More Vineland; Final installment

[Joseph Tracy]

So I never stopped reading through and writing about Vineland. There is 
a fair amount of summary in here, because when I make comments or 
grapple with the meaning and the thoughts evoked I want myself or 
another reader to have enough context from the core storyline and quotes 
to be be able to get some measure the value of the novel and of what I 
say about the novel. I wrote all of this in an easier to read word 
format which allows indentation space between paragraphs, Italics and 
other conventions that make essay style prose more readable. If anyone 
would like a copy of this in that format let me know.



MORE VINELAND: THANATOID ROASTS, ATTACKS ON THE SPIRIT OF WEED, THE 
FASCIST PSYCHOLOGY OF THE LAST ROUNDUP.  ORIGINS OF THE NORTHERN MIGRATION
(  thanatoids are derived from the poem Thanatopsis by William Cullen 
Bryant about considering(opsis) and accepting
death( Thanatos)/

Before the conclusion of the events at COS( College of the Surf) the 
novel goes forward in time to follow Weed Atman in his Thanatoid 
wanderings..
    THE 1984 THANATOID ROAST  After he is killed we find Weed Atman 
wandering around  among the thanatoids not quite sure he is really dead 
and arrives ( after a rather large chunk of time, but who’s watching the 
clock when yer dead) at the 1984 annual Thanatoid Roast at a resort in 
the backcountry of the Emerald Triangle sporting “ a stretch tux in an 
oversize aqua and gold houndstooth check, with lime-green athletic 
shoes.” Van Meter ( ?Don Van Vliet ,aka Captain Beefheart ,lived in 
Trinidad then) was there wondering where the escaped Zoyd  Wheeler was. 
He was rumored to be in a semi-mythic place called Holytail which was 
pretty much Pot-grower central for backcountry bud cultivators hiding  
at this point from the CAMP operation to eradicate Weed. Led by  ex Nazi 
Karl Bopp. The war on these 2 weeds(Atman and marijuana) is a war on 
states of mind  and the dark essence of all state violence for those 
leaning anarchist/freedom of thought and inner exploration. Everyone in 
the Vineland region is on edge and Pynchon offers comic relief and a nod 
to the environmental movement’s  strength in the area  along with the 
growth of mysticism with a story of a Truckload of parrots being sold to 
locals:
“Soon there was scarcely a house in Vineland that didn’t have one of 
these birds….Instead of the traditional repertoire of short, often 
unrelated phrases, the parrots could tell full-length stories—of 
humorless jaguars and mischief-seeking monkeys, mating competitions and 
displays, the coming of humans and the disappearance of the trees—so 
becoming necessary members of households, telling bedtime stories to 
years of children, sending them off to alternate worlds in a relaxed and 
upbeat set of mind, though after a while the kids were dreaming 
landscapes that might have astonished even the parrots. In Van Meter’s 
tiny house behind the Cucumber Lounge, the kids, perhaps under the 
influence of the house parrot, Luis, figured out a way to meet, lucidly 
dreaming, in the same part of the great southern forest. Or so they told 
Van Meter. They tried to teach him how to do it, but he never got much 
closer than the edge of the jungle—if that’s what it was. How cynical 
would a man have to be not to trust these glowing souls, just in from 
flying all night at canopy level, shiny-eyed, open, happy to share it 
with him? Van Meter had been searching all his life for transcendent 
chances exactly like this one the kids took so for granted, but whenever 
he got close it was like, can’t shit, can’t get a hardon, the more he 
worried the less likely it was to happen. .”


Weed meets Dr Elasmo and recalls the dentist’s role in drawing Weed away 
from COS and Frenesi before his death, all very surreal, as though Dr 
Elasmo was easing his way into the land of the dead. ( Dentists are dark 
forces in Pworld). We also see Rex Snuvvle in his earnest desire to be a 
revolutionary, give the keys of his seriously beloved Porsche to BAAD, 
black revolutionaries who come to COS. The murder of Weed Atman plays 
out and the FBI moves in seizing many students. At the trial later the 
origin of the gun is never pursued. In the aftermath of the FBI action 
when news people ask Vond where the students etc are the response is 
startlingly reminiscent in evasiveness of more recent DOJ interviews:

     “the media toadies present wondered aloud where, in his opinion, if 
it was OK to ask, Mr. Vond, sir, the missing  students might have gotten 
to. Brock replied, “Why, underground, of course. That’s our assumption 
in this, from all we know about them—that they’ve gone underground.” 
Somebody from the radical press must have infiltrated. “You mean they’re 
on the run? Are there warrants out? How come none are listed as federal 
fugitives?” The reporter was led away by a brace of plainclothes heavies 
as Brock Vond genially repeated, highlights dancing merrily on his 
lenses and frames, “Underground, hm? Rapture below. Yes, the gentleman 
in the suit and tie?”


In fact they are housed in detention centers prepared for the occasion( 
See Rex84 Bravo above). DL, Howie and an Sledge of 24fps take a 54 Chevy 
Nomad toward the presumed detention camp, bang through a fence and DL , 
with her skill for invisibility enters the camp using Kunoichi 
forgetfulness and pleasure whammies to get past guards , talk to 
prisoners, and find Frenesi coming out of a dream of a California beach 
town drowned in the green waters of the pacific waiting for the 
restoration of”whatever has been taken, whatever has been lost.” They 
escape and drive through night to a Mexican beach town. Frenesi sits in 
Cafe with DL saying they had been like kids playing, as though cameras 
were guns, not making a difference or stopping the power of the real 
guns. ? witness to truth vs power of state?  Frenesi admits. she could 
have prevented Weed being shot. (Truth being she made sure it happened 
by bringing Rex his forgotten pack with gun.) They fight as Frenesi 
discloses more and Frenesi tries to shift blame to Vond getting her 
hooked on anti-psychotics Thorazine& Stelazine. Irreconcilable DL, 
Sledge Howie drive Frenesi back accross border to drop her in Las 
Suegras( Mothers in Law) where, Prairie recalls Frenesi met Zoyd.

