Day-off links

• Our lovely little city was founded on this day in 1525, and so we all get to stay home on a Tuesday.
• Darby climbs aboard the Inconvenience and inevitably, irrevocably gets it.
• Marcelo explains why literature "no longer exists in its own sphere, self-referential, imbued with a sense of mission and exceptionalism"--and tosses Sebald and Aira into the mix.
• ReadySteadyBook hosts a gratifying essay on Cortázar by Kit Maude.
• The Quarterly Conversation is beautifully redesigned.

Rue du Départ

Notes on the fifth and final part of Against the Day (see also Part One, Part Two, Part Three, and Part Four).

~ p. 1074: Quite an eye-catching Freudian slip: "Reef, Stray, and Ljubica returned to the U.S. pretending to be Italian immigrants." Of course, it's not Stray (Reef's first wife), it's Yashmeen. Which makes me wonder if there's an alternate version to this story that didn't get completely edited out or if it was simply a proofreader trying to have some fun...

~ p. 1076: A worthwhile topic:

Jesse brought home as an assignment from school "write an essay on What It Means To Be An American."

"Oboy, oboy." Reef had that look on his face, the same look his own father used to get just before heading off for some dynamite-related activities. "Let's see that pencil a minute."

"Already done." What Jesse had ended up writing was,

It means do what they tell you and take what they give you and don't go on strike or their soldiers will shoot you down.

"That's what they call the 'topic sentence'?"

"That's the whole thing."

"Oh."

It came back with a big A+ on it. "Mr. Becker was at the Cour d'Alene back in the olden days. Guess I forgot to mention that."

~ p. 1077: A recurring theme:

"The world came to an end in 1914."

~ p. 1078: Kit is confronted with

a startling implication of Zermelo's Axiom of Choice. It was possible in theory, he was shown beyond a doubt, to take a sphere the size of a pea, cut it apart into several very precisely shaped pieces, and reassemble it into another sphere the size of the sun.

"Because one emits light and the other doesn't, don't you think."

Kit was taken aback. "I don't know."

He spent awhile contemplating this. Zermelo had been a docent at Göttingen when Kit was there and, like Russell, had been preoccupied with the set of all sets that are not members of themselves. He was also notorious around the beer halls for a theory that no expedition could ever reach either of the poles, because the amount of whisky needed was directly proportional to the tangent of the latitude. Polar latitude being 90°, this meant a value approaching infinity--Q.E.D. It didn't surprise Kit much that the peculiar paradox should be traceable in some way back to Zermelo.

~ p. 1081: Here is more evidence and an expansion of my theory from Part Three, p. 596 that the Afghani dirhan around Yashmeen's neck is the "ancient coin" of the novel's cover. Lord Overlunch explains Kit's visit to Shambhala via a certain stamp:

"I like to look at these all carefully with the loupe at least once a week, and today I noticed something different about this ten-dirhan design, and wondered if possibly someone, some rival, had crept in here while I was out and substituted a variant. But of course I found the change immediately, the one face that was missing, your own, I know it well by now, it is, if you don't mind my saying so, the face of an old acquaintance...."

"But I wasn't..."

"Well, well. A twin, perhaps."

I still tend to think that the dirhan is Yashmeen's and the image is Shambhala after all.

~ p. 1084: The Chums' wives are going to have babies and suddenly the writing has switched to the present tense:

As the sails of her destiny can be reefed against too much light, so they may also be spread to catch a favorable darkness. Her ascents are effortless now. It is no longer a matter of gravity--it is an acceptance of sky.

Glorious life continues...as the novel ends.

~ p. 1085: "They fly toward grace."

Against the Day

Notes on the fourth part of Against the Day (see also Part One, Part Two, and Part Three).

Since I've finished, it's been interesting to think about how the multitude of characters and locations actually serve to diminish distances. Yes, it's a sprawling, expansive, huge novel--but reading large chunks at once really left me with the impression of the tightly knitted, interconnected nature of global community. Nothing happens in isolation, but is a consequence of other occurrences, decisions, and seemingly "random" events.

It's also interesting that although the focal point of the novel is World War I, we never actually see it take place. Rather, the narrative deals with the events that lead up to it and then the aftermath.

~ p. 735: Dally's dilemma about Kit:

What did she want? Wasn't this just Merle all over again? That alchemy, the magic crystals, the obsessive assaults on the Mysteries of Time, she'd really believed once that she had to get away from that before it drove her as crazy as her Pa, and now, would you just look, here she was getting it back, here was another lunatic, somebody this time leaving her, to go search for an invisible city over the edge of the world.

~ p. 738: Andrea Tancredi rails against the massive buying and selling of art (what Scarsdale Vibe is up to, because after all, everything comes back to chasing light):

"It's not the price tag," Tancredi cried, "it's what comes after--investment, reselling, killing something born in the living delirium of paint meeting canvas, turning it into a dead object, to be traded, on and on, for whatever the market will bear. A market whose forces are always exerted against creation, in the direction of death."

~p. 744: An artist's redemption:

He was a virtuous kid, like all these fucking artists, too much so for the world, even the seen world they were trying to redeem one little rectangle of canvas at a time.

~ p. 749: From Yashmeen's letter to her "father":

"For what mission have I here, in this perilous segment of space-time, if not somehow to transcend it, and the tragic hour into which it is passing?

"Mathematics once seemed the way--the internal life of numbers came as a revelation to me, perhaps as it might have to a Pythagorean apprentice long ago in Crotona--a reflection of some less-accessible reality, through close study of which one might perhaps learn to pass beyond the difficult given world."

~ p. 757: An amusing exchange:

"Fond of the English, are you sir."

"I love Gweat Bwitain! Lord Salisbuwy is my wole model!"

~ p. 761: The curse of Tamerlane's tomb

~ p. 762: "Invisible birds, collecting against the night, sang boisterously."

~ p. 777: Lieutenant Prance sets Kit straight on the matter of American history--how political or economic motives are exposed as religious ones.

~ p. 779: The Tunguska event becomes one of the central moments of the novel, affecting all characters and upsetting the balance of nature. It's fascinating how Pynchon explores the possible implications of a historical fact, tying together the various mathematical theories and ideas that coalesce throughout the story. Reading this list of literary references to the event, I was a little surprised by the connection that is made:

Thomas Pynchon's book Against the Day, puts forth a complex explanation for the Tunguska event, centering around the idea that an expedition near the North Pole unearthed a sentient geological being which, after being transported to the Tunguska area, proceeded to unleash rage-fueled destruction on the humans that transported him.

