As the ordeal went on, it became clear to certain of these balloonists, observing from above and poised ever upon a cusp of mortal danger, how much the modern State depended for its survival on maintaining a condition of permanent siege—through the systemic encirclement of populations, the starvation of bodies and spirits, the relentless degradation of civility until citizen was turned against citizen, even to the point of committing atrocities like those of the infamous pétroleurs of Paris.
* * * * * * * * * *
Fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuck.
Where do I . . . I mean, how does one even . . . it's just, I'm reading this boys' adventure novel with some slapstick nonsense and a talking dog and maybe a line here or there that's all "Hey, the poverty stricken immigrants are like the cows in The Stockyard in Chicago, mates" but mostly just kids doing wacky crazy super scientific stuff in 1893 and then Pynchon blackjacks me over the back of the head with a sentence like this. Okay, sure. Sentences like this are why I'm writing this blog. But where do I even begin?!
Should I begin with Peter Sascha, the control who put Carroll Eventyr into contact with Roland Feldspath (whom I've mentioned before as a possible voice or spirit in the skies), and how Sascha's death in Gravity's Rainbow ties into this? Or should I start by asking questions like the previous question because it's easier than actually wrapping my mind around Pynchon's sentence and its ties to Leni Pökler in Gravity's Rainbow and the history of anarchism and the Paris Commune and Mikhail Bakunin and Rosa Luxemburg and the earlier Chicago Stockyard comparison and . . . and . . . it's so much. So, so much.
Pictures get to be celebrated for saying a thousand words simply because they contain no words themselves, allowing them to encompass all of the words and thoughts evoked by the image. But words also say a thousand words, and more, simply by referring the reader to so many, many other words that have come before. It's simply why The Bible is so important to the Western Canon. Just by naming your character Ruth, you automatically imbue that character with certain traits and expectations for people who know the story. