SLPAD - 102 - "Low-Lands" - 15

[Michael Bailey]

Geronimo Diaz was clearly insane; but it was a wonderful, random sort of
madness which conformed to no known model or pattern, an irresponsible
plasma of delusion he floated in, utterly convinced, for example, that he
was Paganini and had sold his soul to the devil. He kept a priceless
Stradivarius in his desk, and to prove to Flange that this hallucination
was fact he would saw away on the strings, producing horribly raucous
noises, throw down the bow finally and say, “You see. Ever since I made
that deal I haven’t been able to play a note.” And spend whole sessions
reading aloud to himself out of random-number tables or the Ebbinghaus
nonsense-syllable lists, ignoring everything that Flange would be trying to
tell him. Those sessions were impossible: counterpointed against
confessions of clumsy adolescent sex play would come this incessant “ZAP.
MOG. FUD. NAF. VOB,” and every once in a while the clink and gurgle of the
martini shaker. But Flange went back again, he kept going back; realizing
perhaps that if he were subjected for the rest of his life to nothing but
the relentless rationality of that womb and that wife, he would never make
it, and that Geronimo’s lunacy was about all he had to keep him going. And
the martinis were free.




Is the priceless Stradivarius a metaphor for something? Reading it one way,
a) the Strad's his reasoning mind
b) the noise is the result of applying Freudian theory to his discourse
c) the entire notion of selling his soul to the devil is pre-scientific and
contrary to Freudian theory, which would tend to deconstruct demons into
reaction formation or something
d) unless we posit Freud as the devil

Or is he "demon"strating something with this action: giving Flange a
ridiculous spectacle by way of mirroring the irrationality of Flange's
unhappiness, which stems from his false beliefs?


Ebbinghaus was a peripatetic (Univ of Bonn, armed service in
Franco-Prussian War, England, France, Univ of Berlin, Univ of Breslau,
Halle) early psychologist (1850-1908) - he was the first to describe the
forgetting curve, the learning curve, and the spacing effect.

He (laudably) conducted his memory experiments on himself, reading 3-letter
nonsense syllables, 2200 of which he culled from all possible combinations
with the criteria of meaninglessness and lack of sound-alike quality to any
meaningful words - and graphing the time it took to memorize against
different numbers of syllables. (Wikipedia has a couple of the graphs)

He did recognize that similar sounds would creep in anyway, but tried to
memorize without any associative help.

Seems like "contra naturam" to eliminate that helpful element, doesn't it?

And Geronimo Diaz apparently eliminates repetition, or any attempt to
remember the syllables, making another shambles of the already questionable
praxis.


Flange sees these sessions as his only relief from the "the relentless
rationality of that womb, that wife" -


Affluenza?



Early Pynchon tropes: the name "Geronimo", a bemused parodic fascination
with psychiatry,
lots of drinking

Also, how about Geronimo's "irresponsible plasma of delusion" -

Wasn't there some plasma in "The Small Rain"?

No - I was thinking of the spectrum and the closed-circuit.

Here, I think he means blood plasma (Geronimo gets into blood and sea water
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