It looks like I'm going to have to reread it (someday), because I did not pick up on that at all. (This probably has something to do with the fact that it took me nearly a year to make it half-way, and then only a few weeks to finish the rest.)

~ p.782: Someone's conclusion about the Event's cause:

"Exactly what I'm saying. Time-travel isn't free, it takes energy. This was an artifact of repeated visits from the future."

~ p. 793: Shambhala is revealed in the aftermath of the Event, but then so are the Chums:

What it would take the boys longer to understand was that the great burst of light had also torn the veil separating their own space from that of the everyday world, and that for the brief moment they had also met the same fate as Shambhala, their protection lost, and no longer able to count on their invisibility before the earthbound day.

This is another thing I didn't fully realize: the Chums of Chance are fictional characters to this world of "real" people. Fictions within the fiction, finally exposed.

~ p. 794: The theory that Tesla had something to do with it is discussed. (The Tom Swift reference is particularly funny.)

~ p. 805: "As nights went on and nothing happened and the phenomenon slowly faded to the accustomed deeper violets again, most had difficulty remembering the earlier rise of heart, the sense of overture and possibility, and went back once again to seeking only orgasm, hallucinaion, stupor, sleep, to fetch them through the night and prepare them against the day."

~ p. 809: A nice little history lesson describing the events leading up to WWI. (Much more intelligible than what gets stuck into history texts these days.)

~ p. 815-16: Yashmeen on the verge of her revelation:

Just for the instant, the matter was illuminated, unequivocally, something as obvious as Ramanujan's Formula--no, something of which Ramanujan's Formula was a special case--revealed why Riemann should have hypothesized one-half as the real part of every ζ(0), why he had needed to, at just that point in his thinking...she was released into her past, haunting her old self, almost close enough to touch--and then of course it was gone again and she was more immediately concerned with the loss of her hat [...].

I love Peter Keough's idea that the formula of the Quarternionist's beloved Hamilton (i² = j² = k² = ijk = -1) "relates to the structure of the book, each term in the equation applicable to each of the novel’s five sections". I think there's a lot more of this sort of thing going on, and (again) I'd love to read a mathematician's take on it.

~ p. 845: The European Question, "this bad daydream toward which all had been converging, murderous as a locomotive running without lights or signals, unsettling as points thrown at the last minute, awakened from because of some noise out in the larger world, some doorbell or discontented animal, that might remain forever unidentified."

~ p. 867: The description of Penhallow's painting, The Iron Gateway, expresses "his meditation on the fate of Europe" and depicts "shadowy multitudes trooped toward a vanishing line over which broke a hellish radiance." I'm immediately reminded of the vision of the future that the Chums saw from the Time machine--fictional fictional characters peering into the horror of reality.

~ p. 892: So there is doom and gloom, and then this:

"Who, 'Pert? Why she's the most naïvely trusting person I know."

"The woman gets jealous of oatmeal, Hunter." Dally had recently walked in on Ruperta with her face inches from a bowl of steaming porridge, addressing it in a low, vicious snarl [...] while her four-year-old niece Clothilda sat patiently nearby with a spoon and a milk jug.

~ p. 896: Ruperta nearly goes the way of Remedios the Beauty.

~ p. 930: "Frank respected this--who at some point hadn't come to hate the railroad? It penetrated, it broke apart cities and wild herds and watersheds, it created economic panics and armies of jobless men and women, and generations of hard, bleak city-dwellers with no principles who ruled with unchecked power, it took away everything indiscriminately, to be sold, to be slaughtered, to be led beyond the reach of love."

~ p. 934: Anarchists' Golf reminds me of Calvinball.

~ p. 936-37: The map depicting the Renfrew/Werfner "Interdikt" phosgene trap that Lew discovers in London falls into the hands of Cyprian, Yashmeen, and Reef:

Cyprian had been closely scanning the map with a Coddington lens. "Here then, the line-segment of interest seems to be labeled 'Critical Line'--Yashmeen, isn't that Riemann talk?"

She looked. "Except that this one's horizontal, and drawn on a grid of latitude and longitude, instead of real against imaginary values--where Riemann said that all the zeroes of the ζ-function will be found."

The connections don't simply describe each other, they infiltrate meaning.

~ p. 942: Jenny:

"This is our own age of exploration," she declared, "into that unmapped country waiting beyond the frontiers and seas of Time. We make our journeys out there in the low light of the future, and return to the bourgeois day and its mass delusion of safety, to report on what we've seen. What are any of these 'utopian dreams' of ours but defective forms of time-travel?"

~ p. 947: Henry Adams crops up again: there are "dynamos" connected to the Interdikt, tied to the eventual destruction of Europe. (I really do need to find out what else Pynchon has said about him. It's amazing how necessary "The Dynamo and the Virgin" is to understanding what he's up to in this book.)

~ p. 953: The Interdikt's true weapon:

"It seems that isn't a gas weapon, after all," said the motoros. "'Phosgene' is really code for light. We learned it is light here which is really the destructive agent. [...] From military experience with searchlights, it was widely known how effectively light at that candle-power could produce helplessness and fear. The next step was to find away to project it as a stream of destructive energy."

"Fear in lethal form," said Cyprian. "And if all these units, all along this line, went off at once--"

"A great cascade of blindness and terror ripping straight across the heart of the Balkan Peninsula."

~ p. 957: "The Manichæan aspect had grown ever stronger--the obligation of those who took refuge here to be haunted by the unyielding doubleness of everything. Part of the discipline for a postulant was to remain acutely conscious, at every moment of the day, of the nearly unbearable conditions of cosmic struggle between darkness and light proceeding, inescapably, behind the presented world."

~ p. 960: Father Ponko:

"When God hides his face, it is paraphrased as 'taking away' his Shekhinah. Because it is she who reflects his light, Moon to his Sun. Nobody can withstand pure light, let alone see it. Without her to reflect, God is invisible. She is absolutely of the essence if he is to be at all operative in the world."

~ p. 973: "Her love for Ljubica being impenetrable and indivisible as a prime number, other loves must be accordingly reevaluated."