  So the reader is brought back into the present 1984 action. Prairie, 
processing the story and footage is particularly devastated by one photo 
of her mother revealing Frenesi’s dark side.. They are interrupted by a 
call from Zipi on east coast with news that due to astrological 
movements cited by her mother several ex 24fps have been busted. DL does 
a sweep with an FM radio and discovers they are bugged. Looks to Ditzah 
like a last roundup is underway. Prairie asks can this be real.Here 
Pynchon inserts some DL  lines that refer to the reality of the COG /Rex 
84/ Maincore plans mentioned above before they head out for a safer place :


    “Yep, I’ve seen ’em, your mom was in one, you’ll recall, but better 
than us reminiscing and boring you, go to the library sometime and read 
about it. Nixon( Possibly LBJ also in my research) had machinery for 
mass detention all in place and set to go. Reagan’s got it for when he 
invades Nicaragua. Look it up, check it out.”….
“Why would he come after us? Is he trying to roll back time? What is it 
that’s so hard for him to live with?”
“Turn on his past like ’at, don’t know, Ditzah, sounds too weird even 
for Brock.” “Then again, it’s the whole Reagan program, isn’t 
it—dismantle the New Deal, reverse the effects of World War II, restore 
fascism at home and around the world, flee into the past, can’t you feel 
it, all the dangerous childish stupidity—‘I don’t like the way it came 
out, I want it to be my way.’ If the President can act like that, why 
not Brock?”

In a new chapter the action shifts to Brock regretting that he never 
fully possessed Frenesi and determined to re-ignite his ascendance and 
his plans to turn subversives into state assets.

Brock Vond’s genius was to have seen in the activities of the sixties 
left not threats to order but unacknowledged desires for it. While the 
Tube was proclaiming youth revolution against parents of all kinds and 
most viewers were accepting this story, Brock saw the deep—if he’d 
allowed himself to feel it, the sometimes touching—need only to stay 
children forever, safe inside some extended national Family. The hunch 
he was betting on was that these kid rebels, being halfway there 
already, would be easy to turn and cheap to develop. They’d only been 
listening to the wrong music, breathing the wrong smoke, admiring the 
wrong personalities. They needed some reconditioning.

Roscoe( gun), Vond’s underling, is dubious of this plan but is never 
listened to despite his contributions to Vond’s survival,
     "In that memorable dope-field shoot-out, Brock had followed Roscoe 
dumb and terrified as a recruit obeying his sergeant, through the dense 
resin smell, as a great nation pursued its war on a botanical species, 
rounds whinging and burring hotly by through shade leaves, breaking 
stems, knocking seeds out of colas, Brock following every move of 
Roscoe’s stuck like a shadow, till they made it to the chopper and rose 
so swiftly, like a prayer to God, like a pigeon to the sky—“Roscoe,” 
Brock Vond was babbling, “I owe you, oh boy do I, the very biggest one, 
the Big L itself,( p271)

Readers are led through memories, dreams and thoughts deeper into Vond’s 
( fascism’s) disturbing  mental landscape ( humiliation, power seduction 
games, Lambroso based theories of  facially (racially) observable 
criminality,  revelations that he fears sex as stealing his life, of 
dreams in which he is in an asylum trying to shut the widows  when he is 
then raped and killed by a madwoman in the attic)….


      …    “Out in the waking world, of course, he was an entirely 
different fellow, so thoroughly personable, in fact, that maintaining 
even dislike for the Prosecutor was always a chore, even for the 
criminal degenerates he helped put away. He projected a charm that 
appeared to transcend politics, and was known both inside the Beltway 
and out in the field as a sought-after raconteur and bon vivant who 
appreciated fine distinctions in food, wine, music. Women found him 
intensely appealing for reasons they later could or would not specify.….
…Well, what a life, you’d ordinarily say. But Brock coveted more. He’d 
caught a fatal glimpse of that level where everybody knew everybody 
else, where however political fortunes below might bloom and die, the 
same people, the Real Ones, remained year in and year out, keeping what 
was desirable flowing their way.”


Brock is devastated when Frenesi disappears and gets shuffled away from 
his management. The obsession dominates his inner life in a kind of 
reversal of his vision of controlling the youth of the 60s, he is 
fascinated and disgusted as  roles reverse in him and around him, as 
colleagues grow their hair, leave to explore psychedelic culture.

We then  follow Frenesi, Sasha, Hubbel, and Zoyd  as Frenesi slowly 
under influence from her mother’s disapproval of Zoyd, post partem 
depression so bad she yells at Sasha to “get her”, the newborn Prairie, 
“the fuck out of here” imagining her as a parasite ,along with soul 
tormenting guilt over her murderous betrayals,  and generally finding 
herself a self caged  animal with a full spectrum of pain meets again 
with Vond,  and splits from the marriage back to being a co-operative 
person for COINTELPRO.
Through Hub’s reminiscences as he holds Prairie, his newborn grandchild, 
we get another glimpse into The labor struggles in post W2 Hollywood, 
the mob control of the all too  pro-studio IATSE union, the demonization 
of worker rights pro-Roosevelt CSU union as communists, the blacklists  
  approved in an act of betrayal by Ronald Reagan as head of screen 
actors guild

With Zoyd we get a glimpse of the music scene and early stages of 
psychedelic influences one of which was an LSD  suffused bonding between 
Zoyd and  the infant Prairie. The Corvairs get a contract with Indolent 
Records, but no album is made.

