Beowulf split between good and evil, fair heroes and subhuman  monsters in tens of thousands of movies and tv series, until in the aftermath of 9-11 fair haired torturers with drills  plunged into flesh and bone are regularly exposing the plots of the wicked to save the good people of the United States on 6 foot digital video screens, while real american soldiers are torturing real prisoners who have no valuable information:  waterboarding them, beating them to pulp, destroying their eardrums with destructive volume,  torturing them with dogs.  And huge numbers who had nothing to do with 9-11 are bombed to smithereens, murdered at weddings with drones, and poisoned with depleted uranium. If what Heidi sees is Truth with a capital T, this  collective punshment of countries with too much oil and natural gas is where the culture she wants to document is headed.  Why?  And how does Halloween enact that change. And perhaps more to the point, how does it fail to do what it , in its ancient roots,  is supposed to do, to summon our unconsidered past, our shadow selves and our holiest selves to scare us awake from the childhood state where there is no death, no anguish of our potential for life misspent, none of our actual fears.  It seems to me that our actual fears are much more likely to appear in the massive growth of clinical depression, but also  the horror genre and the real events that feed that genre:,  zombie consumer apocalypses, serial killers, alein abductions and invasions, abuse of children, demonic possession, killer pandemics, nuclear destruction, the triumph of malign AI and absolute surveillance.  

It is perhaps something that only Pynchon could accomplish to have comic relief come in the form of  a pair of Russians with criminal connections costuming themselves as Osama Bin Laden and entering the scene of a small crime which seems to have intimate connections to the great crime that has changed so much. Why is it funny? Why is anything funny? Often the surprise of the unexpected truth being told publicly is a powerful form of humor, and a major tool of satire.  Misha and Grisha want to piss off the people in the Deseret and NYC, to force them to be angry at the trivialization of their conveniently supplied scapegoat, to force them into confusion over what is real and what is fake and perhaps to actually ask questions.  Misha and Grisha think they have a right to push the buttons of gullible americans, being reasonably sure there is some connections between the killer of their friend and the destruction of the WTC and Building 7.   Along with the historical questions raised by the stock-trading in airlines,  the Deseret is the scene of Pynchon’s own fictionalized doubts about 9-11, heavily imlying that the CIA had foreknowledge if nothing else. 

(OK, don’t know if anyone will read this but at least it goes into the archives.)