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 Something was wrong with the faces.

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It's weird reading a paragraph by Thomas Pynchon that actually has multiple sentences. The usual way is multiple pages that just have one sentence. I'm exaggerating! But I still think he's creating this pace on purpose by using so many short sentences. He's slowing down the narration to mimic the time it takes for the photograph to appear on the clear plates. It's a process. It's discovery. None of that's meant to be fast or easy. And again, he's not just talking about developing photos. He's talking about reading. And not just reading but comprehension. The patience it takes to try to understand what the artist is trying to portray. And sometimes the faces are wrong. Not because of the fault of the writer; not because of the fault of the reader. It's the fault of a disconnect between the two, a mistake in communication. Sometimes what is being said is inverted by the reader because the writer thinks the reader will understand the subtlety, or the parody, the satire or the exaggeration. But the reader will take it literally. They will view the negative as the final work.

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 Merle peered uneasily.

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Look, I really am doing this blog one line at a time. If I knew this line was next, I would have saved the unheimlich stuff for this entry! Just pretend you read it here and let's move on.

Chapter 1: Section 7: Page 64: Line 165 (1147)

 It happened to be the Newburgh asylum, with two or three inmates standing in the foreground, staring.

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The picture that suddenly appears to Merle, the picture that he describes as "clearer than real", is of the place in Cleveland where reality is the least clear. Nobody can say what the two or three inmates were staring at when this photo was taken, and nobody can absolutely sure that they weren't staring back at Merle himself.
    What Merle is questioning with the development of these photographs how reality works and so the first picture he observes coming into being like magic, out of the pale Invisible, is of a place where reality is not only questioned but denied, disbelieved, unstable, un-understood.

What this sentence screams at me, in German, of course, is "unheimlich". It's uncanny. It's strange. It's a photo of the most un-home-like place you can be, a place that you must call home although you do not want to. Different from a prison in that the inmates, presumably, can not even know why they're here. And the inmates staring out from it makes them feel trapped, as they are in the photo. They are not looking back. They are not merely looking out. They are staring. They are longing. They are not home.

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 Come in out of the pale Invisible, down into this otherwise explainable world, clearer than real.

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Sometimes I can't help thinking of Pynchon's other works where reading a line from, well, any other of Pynchon's works. That's why I'm sad that can't read everything by him after first reading everything by him. I mean, I can but not in the way I want. I don't want to have to read everything twice! That's ludicrous! The point I want to make which needed me to preface it with the preceding sentences was that this line reminded me of a V-2 rocket. And even though the ghosts of all of my college teachers are screaming, "Expand your thought!", into my head right now, I won't.

Merle's experience of developing photographs speaks of something beyond what can be known (again, more Gravity's Rainbow shouting in my brain with all that stuff with the medium and speaking with the dead). As if the photo developing on the plate weren't a scientific process that can be understood and replicated and instead is simple magic produced by the correct ritual movements and ingredients.

This section that seems to concern Merle having a pseudo-religious experience concerning light (especially when he's just spent the last few months living with, speaking with, and drinking with light worshipers) had me thinking about one of the basic reasons (among myriad reasons) that I cannot believe in God. It simply comes down to adding another link to a chain of the unknowable. I do not understand why matter exists. In my head, I can think of the universe as beginning at the Big Bang and then, well, I don't know. Unknowable. A question mark. What I don't need to do is add another link to that chain by saying, "Before the Big Bang, God. He created it. But where did God come from? Unknowable." See? How does adding God to that chain clarify anything? Sure, for some reason, people seem to accept God as infinite. But if you have to accept something as infinite to explain reality, why do you have to invent the God step? God is an anomaly in the system. You can explain it all right up to the moment before the Big Bang and then suddenly you're going to introduce something unexplainable which doesn't even play by the universe's rules? I just don't see the point. God can climb back into the pale Invisible and stay there for all I care. "Down into this otherwise explainable world" writes Pynchon. Otherwise explainable. As if the unexplained is something that will remain unexplained for all time. The reason postmodernism exists is because too many questions were answered (and also too many atrocities were committed by answering so many questions!) and the answer, "God," just stopped cutting even the blandest mustard.

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 Come from nothing.

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Sure, sure. Come from "nothing". If we regard light as nothing then this statement makes sense. And isn't that the essence of the religious experience? If we disregard, or remain ignorant, of the things which cause the thing to happen, then we witness God at work. We see a miracle. We see the rabbit appear from an empty hat and we gasp and yell, "Praise God!" We see an endless supply of handkerchiefs come from the robes of the Bishop and we shout, "Hallelujah!" We see the sun disappear in the middle of the day and we cower in fear and repent our sins.
    Or we don't and we realize that the only thing to come from nothing is nothing. There's always an explanation. Unless you're Soy Rakelson in 1988 and you're trying to show all of your friends how stupid they are by not believing in God with a bunch of tricks you learned from C. S. Lewis. Although, really, his biggest trick was "Nothing comes from nothing! Therefore, God!" which is what I've been trying to explain away with the same trick! Soy could just never get a handle on the whole "Nothing comes from nothing, therefore something we just currently don't understand about reality." It's weird to go straight to God when you don't know the answer to something since God works differently than every other answer we have to questions. Our answers always play by reality's rules. And if we don't know the rules yet, we figure we'll learn them at some point. But God is like playing The Game of Life and when you need to pay your taxes, you just grab some money out of the Monopoly box.

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 And Merle saw the image appear.

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Out of nothing, something. Merle's having a religious experience now. The Ur religious experience. The Creation Myth. We know Merle's suffering from a religious experience because he becomes completely wrapped up in photography after this moment. I used the word "suffering" because who needs a religious experience? It's more pain than it's worth. It's like getting arthritis but for your consciousness. And, yes, this is science and it can all be explained so as religious experiences go, it's pretty crap. I would have simply said this was a moment of true wonder for Merle or that he was stunned into amazement. But that's not what Pynchon's going for here. He wants us to witness Merle witnesses the profound, visualizing a miracle of the 19th Century.

Also this is still about writing! The writer does all stuff with mixing the big words and dumping them onto a plate (page!) so that readers can see the story.

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 "Now watch."

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Boobies.

*drools in my drool cup*