  Brock Vond, after re-recruiting Frenesi,  and despite his early 
abhorrence for Prairie, decides he wants to  remove Prairie from 
inducing  any mothering  influence on Frenesi, and sends Hector Zuniga 
to plant a giant brick of weed to arrest Zoyd and get hold of the child, 
but Sasha shows up and takes Prairie while Zoyd gets driven away. ( The 
writing here is wryly tenderhearted and full of detail, so much more 
like real events than the scene at COS.) Vond shows up at Zoyds cell and 
negotiates deal where Zoyd disappears with Prairie and no contact with 
Frenesi. Vond seals the nature of the deal by having Zoyd punched in the 
gut. Hector Zuniga gets him to say something uselessly incriminating  
about a friend, thus muddying  Zoyd’s conscience  as a snitch. Zoyd will 
need to apply for disability and get monthly check so they know where he 
is. Zoyd is released

Sasha tells him about Vineland where she has relatives, and which is a 
great place to grow up with redwoods, Pacific coast , rivers and places 
to hide.. Van Meter wants to join him and Zoyd gives him the car and 
they agree to meet later. He and Prairie hitch up to Sacramento first , 
stay for  while at a noisy, smelly commune, which they soon leave  and 
then go to San Francisco ’s Haight to the resplendent  house of Mucho 
Maas, a character from COL49, where Zoyd and Prairie are greeted by 
Mucho’s young girlfriend who takes up Prairie and dances her around  the 
large psychedelic house, Mucho away on a retreat in Marin.   Zoyd sings 
Prairie to sleep with his lullaby, Lawrence of Arabia with his wig wag 
woggledy doo , watches Woody Allen in The Young Kissinger, looks around 
for some pot with no success and we are off into a post-Oedipal history 
of Mucho Maas’s rise as record producer, as a renowned generous provider 
of LSD, and his fall into cocaine addiction ending in major nasal damage 
including green nasal emissions. He goes to rhinologist Hugo 
Splanchnick( splanchnic nerves are nerves connected to major organ 
systems,  (all nerves connected to the brain) who wants him to sign 
pledge in blood to abstain from coke on penalty of death. Unwilling, the 
Rhinologist shows him specimens of brains and sinuses destroyed by coke. 
The upshot is that Mucho goes on the natch and becomes an advocate of 
drug free life.  Zoyd counters with Anslinger and the motive of the 
government to control both drugs and mental freedom including freedom 
from the fear of death illuminated by a shared windowpane experience.( 
1- This may put a different spin on Zoyd’s  annual leap through a 
windowpane.) (2- It also sounds like a  version of the fearlessness to 
challenge the violence of empire induced in early  Christians by faith 
in the resurrection.) ( 3-One can find a connection between 1 and 2 in  
Brian Muraresku’s bestseller The Immortality Key or earlier in the less 
tethered speculations of John Allegro’s Sacred Mushroom and the Cross.
Mucho and Zoyd find  accord in this windowpane experience and listen to 
Sam Cooke


    “I’m not gonna forget,( referring to the windowpane revelation of 
deathlessness)” Zoyd vowed, “fuck ’em. While we had it, we really had 
some fun.”
“And they never forgave us.” Mucho went to the stereo and put on The 
Best of Sam Cooke, volumes 1 and 2, and then they sat together and 
listened, both of them this time, to the sermon, one they knew and felt 
their hearts comforted by, though outside spread the lampless wastes, 
the unseen paybacks, the heartless power of the scabland garrison state 
the green free America of their childhoods even then was turning into."


Zoyd and Prairie get on a Greyhound.  “Crossing the Golden Gate Bridge 
represents a transition, in the metaphysics of the region, there to be 
felt even by travelers unwary as Zoyd.”  I used to cross this bridge 
many times, traveling to our house in Arcata or back to my mother and 
sister in the Bay area where I was born. I personally believe there are 
still areas where  the wild beauty lives and the heart opens to spirit.

Zoyd settles comfortably into Vineland ( a kind of composite of Arcata 
on the north of Humboldt Bay,  plus maybe Blue Lake and Mckinleyville. 
Eureka is on the south side of the Bay) I lived in Arcata to attend 
Humboldt State, work various gigs and start teaching and the description 
of this community and of Humboldt county is rich and accurate. One thing 
that changed about when Zoyd arrives 67-68? was that 101 was altered 
from running through town and was separated to good effect  from the 
town itself with overpasses and onramps.   The description of how Zoyd 
fits into the community  and with his inlaws and finds work is 
realistic. He also fully realizes his role with Prairie

“Zoyd was allowed into the Traverse-Becker annual reunions, as long as 
he brought Prairie, who at about the age of three or four got sick one 
Vineland winter, and looked up at him with dull hot eyes, snot crusted 
on her face, hair in a snarl, and croaked, “Dad? Am I ever gonna get 
bett-or?” pronouncing it like Mr. Spock, and he had his belated moment 
of welcome to the planet Earth, in which he knew, dismayingly, that he 
would, would have to, do anything to keep this dear small life from harm,..”