~ p. 983: The meteorites of Mexico: "a gigantic one known as the Chupaderos, whose fragments, weighing in all perhaps fifty tons, had been taken away to the Capital in 1893." Which, of course, was back when our story began, at the World's Fair in Chicago.

~ p. 991-92: Once again, light as flesh:

"In the same way," amplified Günther, "that our Savior could inform his disciples with a straight face that bread and wine were indistinguishable from his body and blood. Light, in any case, among these Indians of Chiapas, occupies an analogous position to flesh among Christian peoples. It is living tissue. As the brain is the outward and visible expression of the Mind."

~ p. 1018: The Chums of Chance "had voted, finally, to disafilliate."

~ p. 1020: "The corollary, Chick had worked out long ago, being that each star and planet we can see in the Sky is but the reflection of our single Earth along a different Minkowskian space-time track. Travel to other worlds is therefore travel to alternate versions of the same Earth. And if going up is like going north, with the common variable being cold, the analogous direction in Time, by the Second Law of Thermodynamics, ought to be from past to future, in the direction of increasing entropy."

~ p. 1023-24: Miles remembers Ryder Thorn and what he wanted him to remember in Flanders, before the beginning of the end:

"Those poor innocencts," he exclaimed in a stricken whisper, as if some blindness had abruptly healed itself, allowing him at last to see the horror transpiring on the ground. "Back at the beginning of this...they must have been boys, so much like us.... They knew they were standing before a great chasm none could see to the bottom of. But they launched themselves into it anyway. Cheering and laughing. It was their own grand 'Adventure.' They were juvenile heroes of a World-Narrative--unreflective and free, they went on hurling themselves into those depths by tens of thousands until one day they awoke, those who were still alive, and instead of finding themselves posed nobly against some dramatic moral geography, they were down cringing in a mud trench swarming with rats and smelling of shit and death."

This novel is (among many other things) a lament for World War I--something the world has never recovered from.

~ p. 1036: Living pictures:

"See, every photographic subject moves," Roswell explained, "even if it's standing still. It breathes, light bounces off, something. Snapping a photograph is like what the math professors call 'differentiating' an equation of motion--freezing that movement into the very small piece of time it takes the shutter to open and close. So we figured--if shooting a photo is like taking a first derivative, then maybe we could find some way to do the reverse of that, start with the still photo and integrate it, recover its complete primative and release it back into action...even back to life..."

~ p. 1048: The potato-salad recipe discussion reminded me of Carl Solomon and the infamous food-fight incident at CCNY around the time (I think) Pynchon was at Cornell.

~ p. 1057: Lake's fate:

Instead she was alone with the sort of recurring dream a long-suffering movie heroine would expect to wake from to find herself pregnant at last.

~ p. 1062: A technological advancement is simply the means by which love can be communicated.

Bilocations

Notes on the third part of Against the Day (see also Part One and Part Two).

~ p. 431: Light as a "secret determinant of history"

~ p. 437: Using Iceland spar to read by...and the polarization of light in time as well as space

~ p. 438: The Manichæans make an appearance:

"Everything you appreciate with your senses, all there is in the given world to hold dear, the faces of your children, sunsets, rain, fragrances of earth, a good laugh, the touch of a lover, the blood of an enemy, your mother's cooking, wine, music, athletic triumphs, desirable strangers, the body you feel at home in, a sea-breeze flowing over unclothed skin--all these for the devout Manichæan are evil, creations of an evil deity, phantoms and masks that have always belonged to time and excrement and darkness."

"But it's everything that matters," protested Chick Counterfly.

Indeed. I could go on about how the Manichæan heresy has invaded fundamentalist Christianity, causing many "Christers" to miss the entire point of the Incarnation and the holiness of day-to-day existence...but I won't. Chick said it all.

~ p. 452-53: On the nature of Time (beneath a whirling tornado)

~ p. 456: Roswell and Merle discuss the lure of light--and its future in the movies, "'the whole idea of a movie projector being built like a clock,'" how Time is "'vulnerable to the force of gravity,'" and the need of making gravity "'impervious to time.'" Merle asks why, and

Roswell shrugged. "It's that one-way business again. They're both forces that act in one direction only. Gravity pulls along the third dimension, up to down, time pulls along the fourth, birth to death."

"Rotate something through space-time so it assumes all positions relative to the one-way vector 'time.'"

"There you go."

~ p. 458: The connection to "'all those Æther folks'" is pointed out: "'We were all probably on to somethin then, didn't know it.'"

~ p. 471: Pynchon draws an interesting parallel between the mothers Mayva and Erlys (who ran off with a magician):

"All the time we were growing up," Frank said, "you wanted to run away and join the carnival?"

"Yes, and there I was with all o' you, right in the carnival, and didn't even know it." And he hoped he'd always be able to recall the way she laughed then.

~ p. 476 & 503: He has "Wall o' Death, Missouri, built around the remains of a carnival, one of many inspired by the old Chicago Fair" where our story begins. Have things come full circle? On p. 503,

The world, since the Chicago Fair of 1893, had undergone a sudden craze for vertical rotation on the grand scale. The cycle, Yashmeen speculated, might only seem reversible, for once to the top and down again, one would be changed "forever." Wouldn't one.

~ p. 498: Yashmeen's preoccupation with Riemann's "Zeta-function problem" has proven to be one of the most thought-provoking elements of the book. I know virtually nothing about higher math, but Pynchon has got me thinking that I'm capable of filling in the blanks of explanations he all but spells out. There are certain connections that I'm just not making...but then, Yashmeen herself is on the verge of understanding as well:

[S]he was not quite able to ignore the question, almost as if he were whispering to her, of why Riemann had simply asserted the figure of one-half at the outset instead of deriving it later.... "One would of course like to have a rigorous proof of this," he wrote, "but I have put aside the search...after some fleeting vain attempts because it is not necessary for the immediate objective of my investigation."

But didn't that then imply...the tantalizing possibility was just out of reach...

...and suppose that at Göttingen [...] he had actually been unable not to go back to it, haunted as anyone since, back to the maddeningly simple series he had found in Gauss and expanded to take account of the whole "imaginary" mirror-world which even Ramanujan here at Trinity had ignored until Hardy pointed it out to him--revisited, in some way relighted the scene, making it possible to prove the conjecture as rigorously as anyone might wish...

