BEg2 ch 38 - brief summary

[Joseph Tracy]

thoughts on ch 38
Maxine found “the day somehow blighted by this what-is-reality issue”

   Is there a difference between the oymoronic tendency of the phrase ’artificial intelligence’ and the more obviously absurd phrase 'artificial reality’ or 'artificial life’? Words and picture can bend the mind but they can’t make frogs or a blade of grass, or photosynthesize carbohydrates from sunlight or bring the dead to life. Distinguishing the artificial from the real can get hard but there is a diffrence and perhaps more difference than we would care to find out by surprise.
    
People often think they want to know the truth, the reality , until they find out the reality, or at least enough of the truth to freak them the fuck out, or up, or into the grave. A person seems to be defying the odds, spinning through the city in virtual flight like a magic lid. Free from it's trash-can and headed for glory, but around the next corner it gets flattened,  turned from aerodynamic marvel to plastic litter on the streets of Manhattan. 
    In ch. 38 a real person on a real street disappears like magic, and a dead person, his personality intact, appears in a virtual computer world. Did someone program Lester into deep archer? Did Maxine’s subconscious program his appearance? Avi and Brooke left their tribal identity in Israel to come back to a promising NYC job withbig shot  Ice; the questionable narrative of heroic nation building turning into a rather hellish paranoia of cut-throat infighting and directives to find the evil insider( where have I watched that story lately?).  
   Maxine is the Dante style seeker in this story and the harder she searches the weirder things get and the more her fellow seekers start to head for the hills like Reg and Eric. Or find some other form of Departure. May I suggest there are a lot of people having this experience in as disconcerting a way as Maxine. How many will be packing and learning Krav Maga before it’s over?  Anyway what if you don’t seek, but follow orders, grab some previously stolen cash, fill your laptop memories with home made porn,  head off arm in arm with someone looking for eau de cologne of Hitler, sell shit that doesn’t exist, believe shit that doesn’t exist?  Is a capitalist inferno close enough? Does everyone have enough enemies yet? 
  Funny how Maxine/we expects the ghost of the dead victim to know who did it, surely death confers answers, not just the same old memories with no particular meaning. Billions of memories are now stored somewhere in the various levels of death or government or corporate secrecy,   the dark web, the triple password-protected servers, or on actual hard copies which we think of as more real than digital versions. Are they there so they can be accessed when needed or are they there to be forgotten by everyone, so the new recruits can make the same profitable mistakes the old recruits made. 
  Is the future Pynchon is exploring about who controls memories?.. about who controls the relation between information wars and real wars? Will krav maga allow us to defend the memories that make us who we are? Who decides what we are allowed to know?  Ownership in the information age is more and more a function of submission to allowable truth. That is what the characters in BE seem to find out as they look their gift horse in the mouth and see some well armed greeks with  serious coding skills  ready to take the joint over.
  
  
   
  
  

> On Dec 12, 2022, at 5:58 AM, Michael Bailey <michael.lee.bailey at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> Tells Shawn the emotherapist all the Windust emotions she couldn’t tell her
> father; tells Shawn she’s through with his tutelage.
> 
> He gives her a final bit of wisdom.
> 
> 
> The passage of time without harm to Ziggy & Otis makes her feel a tiny bit
> better each day.
> 
> 
> She realizes her sister Brooke is pregnant.
> 
> 
> Avi gets in the habit of confiding in Maxine during visits to her office.
> He hates working at hashslingrz & wants to quit but they just bought into a
> co-op.
> 
> 
> Periodically Maxine looks at the Windust dossier file on her hard drive, &
> mysteriously, more material is being added to it.
> 
> 
> & of course she can’t stay out of DeepArcher.
> 
> Running into Lester Traipse:
> 
> “ “So! Lester. Who did the deed?”
> 
>         “Interesting. First thing most people want to know is what’s it
> like being dead.”
> 
>         “OK, what’s it—”
> 
>         “Ha, ha, trick question, I’m not dead, I’m a refugee from my life.
> As for whodunit,
>            I’m supposed to know? I arranged over the phone to drop a
> shrink-wrapped cube of cash
>            as a first installment for Ice underneath The Deseret pool at
> midnight, next thing
>            I know, I’m here wandering around with my spectral thumb in my
> metaphysical ass.”
> 
> 
>         “Igor Dashkov said you talked about trying to seek some kind of
> asylum in DeepArcher.
>            Is this who I’m really talking to now, Igor? Misha, Grisha?”
> 
> 
>         “Don’t think so, I say ‘the’ too much”
> 
> 
> Then she finds a place created by her sons, Zigotisopolis. It’s a retro New
> York from before the Trump-and-his-ilk depredations, which would have
> required formidable research. She doesn’t announce herself, but makes a
> mental note to talk with them about it, back in “reality.”
> 
> Which she’s finding increasingly difficult to distinguish from the virtual
> worlds.
> 
> Sees some weird things on the street, most notably the merchant fraudster
> Uncle Dizzy, who proffers a ring of invisibility. When she gives it back to
> him, he puts it in, *and disappears!*
> 
> 
> Meeting up with Eric, she helps him take a photo for a traveling ID, and
> his take - he’s been having reality-doubt too - is that maybe those Montauk
> folks (he was with her when she went to their deep Web site & heard the
> Colonel’s briefing) are messing with reality via time travel. Eric says
> he’s going to be a radical activist in some kind of hacker Counterforce -
> she later realizes that’s his way of saying goodbye.
> 
> Driscoll still available via email, looking to get a day job & her own
> place w/out roommates, sad but not surprised that Eric’s flown the coop.
> 
> Stolid Horst is the only one in the family not subject to the
> fantasy/reality blurring.
> 
> 
> 
> Discussing this with Heidi - also not prone to this form of “borderline
> disorder” - there’s mention of a “Granada-Asbury Park Uncertainty Question”
> and, I finally figured out, a related Frank Sinatra song detailing the
> quandary:
> https://youtu.be/cweF4oj4RII
> 
> This convo occurring at the airport where Heidi’s waiting to board a flight
> to Munich with Conkling, whose 4711 Cologne sets off TSA alarms - he’s
> still obsessed, Heidi and he are still an item. But no Munich trip that day.
> 
> 
> Magical Messenger Marvin brings another CD: when she plays it there’s a
> familiar face & voice. It seems Eric in his righteous quest has met kindred
> spirit Reg Despard. They’ve found financing & they are going somewhere
> snowy & mountainous in a rolling data center to do - something. He asks her
> to destroy the disc after watching it.
> 
> Horst watching over her shoulder recognizes the scenery as maybe Bozeman
> Pass - she pauses the disc, Horst is not jealous recognizing Eric, but
> envious of Eric driving out there in the frozen wastes - he loves that
> stuff, and broaches taking Maxine there sometime.
> 
> Unwilling for him to see potentially dangerous content, she gently nudges
> Horst back to the TV before un-pausing the disc.
> 
> Eric only has a little more to say, as to how they’re only getting started
> just yet. The disc ends abruptly mid-sentence: “Maybe someday -“
> 
> But that could just be artsy editing by Reg Despard.
> --
> Pynchon-L: https://waste.org/mailman/listinfo/pynchon-l