“he at last began, even out scuffling every day, to relax some, to 
understand that this had been the place to bring her and himself after 
all, that for the few years anyway, he must have chosen right for a 
change, that time they’d come through the slides and storms to put in 
here, to harbor in Vineland, Vineland the Good.”


  The New chapter
brings us forward in time to 1984 and a kind of parallel picnic of 
Thanatoids  and the sprawling Becker and Traverse Families. The 
Thanatoids emit a desolate howling picked up down in LA  on Takeshi’s 
electronic tuning device and heard by Prairie and DL. Prairie is hanging 
out with an old friend from Vineland and we get a taste of suburban mall 
California consumption culture, teenage style preoccupations and their 
perceptions of the difference between on-screen reality and real life. 
Che runs away sometimes, fights with her mom and her mom’s boyfriend and 
has been in juvie


“It was a close call, you could see he was torn between coming after me 
and tryin’ to save that bourbon—last I saw as I was running out he was 
down tryin’ to suck what he could up off of the floor, had to keep 
spittin’ out little slivers of Elvis’s head—but he looked up at me, and 
his face was just full of murder, you know that look?”
Prairie realized she didn’t . . . and then, with a stab of sadness, that 
Ché did. ...
“So what the fuck,” Ché asked softly, “am I supposed to do? I keep 
getting these business offers from gentlemen in megastretch limos, and 
some of ’m I think seriously about.”

Che is also into joyriding in borrowed vehicles and playing centerfold 
sexy and bad girl. Pynchon clearly wants to show the range of pressures 
and choices open to Prairie, whose very name suggests such openness. He 
also seems to have mixed feelings about adapting to a culture steeped in 
consumerism, advertising, image and  sex as a commodity, conveying both 
the allure and emptiness of that culture. Prairie is at once wary and 
entranced by Che and her family struggles, and she discloses to Che her 
own inner relation to her absent mother Frenesi before leaving for 
Vineland:“Sometimes,” she’d told Ché, “when I get very weird, I go into 
this alternate-universe idea, and wonder if there isn’t a parallel world 
where she decided to have the abortion, get rid of me, and what’s really 
happening is is that I’m looking for her so I can haunt her like a 
ghost.” The closer they got to Shade Creek, the more intense this 
feeling grew.”


Before leaving with Takeshi and DL in a Lamborghini Ditzahs film lab in 
her garage gets burned down by Justice department people, seemingly 
wiping out any counter-narrative about the College of the Surf, the 
murder of Weed Atman, and the disappearances of students. This forecasts 
the current war over video footage, police cams etc in a world where 
everyone carries a video camera and government agents do bad shit.
KARMA, DUE PROCESS, THE UNDEAD PAST, MOTHER AND CHILD REUNION,


When Takeshi and crew arrive in Vineland they find Brock Vond and his 
small army set up by the airport and Hector with a film crew intent on 
making his cops saving America movie, asking about Frenesi, and 
disturbing the Thanatoids.  Why they are freaking is unclear. Maybe he 
represents the TV lies that have shaped their fates,  but we get a 
glimpse into how far Hector has gone into the  tubal addiction he shares 
with the thanatoids:
“Who could have foreseen that Hector would have such an abnormally 
sensitive mentality that scarcely an hour of low-toxicity programming a 
day would be more than enough to jolt it into a desperate craving for 
more? He crept out of his ward at night to lurk anywhere Tubes might be 
glowing, to bathe in rays, lap and suck at the flow of image, more out 
of control than ever before in his life,..”

This opens another lengthy  digression into Hector Zuniga’s escape from 
Tubal Detox followed by his  movie-deal connection to Sid Liftoff and 
Ernie Triggerman. These guys are Hollywood deal makers ; and both are 
coke users trying to clear their own  records, and to cash in on the 
potential profit from the wave of Reagan driven anti-drug hysteria. The 
pairing of TV addiction and the war on drugs  is obvious source material 
for satire. In a capitalist economy saturated in mind and body-altering 
chemistry and centuries of practice at feeding a wide array of 
addictions, the attempt to sort the acceptable and therapeutic  from the 
dangerous, by people whose moral consistency is on a par with Mafia 
members, deserves ridicule; and Pynchon is happy to provide it.

   “Hector assumed parallels were being drawn to back in ’51, when HUAC 
came to town, and the years of blacklist and the long games of spiritual 
Monopoly that had followed. Did he give a shit? Communists then, dopers 
now, tomorrow, who knew, maybe the faggots, so what, it was all the same 
beef, wasn’t it? Anybody looking like a normal American but living a 
secret life was always good for a pop if times got slow—easy and 
cost-effective, that was simple Law Enforcement 101. But why right now?”

Vineland was published in 1990, and bounces back and forth between the 
60s and 1984.

In the 60s he wrote the Crying of Lot 49, set in the early 60s which 
includes 2 major plot lines. These plot lines are brought together by 
the investigations of a woman executor into the will of a robber baron 
modeled after Howard Hughes. One plot concerns the control of the postal 
service, one is about a Jacobean play with 2-3 versions depicting the 
murders of a king and his heir by an unscrupulous rival using hired 
killers from one of these postal enterprises. The postal service  and 
warring kingdoms is clearly meant to stand for the control of private 
communication. The murderous war and the differing versions of the play 
, fit easily into the political murders of the 60s  and the question who 
will shape political direction and who will tell history’s story. It is 
also firmly set in suburban  southern California’s aerospace defense 
industry culture, the emerging psychedelic culture, COINTELPRO mind 
control experiments, sexual ‘liberation’, and the war over the emerging 
digital communications and data management systems.