(And it's only now that David Leavitt's The Indian Clerk goes into my TBR list...)

~ p. 525: Around the time I reached this page, I heard a reference made to Quaternions on Futurama and realized (I'm embarrassed to admit) that Pynchon did not just make them up. In fact, most of the fun of posting these notes comes from the discoveries of the real personalities and concepts that Pynchon writes about. It's been quite an education. I'd really love to read a mathematician's take on this novel.

~ p. 534: A Quaternioneer's lament:

"Actually Quaternions failed because they perverted what the Vectorists thought they know of God's intention--that space be simple, three-dimensional, and real, and if there must be a fourth term, an imaginary, that it be assigned to Time. But Quaternions came in and turned that all end for end, defining the axes of space as imaginary and leaving Time to be the real term, and a scalar as well--simply inadmissible. Of course the Vectorists went to war. Nothing they knew of Time allowed it to be that simple, any more than they could allow space to be compromised by impossible numbers, earthly space they had fought over uncounted generations to penetrate, to occupy, to defend."

~ pp. 535-36: There is no way I can not quote this:

"Heaviside was once termed 'the Walt Whitman of English Physics'--"

"What...excuse me...does that mean?"

"Open question. Some have found in Heaviside a level of passion or maybe just energy, beyond the truculence already prevailing among the different camps in those days."

"Well if Heaviside's the Whitman," remarked a British attendee nearby in a striking yellow ensemble, "who's the Tennyson, you see?"

"Clerk Maxwell, wouldn't you say?" suggested someone else, as others joined in.

"Making Hamilton I imagine the Swinburne."

"Yes and who'd be Wordsworth then?"

"Grassmann!"

"I say, what an amusing game. And Gibbs? The Longfellow?"

"Is there an Oscar Wilde, by any chance?"

"Let's all go to the Casino!" someone invisible screamed.

~ pp. 538-39: More of Pynchon's little jokes:

"Cambridge personality Bertie ('Mad Dog') Russell observed," observed Barry Nebulay, "that most of Hegel's arguments come down to puns on the word 'is.'"

Due to its "'altogether disquieting square root of minus one,'"

"If you were a vector, mademoiselle, you would begin in the 'real' world, change your length, enter an 'imaginary' reference system, rotate up to three different ways, and return to 'reality' a new person. Or vector."

From one who practices this:

"Each time I become somebody else. It is like reincarnation on a budget, without the element of karma to worry about."

~ p. 543: The phrase "against the day" has a variety of meanings and interpretations, depending on when it appears in the story. This seems to be a central one:

"It's a peculiar game we all play. Against what looms in the twilight of the European future, it doesn't make much sense, this pretending to carry on with the day, you know, just waiting. Everyone waiting."

~ p. 554: Ryder Thorn visits Miles from the future and tells him that

"Flanders will be the mass grave of History."

"Well."

"And that is not the most perverse part of it. They will all embrace death. Passionately."

"The Flemish."

"The world."

The foreshadowing of WWI runs all through the novel, but this is one of the more specific moments.

~ p. 558: The inevitable next step emerges: "'A weapon based on Time.'"

~ pp. 564-5: The terrible weapon is described and it involves light, lenses, and calcite (Iceland spar).

~ p. 571: Luca Zombini's process of creating doubles is a result of a three-dimensional mirror:

"We pass from a system of three purely spatial axes to one with four--space plus time. In this way time enters the effect. The doubles you report having produced are actually the original subjects themselves, slightly displaced in time."

~ p. 577: Hunter Penhallow agonizes:

"Political space has its neutral ground. But does Time? is there such a thing as the neutral hour? one that goes neither forward nor back? is that too much to hope?"

~ pp. 579-80: Penhallow on art (to Dally):

"The body, it's another way to get past the body."

"To the spirit behind it--"

"But not to deny the body--to reimagine it. Even"--nodding over at the Titian on the far wall--"if it's 'really' just different kinds of greased mud smeared on cloth--to reimagine it as light."

This leads into a discussion of a story about Jesus from the "Infancy Gospel of Thomas" that reminds Dally of "that Pentecost story in Acts of the Apostles":

"Apostles are meeting in a house in Jerusalem, you'll recall, Holy Ghost comes down like a mighty wind, tongues of fire and all, the fellas come out and start talking to the crowd outside, who've all been jabbering away in different tongues, there's Romans and Jews, Egyptians and Arabians, Mesopotamians and Cappadocians and folks from east Texas, all expecting to hear just the same old Galilean dialect--but instead this time each one is amazed to hear those Apostles speaking to him in his own language."

Hunter saw her point. "Yes, well it's redemption, isn't it, you expect chaos, you get order instead. Unmet expectations. Miracles."

~ p. 596: Is this describing the coin shown on the jacket cover and the page preceding Part One?

Today [Yashmeen] wore an ancient coin, pierced and simply suspended from a fine silver chain around that ever-fascinating neck.... "It's an Afghani dirhan, from the early days of the Ghaznivid Empire. He gave it to me, for luck."

Is Pynchon slipping us a good-luck charm against the day?

~ p. 613: Lamont Replevin and his religious persuasion:

"They worship it, this empty space, it's their highest form of worship. This volume, or I suppose nonvolume, of pure Akaša--being the Sanskrit for what we'd call Æther, the element closest to the all-pervading Atman, from which everything else has arisen--which in Greek obviously then becomes 'Chaos,' and so down to van Helmont in his alchemist's workshop, who being Dutch writes the opening fricative as a G instead of a Chi, giving us Gas, our own modern Chaos, our bearer of sound and light, the Akaša flowing from our sacred spring, the local Gasworks. Do you wonder that for some the Gas Oven is worshipped at, as a sort of shrine?"

~ p. 616: Yashmeen:

"Lenin himself is said to be writing a gigantic book now, attempting to refute the 'fourth dimension,' his position being, from what I can gather, that the Tsar can only be overthrown in three."

~ p. 633: Another joke at Bertrand's expense--a certain mural depicts: "a mischievously hydrophobic Bertrand Russell actually entering and departing the scene, depending on the viewer's position and velocity." Yes, that's right--rabid Russell.

~ p. 675: Vectors fail Kit: they "had not shown Kit, after all, a way to escape the world governed by real numbers."

