COL 49 CH 5 Arrabal to Hilarius and arrival of cops

[Michael Bailey]

Yeah, it’s weird.

IMHO, none of those things are impossible for old Pierce, given enough
money, an undying passion, & an imaginative trusted factotum willing to
farm out tasks.
Especially with the partial disclaimer that maybe she didn’t see as many
post horns as she thought.

The man in black, for instance, might not have been Johnny Cash, but could
easily have radioed ahead to a crew who would then follow her - and by
covert suggestion, not a hard task given her state of mind, lead her onto
specific buses etc.

And so on & so forth.

There’s a certain amount of willful & wistful romanticism required to
prosecute this viewpoint, and I don’t think that’s my main angle anyway.
But ijs…

What stood out recently for me is the action spreading over time with
references to a panoply of plotting and evildoing - and a great many
references to WWII, from the bones, to IA founder’s time in service, to
Oedipa’s lightly almost wishing wartime military on Wendell as an
alternative, more serious trauma than the used car lot, to Metzger’s
contemptuous imagining of Oedipa’s war, to Hilarius’s role in the most
horrific scenes thereof.

It’s a glimpse of a mindset that I’ve read about, people whose viewpoints
and planning were molded in wartime, shaping all their future actions,
making it easier than it ought to be for them to perpetuate offensive acts
in the name of defense and security.





On Sun, Jul 14, 2024 at 6:34 PM Joseph Tracy <brook7 at sover.net> wrote:

> She seems to b moving around SF a lot, first by beach then in Fillmore
> black neighborhood and sees posthorn scratched in back of a bus seat(
> impossible for PI to have set up) with DEATH as  acronym DON’T EVER
> ANTAGONIZE THE HORN. That message  returns to  what I am seeing as the back
> and forth between a sinister and Dangerous Trystero and the less scary idea
> of un-monitored communication at the grass roots (WASTE). The airport is
> even further away. ACDC with posthorn claims to be death cult. Basically
> one seriously weird person after another.  "She busrode and walked on into
> the lightening morning, giving herself up to a fatalism rare for her. Where
> was the Oedipa who’d driven so bravely up here from San Narciso? That
> optimistic baby had come on so like the private eye in any long-ago radio
> drama, believing all you needed was grit, resourcefulness, exemption from
> hidebound cops’ rules, to solve any great mystery. But the private eye
> sooner or later has to get beat up on. This night’s profusion of post
> horns, this malignant, deliberate replication, was their way of beating up.
> They knew her pressure points, and the ganglia of her optimism, and one by
> one, pinch by precision pinch, they were immobilizing her.”
>
> She pondered this  refusal of the government postal service.
>
> "It was not an act of treason, nor possibly even of defiance. But it was a
> calculated withdrawal, from the life of the Republic, from its machinery.
> Whatever else was being denied them out of hate, indifference to the power
> of their vote, loopholes, simple ignorance, this withdrawal was their own,
> unpublicized, private. Since they could not have withdrawn into a vacuum
> (could they?), there had to exist the separate, silent, unsuspected world."
>
> But something changes in her through her encounter with the alcoholic
> sailor where she acts directly to comfort and help him send a letter to a
> long separate wife.  Not the only time Pynchon has observed  that there is
> something about the courage to act from compassion, no matter how seemingly
> trivial that often marks a change and frequently leads to larger actions,
> deeper courage. She uses her letter delivery to follow the WASTE  mail
> carrier back to Nefastis’s  Ap. ???That is weird to me and I would be very
> curious if anyone sees a particular meaning there? ??
>
> She moves through serious doubts about her sanity as she returns home( to
> Galilee in the Pines; with the name Kinnaret taking on intensity  as though
> an ancient question of truth and faith were at play) with the hope that
> Hilarius will be able to resolve the question of her sanity.  This is a
> reflection and question and self doubt that is both normal and healthy and
> also holds the potential for a dark turn toward authority as the voice of
> truth. How much should a sane person who is confronted with evidence of
> something that does not fit her picture of the world relinquish the direct
> evidence of an honest inquiry to a psychological or politically comforting
> explanation.?
>
> More later, which I know D Morris will be looking forward to anxiously or
> amusedly or some somethingly.  I aim going out to play music and dance.
>
>
>
> --
> Pynchon-L: https://waste.org/mailman/listinfo/pynchon-l
>