The great writers of Pynchon’s  time and really of any time imagine 
cultural, historic and technological context with equal intensity as 
character, dramatic conflict, atmospheric setting etc.  In this case the 
changing  technologies of communication from oral priesthoods to 
writing  , to printing press, to radio, TV and computers  and the roles 
they play in our lives is something Pynchon wants to write about and to 
compel his audience to think about. One of many probing sentences and 
jokes on this theme takes place in the Tubal Detox bed-time lullabye
It’s dri-ving you, insane! It’s shoot-ing rays, at you, Over ev’ry-thing 
ya do, It sees you in your bedroom, And—on th’ toi-let too! Yoo Hoo! The 
Tube. . . . It knows, your ev’ry thought, Hey, Boob, you thought you 
would- T’n get caught— While you were sittin’ there, starin’ at “The 
Brady Bunch,” Big fat computer jus’ Had you for lunch, now Th’ Tube— 
It’s plugged right in, to you!

In the 1980’s, a time of transition from video and film to digital, 
Pynchon is showing  how quickly we may move into the fulfillment of Big 
brother watching,  of secret detention centers, hidden state violence, 
the passivity and addictive consumption of a zombified culture. But he 
is also reminding us of another history and culture, do it yourself 
building, home made songs and music, unions, connecting to the wild 
places within and around, of families full of life and differences, of 
history defined by real people, by campfire stories, by confrontations 
with the fascism of our time.  He is showing us that the allure of 
safety through policing, wars and conformity leads to intolerant and 
violent over-reaction to even the gentlest pursuit of freedom.

Hector Z seems like a novice to professional scumbag tv/movie producers 
Sid and Ernie, but drives a hard bargain on his take for the film 
production using a kind of one-man god-cop, bad-cop act. He finds 
Frenesi in Vegas working as cocktail waitress, shows her a photo of 
Prairie and Zoyd  and wants her to direct his film. She is shaken by the 
photo but not interested in working with Hector. She does take his money 
for tickets to Vineland, money distributed by another COINTELPRO cop who 
tells them Brock Vond, now running the VL airport  may be rogue or may 
be supported from high up. After Frenesi almost refusing to cross a 
picket line the picketers tell them it is ok and  she, Justin and Flash 
fly to Vineland where they are met by Hector who takes them to a Hotel 
and gets them food.

   Hector comes marinated in TV references and tubal detox jokes. 
Despite the ease with which he gives into using cocaine or weed, despite 
planting evidence for creeps, despite knowing he is a TV addict, he 
still aspires to feed the public’s appetite for cop shows where the good 
guys are catching the bad guys and saving America from Americans, and  
he still sees himself as the potential hero of the kind of cop shows 
that have shaped the sad fiction that is his life. Frenesi sees the 
insanity, but  also that she is living much the same life.  In Vegas 
they end up dancing, him thinking of his ex , Debbi, her moved by his 
unexpected grace and thinking of Prairie.
  After this memory from Vegas, the scene moves to the Cucumber lounge 
where Ralph Wayvone, uninspired by the family business, is bombing badly 
at his aspiration to do standup comedy. Hector is there to check out the 
vomitones for his film. Zoyd is there  too and we get a sense of the 
house he has built for himself and Prairie from scrounge and imagination 
and love, now threatened by Feds acting  like an occupying army.

“…most of Brock’s troops had departed after terrorizing the neighborhood 
for weeks, running up and down the dirt lanes in formation chanting 
“War-on-drugs! War-on-drugs!” strip-searching folks in public, killing 
dogs, rabbits, cats, and chickens, pouring herbicide down wells that 
couldn’t remotely be used to irrigate dope crops, and acting, indeed, as 
several neighbors observed, as if they had invaded some helpless land 
far away, instead of a short plane ride from San Francisco.”

  Of course the helpless lands far away under Reagan - El Salvador, 
Guatemala and Nicaragua -were not really any  further  from LAX than 
Humboldt County.  Zoyd inquires with Van Meter and his lawyer about 
getting weapons, maybe recruiting a motorcycle gang  for resistance who 
had donned the name of a monastic order of nuns. Mostly  this is angry 
human fantasy, he wants his homestead back, his life, his daughter, his 
world , his dog.
The burden of proof, Elmhurst explained, would be reversed here—to get 
his property back, Zoyd would first have to prove his innocence. “What 
about ‘innocent till proven guilty’?” “That was another planet, think 
they used to call it America, long time ago, before the gutting of the 
Fourth Amendment. You were automatically guilty the minute they found 
that marijuana growing on your land.” “Wait—I wasn’t growin’ nothin’.” 
“They say you were. Duly sworn officers of the law, wearing uniforms, 
packing guns, bound to uphold the Constitution, you think men like that 
would lie?”

I cannot help but observe here that the political  ambiguities and 
narrative circuitousness  that mark the writing of COL49 is distinctly 
absent in Pynchon’s Vineland, particularly as to the historical and 
legal seizure of unconstitutional power by the U.S. executive branch.  
These violations lay the foundation for Trump’s current activities which 
do not look so unique for those who were the targets of the Reagan right 
or LBJ, Nixon CIA and COINTELPRO, those deemed by Reagan not to be real 
nuns but radical communist sympathizers , probably about to ride into 
town with AKs on Harleys. Of course all of these shenanigans are couched 
in satirically barbed humor that  is often fearlessly goofy or over the 
top.