~ pp. 678-79: "At the moment the two were on their way to see the comic operetta Waltzing in Whitechapel, or, A Ripping Romance, based loosely, and according to some reviews tastelessly, on the Whitechapel murders of the late '80s."

~ p. 681: This, of course, brings up a whole government conspiracy that links Franz Ferdinand's ascension to Jack the Ripper,

"working under contract. Considering that he disappeared from London around November of '88, and Mayerling was at the end of January '89--time enough for Jack to get to Austria and become familiar with his target, yes?"

"They were shot, Max," protested Werfner with exaggerated gentleness, "not butchered. Jack was not a firearms person, the only similarity is that the list of suspects in the 'Ripper' case is also long enough to populate a small city [...]. Hundreds, by now thousands, of narratives, all equally valid--what can this mean?"

"Multiple worlds," blurted Nigel, who had floated in from elsewhere.

"Precisely!" cried the Professor. "The Ripper's 'Whitechapel' was a sort of momentary antechamber in space-time...one might imagine a giant railway-depot, with thousands of gates disposed radially in all dimensions, leading to tracks of departure to all manner of alternate Histories...."

~ pp. 685-86: The Truth about Renfrew and Werfner. Despite all of the clues, I didn't see it coming. The answer to the mystery is even the title of this section of the book (!). And Light is at the heart of it all.

~ pp. 687-88: This extends into the Cohen's explanation:

"We are light, you see, all of light--we are the light offered the batsmen at the end of the day [...]. When we lost our æthereal being and became embodied, we slowed, thickened, congealed to"--grabbing each side of his face and wobbling it back and forth--"this. The soul itself is a memory we carry of having once moved at the speed and density of light."

He explains how they try to regain

"that condition of light, to become once more able to pass where we will, through lantern-horn, through window-glass, eventually, though we risk being divided in two, through Iceland spar, which is an expression in crystal form of Earth's velocity as it rushes through the Æther, altering dimensions, and creating double refraction...." He paused at the door. "Atonement, in any case, comes much later in the journey."

This is a key to understanding Yashmeen's pseudo-corporeal condition, and reminds me of the Genesis story of man being made "in the image" of God. If he is light, so are we. But it seems that all threads of this novel lead back to this--the fascination with light and its uses (for both good and evil). Again, science and religion weave in and out of the ideas expressed--some supernatural, some science fiction. But Pynchon makes the "fiction" bit seem very possible.

I was also strongly reminded of lines from Edgar Lee Masters' poem, "Emily Sparks":

That all the clay of you, all of the dross of you,
May yield to the fire of you,
Till the fire is nothing but light!...
Nothing but light!

~ p. 689: The railroad as the key to the "gigantic ten-miles-to-the-inch wall map of the Balkans," as it defines

"patterns of flow, not only actual but also invisible, potential, and such rates of change as how quickly one's relevant masses can be moved to a given frontier...and beyond that the teleology at work [...]."

Iceland Spar

Notes on the second part of Against the Day (see also Part One). As I continue reading the fourth part, putting down these stray thoughts has really helped me get a better handle on the numerous things Pynchon is up to.

~ p. 125: the mythic "extra man" (someone's doppelgänger?) appears aboard the Inconvenience

~ p. 126: How Iceland spar polarizes light

~ p. 127: "Of course he would leave--that was only fortune-telling--it could not interfere with her love."

~ p. 131: An academic argument for the colonization of Time (and "'additional dimensions beyond the third'"): "'Why not?'"

~ p. 132: The math of Time travel

~ p. 133: The Librarian on Iceland spar:

"It's the genuine article, and the sub-structure of reality. The doubling of the Creation, each image clear and believable.... And you being mathematical gentlemen, it can hardly have escaped your attention that its curious advent into the world occurred within only a few years of the discovery of Imaginary Numbers, which also provided a doubling of the mathematical Creation."

~ p. 143: Throyle explains bilocation and how the shamans' "'notion of time is spread out not in a single dimension but over many, which all exist in a single, timeless instant.'" Interestingly, this is also the perspective of light. In other words, if one were traveling at the speed of light, past and future would merge into "a single, timeless instant" (or an eternal now). Light is completely "present"--as well as being both particle and wave.

~ p. 176: Lew and the social invisibles:

There was always some Forty-seventh Street, always some legion of invisible on the one side of the account book, set opposite a handful on the other who were getting very, if not incalculably, rich at their expense.

~ p. 198: "Web found himself crying out the names of his sons. From inside the pain, he was distantly surprised at a note of reproach in his voice, though not sure if it had been out loud or inside his thoughts. He watched the light over the ranges slowly draining away."

~ p. 228: Madame Eskimoff on how she records her séances:

"We take electros of the original wax impressions immediately after every sitting. Part of the routine. I have listened to these tonight already several times, and even if details are here and there obscure, I felt it a grave enough development to summon you here."

I immediately thought of William Gass quoting Rilke:

"The coronal suture of the skull...has...a certain similarity to the closely wavy line which the needle of the phonograph engraves on the receiving, rotating cylinder.... What if one changed the needle and directed it on its return journey along a tracing which was not derived from the graphic translation of a sound, but existed of itself naturally...along the coronal suture, for example." At the present time technicians have done something similar for the movement of the heart, so that death is seen as a straight line, or heard as a continuous drone.

It is of course a fanciful project: to fill the world's cracks with needles that will let us hear those cracks speak.

~ p. 237: Anarchists as Trekkies! This is classic Pynchon:

This person greeted the Cohen by raising his left hand, then spreading the fingers two and two away from the thumb so as to form the Hebrew letter shin, signifying the initial letter of one of the pre-Mosaic (that is, plural) names of God, which may never be spoken.

"Basically wishing long life and prosperity," explained the Cohen, answering with the same gesture.

Also acknowledging sci-fi fans as a subversive element?

~ p. 242: Renfrew on Werfner: "'keen-witted but unheimlich'". Thanks to Mark Danielewski's House of Leaves, I know that this last word means "uncanny." That whole digression of his about this word was one of the best parts of the book (that and "Echo"). I really should reread it sometime (and toss in The Whalestoe Letters while I'm at it).

~ p. 250: The complex combination of light, Iceland spar, lenses, and mirrors "'reveal the architecture of dream,'" allowing one to see into the Invisible.

