BEg2 ch 39 - brief summary

[Joseph Tracy]

Tarot as though a message is being assembled from modern characters, The scholar, houseless, haunted woman...
in the pedestrian corridor to the Port of Authority ads for movies, albums, yup toys,fashon… she thinks hell were a bus station in NY this is what All Hope Abandon would look like( sounds more a P thought than a Maxine reference.) My earlier (ch 38 thoughts) Dante reference was intuitive, not recalling this passage. This refer ence to hell is more than a little strange from a woman whose best friend is obsessed with the cultural ephemera being advertised. Still, death has a way of putting things in the starkest perspective and Windusts death was as starkly grim a memory and a regret as any that occupy Maxine.  I really don’t know how to take this vision of hell aspect of Bleeding Edge. Is it about the way we, or they, have structured the world from our own, or their own, darkest fears and most lascivious dreams of winners and losers in deadly games with the fierce gods of our moment in time? Is it the real structure of the world or just a case of following priests, salesmen and politicians in their unnecessary derangement? The reason the image of the bus station ads as the entry to hell makes sense to me is that it is entertainment and distraction which pulls us away from the prophetic warnings about where we are headed. There is less and less common ground in our stories. There is only win or lose in the ampitheatre of an ever shortening public span of attention where 
we are cheering spectators until the moment when our head is needed for a ball. I cannot go along with the idea that BE is Pynchon Lite.

 Random thought: The one thing that Pynchon fails to take seriously in BE is the mythic power of the Islamic terrorist übermensch . He appears only as a halloween mask of Misha/Grisha, as a hundred arabs working on computers in a secret room at hashslingerz. What kind of a 9-11 story is this fer christsakes? 
 
   Xiomara. Such a beautiful name. If you have never heard the cuban american singer Xiomara Laugart she is soulful and subtle  and worth a listen; ocean breezes flow through her. 

Xiomara's story with Windust is telling. He 'saves' her from his own deadly mission.  American CIA heroes are always saving the benighted, those beguiled by anti-market forces and those  who think they should decide for themselves what they want . Windust is the one who needed saving, but his lostness went back far and deep and he was so lost that he had no idea how much he needed something  real. We have met him before in the works of Pynchon, picking off Hereros in the distance, experimenting on children, doing those things that “somebody has to do”, according to some very important somebodies. He was loved by 3 women we knw of  but it barely got past his cock, never came near who ever he was before he was recruited into the great game. 

Well ok we’ve all known a few Windusts, and we all are dealing with the effects of their version of realism. 
  
  

> On Dec 13, 2022, at 2:19 AM, Michael Bailey <michael.lee.bailey at gmail.com> wrote:
> .
> Corrigendum from Chapter 38: Uncle Dizzy, who proffers a ring of
> invisibility. When she gives it back to him, he puts it in, *and
> disappears!*
> 
> 
> 
> Maxine riding the subway seeing faces in windows of trains on parallel
> tracks, as if they are Tarot cards.
> Those whose eyes meet hers she figures are portentous. Eventually she
> wonders if she’s performing the same function for some of them.
> 
> 
> One of these people makes contact with her. It’s Windust’s Guatemalan
> honey! She’s got an envelope, redolent of 9:30 Cologne, with the money
> Windust borrowed from her at their last meeting, and some “vig.”
> 
> After apologizing that it’s not the earrings she’d requested, Xiomara
> suggests they walk over the Brooklyn Bridge together. Maxine agrees,
> stipulating to a meal thereafter.
> 
> Xiomara’s apparently in academia now, and is repaying Maxine as a favor to
> Windust’s 2nd wife, now widow, Dotty (and also perhaps in aid of learning &
> relaying news to interested Beltway parties on the likelihood of Maxine
> making waves vis a vis Windust’s quietus.)
> 
> At lunch, they converse.
> 
> Xiomara has been on friendly terms with Dotty since the Clinton years.
> She’s got some words on ultra-violent ancient Mayan ballgames & hellish
> underground playing fields, & how they’d captured Windust’s imagination,
> for Maxine to add to her collection of horror stories, intermingled
> meaningfully with Rios Montt horrors & Windust’s role in those, before he
> smuggled her out of that danger zone.
> 
> He gave Xiomara a much-belated (like, way, way, way belated! He was already
> married to Dottie, Maxine surmises) huge diamond engagement ring,
> 
> “When you get to D.F.*, I want
>            you to sell it,” and it wasn’t till then, that “you” instead of
> “we,” that she understood
>            he was leaving”
> 
> * Mexico City
> 
> 
> They walk to Fulton Landing where they can look across the river at “Ground
> Zero.” Xiomara initiates another walk back across the Brooklyn Bridge.
> 
> From an observation platform they look at the site.
> 
> Maxine thinks, but doesn’t speak, of DeepArcher, where in a virtual way the
> undestroyed site still “exists.”
> 
> Xiomara says Windust had come there often in his last days, thinking he had
> unfinished business. She thinks, though, that his soul is in Xibalba now.
> The Mayan hell.
> 
> 
> Later at home, Maxine sniffs the last of the 9:30 Cologne on the envelope
> and money,
> “ trying to summon back something as invisible and weightless
>            and inaccountable as his spirit . . .”
> 
> 
> 
> (With a similar longing to that that she’d felt for the untrammeled WTC at
> the observation deck?)
> 
> 
> “ And later, next to snoring Horst, beneath the pale ceiling, city light
> diffusing through
>            the blinds, just before drifting downward into REM, good night.
> Good night, Nick.”
> --
> Pynchon-L: https://waste.org/mailman/listinfo/pynchon-l