Sasha pulls into town in a candy colored stretch limo to attend the 
annual Traverse-Becker picnic. She seems to have shape-shifted to a more 
libidinous soul having just shifted her affections after a yelling 
match,  from Tex Wiener( Texas Wieners are deep fried hot dogs made 
famous in New Jersey)”fooled once agin by a uniform”to “Derek, a 
terminal sobriety case who favored leather, metal, Nazoid regalia,”. She 
is in the same hotel as Frenesi and they run into each other, sit down 
stare at each other intensely, then jitterbug to old swing tunes. The 
2nd instance of recociliation through dance. That night Sasha dreams 
Frenesi is a melon in a melon patch under a lunar spell which Sasha 
breaks with a kiss.
No, I would not give you false hope
On this strange and mournful day
But the mother and child reunion
Is only a motion away …        Paul Simon


Prairie hanging out at shade creek with DL, Ortho Bob, Weed and Takeshi. 
She knows the reunion is her best chance to see her mother but is not 
sure she wants to go.They are at the Zero Inn and a band sings a song 
about Vietnam.
Like a meat loaf. . . like a meat loaf. . . .  Like a meat loaf for, 
your, lunch. . .
  Like a meat loaf in, a lunch-box, Like monkeys in, a grave, We went 
among the Vietnamese,
Some souls for to save. . . . Them souls did some scufflin’ Uh them uh 
monkeys, did too,
‘Twas your bleedin’ feedin’    time, at the zoo.
So we took in, the Mar-ble Moun-tain, And the Perfume River too, 
Sometimes, we found, a bunch of them,
Sometimes, we missed a few, And most times, the things, we seen, we 
didt- ‘N want to see much more than once,
Like the graveyard full of meat loaf, And monkeys for your lunch. . . . 
Like a meat loaf, Like a meat loaf, Like a meat loaf for, your, lunch. . .
. Well we followed our dicks [applause] just a couple o’ clicks,
Down the trail, by the bor-derline, Somebody said, it was ’sixty-eight, 
Others said ’sixty-nine,
But sometimes it felt like neither one, and other Times it felt like both,
With a grave-box for your lunch meat, Full of good ol’ monkey loaf.

Is this dark song cheering-up the Thanatoids including Weed and Ortho 
Bob because it refrains the anger of the angry ghosts? Vietnam is a 
culture that believes in and experiences ghosts as real. Is Pynchon 
invoking the hundreds of thousands of dead because they are about to 
witness a turn in the karmic currents? Because they are hearing their 
cries for justice in a new generation? Where  does the anger go? Will 
there be an end to dining on death? Who is most damaged by the 
cultivation of merciless anger, the Thanatoids or those who damaged them?

Prairie’s reluctance to go to the reunion is brought into a different 
dimensional perspective when Weed Atman says he could have been her, 
entered her mother’s womb from the bardo, but his confusion and 
reluctance trapped him in the nether world.  Ortho Bob’s status is 
similar. Both want the score settled but, but Weed has grown tired of 
harassing Frenesi with his limited ghostly powers; He is weary, not 
ready to forgive but ready to forget. He asks Prairie to visit him after 
she returns home and she agrees. How do we as readers make sense of  the 
Thanatoids or Takeshi, of these interactions between the living and the 
dead? Even if we do not accept the ancient beliefs which prevail 
throughout the world of connections to ancestors or reincarnation, there 
are powerful forces in human affairs that do not disappear through death 
or looking away. A character from Faulkner once said:

“ The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”

Pynchon nudges us forward in time from the talk with Weed to the family 
reunion playing crazy eights  and other fragments of her future which 
seems to include Sasha reminiscing about her childhood and Frenesi. 
Later Hub Gates shows up, starts to bond with Justin; Justin connects 
with with his sister Prairie, while Zoyd and Flash go to get more beer, 
connecting around mutual desire to cancel Brock Vond’s series.

“Soon Traverses and Beckers were filling up the benches at the long 
redwood tables, as the potato salad and bean casseroles and fried 
chicken started to appear, along with pasta dishes and grilled tofu 
contributed by younger elements, and the eating, which would continue 
into the night, got under way with some earnestness. It was the heart of 
this gathering meant to honor the bond between Eula Becker and Jess 
Traverse, that lay beneath, defined, and made sense of them all, 
distributed from Marin to Seattle, Coos Bay to downtown Butte, choker 
setters and choppers, dynamiters of fish, shingle weavers and 
street-corner spellbinders, old and beaten at, young and brand-new, they 
all kept an eye on the head of the table, where Jess and Eula sat 
together, each year smaller and more transparent, waiting for Jess’s 
annual reading of a passage from Emerson he’d found and memorized years 
ago, quoted in a jailhouse copy of The Varieties of Religious 
Experience, by William James. Frail as the fog of Vineland, in his 
carrying, pure voice, Jess reminded them,” ‘Secret retributions are 
always restoring the level, when disturbed, of the divine justice. It is 
impossible to tilt the beam. All the tyrants and proprietors and 
monopolists of the world in vain set their shoulders to heave the bar. 
Settles forever more the ponderous equator to its line, and man and 
mote, and star and sun, must range to it, or be pulverized by the 
recoil.’” He had a way of delivering it that always got them going, and 
Eula wouldn’t take her eyes off him. “And if you don’t believe Ralph 
Waldo Emerson,” added Jess, “ask Crocker ‘Bud’ Scantling,” the head of 
the Lumber Association whose life of impunity for arranging to drop the 
tree on Jess had ended abruptly down on 101 not far from here when he’d 
driven his week-old BMW into an oncoming chip truck at a combined speed 
of about 150. It’d been a few years now, but Jess still found it 
entertaining.”