~ p. 251: Miles sets them straight (yet again):

"As the Franciscans developed the Stations of the Cross to allow any parishioner to journey to Jerusalem without leaving his church-grounds, so have we been brought up and down the paths and aisles of what we take to be the all-but-boundless world, but which in reality are only a circuit of humble images reflecting a glory greater than we can imagine--to save us from the blinding terror of having to make the real journey, from one episode to the next of the last day of Christ on Earth, and at last to the real, unbearable Jerusalem."

~ p. 256: Pynchon describes artillery fire as "abolishing Time":

what they saw "now" in the sights was in fact what did not yet exist but what would only be a few seconds from "now"

~ p. 257: More mama jokes:

"Hey, Lindsay, you can still catch 'em if you hurry," taunted Darby.

"Or we might send in pursuit your maternal relation, Suckling, one glimpse of whom should prove more than sufficient fatally to compromise their morale, if not indeed transform them all into masonry--"

"Well, your mother," riposted the readily nettled youth, "is so ugly--"

"Gentlemen," implored Randolph [...]

Apparently, these date back to Shakespeare.

~ p. 306: Merle's idea of Iceland spar's potential is similar to Tesla's ideas for electricity. In this reading, "anarchy" simply means offering something that would make life easier for all--except the Powers That Be.

~ p. 312: "If she was not to be the great lost love of his life, she could've perhaps been the great unlistened-to commentator upon it."

~ p. 323: The true Anarchists revealed as Vibe's bombers.

~ p. 324: Kit's new direction:

"Dr. Hilbert at Göttingen is developing his 'Spectral Theory,' which requires a vector space of infinite dimensions. His co-adjutor Minkowski thinks that dimensions will eventually all just fade away into a Kontinuum of space and time."

~ p. 354-55: Magician Luca Zombini:

"Remember, God didn't say, 'I'm gonna make light now,' he said, 'Let there be light.' His first act was to allow light in to what had been Nothing. Like God, you also have to always work with the light, make it do only what you want it to."

His trade also involves strategic uses of the Nicol prism, double refraction, and the ubiquitous Iceland spar, which

"Doubles the image, the two overlap, with the right sort of light, the right lenses, you can separate them in stages, a little further each time, step by step till in fact it becomes possible to saw somebody in half optically, and instead of two different pieces of one body, there are now two complete individuals walking around, who are identical in every way, capisci?"

Of course, this creates other problems. Like having multiple versions of the same person roaming the world simultaneously.

~ p. 370: How music trumps Anarchist theory:

"Yet I've noticed the same thing when your band plays--the most amazing social coherence, as if you all shared the same brain."

"Sure," agreed "Dope," "but you can't call that organization."

"What do you call it?"

"Jass."

~ p. 375: Ewball Oust on Iceland spar in Mexico:

"Espato is what they call it down there. Sometimes you hear espanto, which is something either horrifying or amazing, depending."

"Like looking at somebody through a pure enough specimen and seeing not just the man but his ghost alongside him?"

Ewball regarded Frank with some curiosity. "Plenty occasions for goose bumps down in those drifts as it is. Espantoso, hombre."

~ p. 377: Pynchon invokes Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury:

They climbed up the red-brown mountainside, into sunlight and purple artemisia, where wild dogs wandered the roofless stones, till they were high enough to see, beneath the harsh radiance of the Good Friday sky, where cirrus clouds were blown to long, fine parallel streaks, the city below, spread east to west, stunned as if by mysterious rays to a silence even Frank and Ewball must honor--the passion of Christ, the windless hush...even the stamping mills were silent, even Silver itself taking its day of rest, as if to recognize the price Judas Iscariot received. Sunlight in the trees.

~ p. 391: More Iceland spar: "And there was this deep glow, though not enough ambient light in here to account for it--as if there were a soul harbored within."

~ p. 410: G.K. Chesterton references?:

The boys found their way down to West Symmes Street and into the Ball in Hand, which proved to be a particularly low and disreputable haunt.

For some reason, this line made me think of The Man Who Was Thursday's Gabriel Syme and The Ball and the Cross.

~ p. 415: Does Mr. Ace reveal the true motive of the existence of the Chums of Chance?

"You are not aware that each of your mission assignments is intended to prevent some attempt of our own to enter your time-regime?"

More on Pynchon and Henry Adams

As I mentioned on Wednesday, I decided to post anything from this marvelous group discussion of The Education of Henry Adams that reminded me of Pynchon. Against the Day got me thinking of Adams right off the bat, and my suspicions were confirmed by Jennifer Schuessler's introductory post, in which she states that "Adams’s ideas of inertia and entropy profoundly influenced Thomas Pynchon." (But how does she know this? Is it common knowledge? Does Pynchon discuss this somewhere? I'd love to find out.)

Here's something Thomas Mallon wrote next:

Adams’s “Dynamic Theory of History,” developed during a decade in which he was also playing with magnets and seeking revelation in the statistics of coal production, proceeds from a late-life awareness of himself a “a conscious ball of vibrating motions, traversed in every direction by infinite lines of rotation or vibration.” His discovery that, as of 1900, the world would “not be a unity but a multiple” freed him to write a memoir whose own ever-increasing entropy could be rationalized as a shape to suit the times.

I immediately thought of Skip (Pynchon's "ball lightning" that befriends Merle). I'm fascinated by the similarity of language and ideas. It appears that Pynchon carries Adams' ideas to another level (dimension!) and continues to consistently explore them.

Jill Abramson later observed:

It is mind-bending to think that the little boy marched to school by John Quincy Adams lived to see both the discovery of radium and the invention of the motorcar. He was prophetic and saw that American life was going to be completely transformed by technology, and not always for the better. He recognized the deeply disruptive potential of technology and internalized how modernity itself often inspires deep longing for spirituality.

In addition to this, I would add a "longing for mystery"--another aspect of the Virgin. The way in which Pynchon melds religion and science, addressing not only existential dilemmas but the ways in which these two spheres overlap, is truly revelatory. One cannot wholly exist without the other. Where would science be without an affinity for mystery to propel it? And religion gives to some a structure or "worldview" from which to interpret the evidence of the eyes (or at least the visible aspect of "reality").

What's most amazing to me is the artistic harmony that emerges. Of course, these issues aren't without their conflicts and contradictions. But I am in awe of the way in which Pynchon creates (mirrors?) a world in which they coexist, in which the questions are valid. This seemingly whole-hearted embrace of paradox is part of his genius. I feel honored to be reading him.

UPDATE: I've just discovered (thanks to Bud Parr) that today is Pynchon's 71st birthday. If I were in NYC and could send a fax to him, it would probably resemble aspects of this post. Many happy returns to one of the greatest writers in history!

The Light Over the Ranges

"What better place for the keepers of the seals and codes to convene?"

I've reached the half-way point of Against the Day. This last line of p. 542's section gives me as good an excuse as any to celebrate the achievement by posting my scribblings thus far. Since reading Janet Malcolm's Two Lives, I've often thought of how she took a kitchen knife to The Making of Americans (in order to make it more manageable) and have considered following her example with Against the Day. But this sage hardback is too lovely--I couldn't bring myself to do it. So my progress is slow...but it is progress!

What follows are musings from the first of its five parts:

~ From the very beginning, with his Thelonious Monk epigraph ("It's always night, or we wouldn't need light") Pynchon lets the reader in on the extended riff that awaits--a jazz-like work of digressions upon multiple themes (the nature of reality, existence, and truth being just the beginning).

~ As I mentioned many moons ago, the first page's mention of the "World's Columbian Exposition" in Chicago made me go back and reread Henry Adams' "The Dynamo and the Virgin" (from The Education of Henry Adams). Does anyone know if any comparison of this work has been made to Against the Day? It would make a fascinating essay (or even book!). Electricity would only be the beginning... (I've just discovered this Adams group discussion. In the introductory post, Jennifer Schuessler remarks that "Adams’s ideas of inertia and entropy profoundly influenced Thomas Pynchon". Ah ha! I'll put any further developments into another post.)

~ p. 19: Zip:

"There's lights, but there's sound, too. Mostly in the upper altitudes, where it gets that dark blue in the day-time? Voices calling out together. All directions at once. Like a school choir, only no tune, just these--"

"Warnings," said Riley.

~ p. 20: Penny:

"Nobody saw any projectiles, but there was...a kind of force...energy we could feel, directed personally at us...."

"Somebody out there," Zip said solemnly. "Empty space. But inhabited."

~ p. 24: Miles' confession:

"Sometimes [...] these peculiar feelings will surround me, Lindsay...like the electricity coming on--as if I can see everything just as clear as day, how...how everything fits together, connects. It doesn't last long, though. Pretty soon I'm just back to tripping over my feet again."

~ p. 33: Tesla is bound up in this, of course--his "World-System" of free energy gets the usual reaction:

The Professor was literally having an attack of nausea. Every time Tesla's name came up, this was the predictable outcome. Vomit.

(This reminds me that I should try to read Samantha Hunt's The Invention of Everything Else soon. Her interview at Bat Segundo's was fun to listen to.)

~ p. 34: Of course, Edison's name isn't far behind--also,

"Bankrolling Tesla has given Morgan's access to all Tesla's engineering secrets. And he has operatives on the spot [...]".

~ p. 48: The hilarious (previously cited) scuffle with Franz Ferdinand.

~ pp. 49-50: William Blake's Jerusalem makes a logical appearance as an adapted hymn out of "the Workers' Own Songbook." A former professor of mine has a personal theory about Blake pre-envisioning quantum physics in some of his more complex (esoteric?) work. So it makes perfect sense to me that Pynchon generously includes him here. Makes me think that there's much more method to his "madness" than this sprawling novel divulges at first glance.

~ p. 58: Tesla's experimentation linked to "the luminiferous Æther"? The substance "'which can vibrate light...be sheared into positive and negative electricity'" and takes the form of a "religious question."

~ p. 60: Interesting to compare Lew and the Anarchists and their "church" (and Blake hymns) with Merle and the Ætherist community--"maybe as close as Merle ever came to joining a church."

~ p. 73: Merle becomes "sidekicks" with a "ball lightning" named Skip. Light communicating...

~ p. 97: Kit Traverse works for Tesla and considers himself a "Vectorist."

~ p. 99: Kit sees into

the Invisible, and a voice, or something like a voice, whispered unto him, saying, "Water falls, electricity flows--one flow becomes another, and thence into light. So is altitude transformed, continuously, to light."

This becomes a life-altering experience and the

vectoral expressions in the books, surface integrals and potential functions and such, would henceforth figure as clumsier repetitions of the truth he now possessed in his personal interior, certain and unshakable.

The faith-like language Pynchon uses suits the work perfectly. It blends well with the idea of "Word" being at the beginning of existence--Word and Light both taking on continuous reverberations of meaning in Pynchon's universe.

~ p. 104: Tesla to Kit:

"The same began happening to me also at your age," Tesla recalled. "When I could find the time to sit still, the images would come. But it's always finding the time, isn't it."

"Sure, always something.... Chores, something."

"Tithing," Tesla said, "giving back to the day."

~ p. 108: "As, no longer named, one by one the islets vanished from the nautical charts, and one day from the lighted world as well, to rejoin the Invisible."

~ p. 110: Miles drifts...

Wandering corridors of the spectral, Miles had begun, increasingly, to alarm his shipmates. Mealtimes too often were apt to revert to exercises in deep, even mortal, uncertainty, depending where Miles had been that day to procure his ingredients. Sometimes his cooking was pure cordon bleu, sometimes it was inedible, due to excursions of spirit whose polarity was never entirely predictable from one day to the next. Not that Miles would deliberately set out to wreck the soup or burn the meat loves--he seldom got that overt, tending more to forgetful omissions, or misreadings of quantity and timing.

~ p. 114: The first mention of Iceland spar:

Ordinary light, passing through this mineral, was divided into two separate rays, termed "ordinary" and "extraordinary," a property which the Japanese scientists had then exploited to create an additional channel of optical communication wherever in the layered structure of the pearl one of the thousands of tiny, cunningly-arranged crystals might occur. When illuminated in a certain way, and the intricately refracted light projected upon a suitable surface, any pearl so modified could thus be made to yield a message.

I hope to post on part two ("Iceland Spar") later this week--more bread crumbs to help me find my way back to present meaning.

In the meantime

After a while her tears only reflected light but did not flow, and she dropped into silences, and then these, too, gradually lost their resentful edges. [...]