Zoyd, Flash and Isaiah 2:4 are away from the crowd when they are joined 
by Prairie, “all familied out”, they talk and she lies down to rest and 
is awakened by Brock Vond descending from a helicopter,   We never know 
for certain what BV intend’s with Prairie but there are a few lines with 
his sidekick Roscoe that are pretty fucking creepy. 1st: “The key is 
rapture. Into the sky, and the world knows her no more.” 2nd: Roscoe in 
his time had done a heckuva lot worse than abduct kids. He imagined 
himself grown oversize, beastlike, scuffling along beside a more 
human-faced Brock Vond. “Her tits, Master—”
“Nice firm adolescent tits, Roscoe, tits like juicy apples.”  His every 
thought seems to come from hell.

"She lay paralyzed in her childhood sleeping bag with the duck decoys on 
the lining and saw that even in the shadows his skin glowed unusually 
white. For a second it seemed he might hold her in some serpent hypnosis.
  But she came fully awake and yelled in his face, “Get the fuck out of 
here!”
“Hello, Prairie. You know who I am, don’t you?
She pretended to find something in the bag. “This is a buck knife. If 
you don’t—”
“But Prairie, I’m your father. Not Wheeler—me. Your real Dad.”
Nothing that hadn’t occurred to her before—still, for half a second, she 
began to go hollow, before remembering who she was. “But you can’t be my 
father, Mr. Vond,” she objected, “my blood is type A. Yours is 
Preparation H.”
By the time Brock figured out the complex insult, he was also feeling 
mixed signals through the cable that held him. Suddenly,...”


Vond is yanked away because the entire operation is canceled by Reagan, 
decides to ignore the order and the next he knows he is in a compacted  
car then  steps out and picks up a telephone with Vato on the other end. 
He  is picked up by Vato and Blood who ferry him deeper and deeper into 
the underworld telling him a Yurok story about crossing the last river:

"Across the river Brock could see lights, layer after layer, crookedly 
ascending, thickly crowded dwellings, heaped one on the other. In the 
smoking torch- and firelight he saw people dancing. An old woman and an 
old man approached. The man carried objects in his hands that Brock 
couldn’t make out clearly. Then he began to notice, all around in the 
gloom, bones, human bones, skulls and skeletons. “What is it?” he asked. 
“Please.” “They’ll take out your bones,” Vato explained. “The bones have 
to stay on this side. The rest of you goes over. You look a lot 
different, and you move funny for a while, but they say you’ll adjust. 
Give these third-worlders a chance, you know, they can be a lotta fun.” 
“So long, Brock,” said Blood.

HEAVEN AND HELL, REUNION, VISION QUESTS, THE PURPOSE OF STORIES


Meanwhile Prairie meets a foxy blond young Russian named Alexei, just 
ashore from a Fishing boat, who is looking for Billy Barf and the 
Vomitones to sit in. The news about Vond’s timely demise circulates 
quickly among the Thanatoids, where DL and Takeshi hear it. Time 
apparently gets distorted and stretchy when you hang out with Tubal 
addict ghosts and a couple years of Takeshi and DL’s life get magically  
filled in where the no sex clause is revoked to the benefit of both, and 
sister Rochelle, during the annual puncutron adjustment, while  trying 
to figure out who are  the faceless beings chasing Takeshi, tells him a 
story about the war over earth between heaven and hell.  Sister 
Rochelle, as so often in the past, now socked Takeshi with another of 
her allegories, this time about Hell.

     “When the Earth was still a paradise, long long ago, two great 
empires, Hell and Heaven, battled for its possession. Hell won, and 
Heaven withdrew to an appropriate distance. Soon citizens of the Lower 
Realm were flocking up to visit Occupied Earth on group excursion fares, 
swarming in their asbestos touring cars and RV’s all over the landscape, 
looking for cheap-labor bargains in the shops, taking pictures of each 
other in a blue and green ambience that didn’t register on any film you 
could buy down in Hell—till the novelty wore off, and the visitors began 
to realize that Earth was just like home, same traffic conditions, 
unpleasant food, deteriorating environment, and so forth. Why leave home 
only to find a second-rate version of what they were trying to escape? 
So the tourist business began to dwindle, and then the Empire was 
calling back first its administrators and soon even its troops, as if 
drawing inward, closer to its own chthonian fires. After a while, the 
tunnel entrances began to grow over, blur, and disappear behind poison 
oak and berry bushes, get covered by landslides, silted up in floods, 
till only a few lone individuals—children, neighborhood idiots—now and 
then would stumble on one, out in a deserted place, but dare inside only 
as far as the first turnings and loss of outdoor light. And then all the 
gateways to Hell were finally lost to sight, surviving only in local 
tales handed down the generations, sad recitals that asked why the 
visitors never came anymore, and if they would again, stories as 
congested and dark as UFO stories are ethereal and luminous. And always 
shamefaced, with an air not of UFO elation but of guilt, at having 
somehow not been good enough for them, the folks who lived in Hell. So, 
over time, Hell became a storied place of sin and penitence, and we 
forgot that its original promise was never punishment but reunion, with 
the true, long-forgotten metropolis of Earth Unredeemed.”

So all kinds of questions pop out in this minimalist allegory: 1) when 
was earth a paradise and for whom? and what does that mean? 2) Heaven 
vs. Hell. what defines them? Why are they called empires? Did Hell win 
or did Heaven simply withdraw from the battlefield? Doesn’t Heaven 
outgun Hell with 2 out of 3 angels? 3) Why did paradise go bad in the 
same way as Hell? 4)Was Hell always underground and What does that imply 
about earth’s degradation? What does it mean to miss visitors from Hell? 
Isn’t there as much darkness in the heavens as underground? ?Guilt at 
not being good enough for Hell?  What is the elation of UFOs?
    5)What is the reunion promised by hell?  Why is that question about 
reunion placed here in the novel at the time of family reunion,  of Vato 
and Blood taking Brock Vond into the underworld, of karmic adjustment, 
of the end of the no sex clause?

Am I taking this brief story too seriously?  Definitely more than say… 
Pee Wee Herman in the Robert Musil story . Could Pynchon be using this 
twist on common mythic material in the same way as his earlier use of 
Dante’s Divine Comedy(V) or the myths of Orpheus and Euridice (GR and 
ATD)or Narcissus and Echo (COL 49)?

Ok , the best I can do as a reader is offer my own try at  some of these 
questions based on the context of my review of the novel and its themes 
and based on a plausible moral position which I feel to be coming from 
both the novel and this little metaphysical allegory about heaven and hell.

Seems to me that Hell is primarily identified with the metaphysics , 
technos and materials of the interior of the earth: The power of gravity 
and the physics of matter, stone, fire, oil, shit;  to control matter, 
to control fire, to control metals and minerals, to control the power to 
build or destroy, to control humans and establish hierarchies of 
dominance, acceptance of servitude, to control through fear of death and 
the judgement of hell,  to control through the allure of physical 
grandeur,  the allure of status and objects, food and clothing that is 
rare and artfully made, the allure of freedom from moral restraint, the 
indulgence of any whim. We are led to the idea in this myth that Hell is 
an empire that mastered these things before using them to win an earthly 
paradise from heaven. In Pynchon’s world these are qualities and a 
worldview associated with V. and those imprinted with V in their names.

The strategy and powers of the empire of Heaven are less clear in this 
myth, but I want to suggest that it is not angels with swords, or at 
least not primarily so, but messengers of freedom, of the inclusiveness 
of family and healing love, the inclusiveness of an infinite field of 
stars, an infinite connection to consciousness, pretty much the standard 
Avatar message of you can have everything if you learn to share, to ask, 
to open heart and mind, to be thankful, to be fearless, to love.

Luminous vessels of light from the infinity of space are contrasted with 
bad “traffic conditions, unpleasant food, deteriorating environment, and 
so forth.” In the novel the security and life-and-death power of the 
rulers of the state is contrasted with life in a family based community 
in a place still alive with Redwood groves, salmon runs, free rock and 
roll, Wobblie anarchists. In a similar way sex as stolen pleasure, sex 
as dishonest and manipulative seduction, sex as union with security and 
power are contrasted with sex as the search for family, for the real, 
for the intimacy of deeply shared life. There is no perfection in  
Vineland  in either state or family. Sincere love can imprison, false 
love leads to soul death . But what we are offered in Prairie is the 
possibility of wising up to the world while still young and before 
serious mistakes have been made. In some sense it is the entire project 
of literature. It requires that we know our own weaknesses, our real 
history, the pressure that life will bring, and a variety of friends and 
acquaintances. It is hard not to be hopeful for Prairie and her future 
as their dog Desmond comes bounding up looking for and carrying home.

  Andrew Schellings remarkably rich book Tracks Along The Left Coast; 
Jaime De Angulo & Pacific Coast Culture, among several other things 
delves into Jaime and his wife Lucy Freeland’s contacts with the tribal 
peoples located in the 6 rivers region( they were linguists and 
researchers into traditional culture). They were often based in Arcata 
Ca. It is their research from which come the images of the dead leaving 
behind their bones before crossing into the land of the dead. Other 
regional indigenous  names and stories  in Vineland also come from this 
research. One of the common practices of native tribes of california was 
seeking contact with spirits as a passage to adulthood. It was not 
something looked forward to. It was scary, unfamiliar territory and the 
stories were often far from comforting. But getting the power to 
integrate into adulthood and the full dimensions of the community 
required facing those fears and finding ones connections to the wild 
spirits, either plants , animals, insects, rivers etc.. They often 
brought back songs of power to keep that connection alive. I would 
suggest there is a version of that in Prairies journey, and even that 
there is no way of evading that process of individuation as we take a 
role in the events of our time.That we must face the failures of our 
parents and histories, our own fears and weakness and find our own 
poetry, strengths and beauty.

This mythic version of the  promise of reunion between earth and hell  
seems to me to be about the possibility of  renewed contact between hell 
and heaven in  the earthly midpoint of human life. In the novel Frenesi 
has done some real bad shit, but she is still loved, still has a home. 
Her reunion and ongoing transformation ripples out among the living and 
many of the dead,  the effects of that tranformation is the powerful 
core  of the novel’s ever circulating electromagnetic field. Karmic 
adjustement,  Takeshi’s oriental love magic.

Our conceptions of heaven and  also our conceptions of hell are both 
seriously imbalanced, both warlike, both leaving a trail of suffering 
far greater than is needed. Reunion is not conquest, it is more like the 
Yin Yang symbol, no light without dark, no movement without circulation, 
no leaving without return, no struggle without a handshake and embrace, 
no delicate fauns or quails without wolves and  lynxes.