They lived for different futures, but they were each other's unrecognized halves, and what fascination between them did come to pass was lit up, beyond question, with grace.

Still here, still traveling with Pynchon...

Life's for the free and fearless-- / Death's for the bought and sold!

I've thrown myself headlong into Against the Day and am thoroughly enjoying myself. Why did I ever let myself forget how wonderful Pynchon is? (Note to self: Never again let anything you hear intimidate you out of reading something for yourself. It's the only way of really knowing anything.)

From the first page's mention of the World's Columbian Exposition, I'm thrown back to my old fascination with Henry Adams' "The Dynamo and the Virgin". Rereading it seems to be great groundwork for the discussion of the theories and forces that come into play with the Chums of Chance, et al--"physics stark mad in metaphysics" indeed:

Historians undertake to arrange sequences,--called stories, or histories,--assuming in silence a relation of cause and effect. These assumptions, hidden in the depths of dusty libraries, have been astounding, but commonly unconscious and childlike; so much so, that if any captious critic were to drag them to light, historians would probably reply, with one voice, that they had never supposed themselves required to know what they were talking about. [...]

Satisfied that the sequence of men led to nothing and that the sequence of their society could lead no further, while the mere sequence of time was artificial, and the sequence of thought was chaos, he turned at last to the sequence of force; and thus it happened that, after ten years’ pursuit, he found himself lying in the Gallery of Machines at the Great Exposition of 1900, his historical neck broken by the sudden irruption of forces totally new.

And then there is light, sound, the luminiferous Æther, and Miles' admission of "peculiar feelings" that sometimes surround him...

"...like the electricity coming on--as if I can see everything just as clear as day, how...how everything fits together, connects. It doesn't last long, though. Pretty soon I'm just back to tripping over my feet again."

Then there are invocations of the great Edison vs. Tesla "war," William Blake's "Jerusalem," and my suspicion that Lew's storyline will get tangled up with Vanderjuice's out in Colorado. Merle's affinity with the Ætherists resembles Lew's inexplicable feeling for the "Anarchists"--and the fact that Pynchon uses comparisons of "church" for both perhaps alludes to what will take place further along. The tug of community on the alienated and displaced individual resonates strongly. Throw in "a keen sympathy for the invisible" and the vanishing of the American frontier, and you have a remarkable novel that pinpoints the American condition in the uncannily accurate way that Pynchon does so well. And all this in only the first 70 pages!

Meanwhile, this is what happens when Archduke Franz Ferdinand is set loose in "the heart of the vaudeville and black entertainment district" in ca. 1893 Chicago:

"What here are you looking at, you wish to steal eine...Wassermelone, perhaps?"

"Ooooo," went several folks in earshot. The insultee, a large and dangerous-looking individual, could not believe he was hearing this. His mouth began to open slowly as the Austrian prince continued--

"Something about...your...wait...deine Mutti, as you would say, your...your mamma, she plays third base for the Chicago White Stockings, nicht wahr?" as customers begin tentatively to move toward the egresses, "a quite unappealing woman, indeed she is so fat, that to get from her tits to her ass, one has to take the 'El'! Tried once to get into the Exposition, they say, no, no, lady, this is the World's Fair, not the World's Ugly!"

"Whatchyou doin, you fool, you can get y'ass killed talking like that, what are you, from England or some shit?"

"Um, Your Royal Highness? Lew murmured, "if we could just have a word--"

"It is all right! I know how to talk to these people! I have studied their culture!"

Out on a limb

Inexplicably, I've been waking up at 3.00am every morning--mind buzzing and disappointingly alert. So I reach for The Maytrees and lose myself in the wee smas until the sky lightens over the sea, satisfied. (And only then can I rest.)

I have many things to do that are not getting done, but I suspect it's due to the current lack of structure of these few vacation days. So (deep breath) I'm toying with the idea of reading Against the Day (my dusty sage version), finally. I figure that having a goal of about 70 pages per day should carry me through the next couple of weeks, and I could post any random thoughts bullet-style. Yes, it's been done before by better bloggers...but I think it will go a long way towards giving these jelly days a spine. (And this sort of plan has helped me before: the week after graduating college, I took up The Brothers Karamozov at 100 pages a day. A week with Dostoevsky did me incalculable good...especially in the loose-cannon days after college and the beginning of my job search.)

Because aside from a couple personal projects I should be working on, there are also some drafted posts that have been drafts for a little too long. Such as,

• a book-to-film comparision of Mario Mendoza's Satanás (yes, I actually took feverish notes in the theatre--y sí, creo que voy a escribirla en español)
• my little stack of remaining post-it notes to the glorious Cloud Atlas
• mini-reviews to books read this past term (including the break)
• thoughts on Auster's The Book of Illusions
  

Meanwhile, Over the Rhine is nearing the release of a new album. I stumbled on a serendipitous link to the gleefully naughty "Trouble" and the warm country vibe of "If A Song Could Be President" today. (This music + a Peroni + dusk gathering over the ocean under the balcony helped inspire this post.) I owe this band quite a lot (not the least of which includes my introduction to Dillard during my 18th year).

From one more girl who loves Pynchon

What she said.

This is ridiculous. (And what's even more heinous is the fact that--at this posting--42% agree with him...)

Of interest

• Literature Matters (e-zine of the British Council's literature department) enumerates their "Projects in Prospect," where I discover some extremely interesting news...

  Hay Festival
  Where: Cartagena
  When: Jan 2007
  Three UK writers (tbc) invited to perform.

  UPDATE: Found the site for the new program, although the schedule has not yet been posted.
• Some timely discussion of Helen Vendler at The Reading Experience
• The Complete Review analyzes Against the Day.
• Scott McLemee recalls his discovery of a letter by Thomas Pynchon.
• Maud draws attention to some troubling background information on the state of literature in translation; The Literary Saloon offers more. (Thank God for Words Without Borders!)
• A Curious Singularity has pressed on to Katherine Mansfield.
• We've embarked upon the next section of chapters in Reading... The Red and the Black. (Stendhal was a pretty funny guy--never expected to grin so much while reading this one!)
• Anne has begun collecting "mentions of, allusions to, and debts to Woolf in contemporary culture."
  
• Joanna Newsome's new album, Ys, has finally arrived! Largehearted Boy raves.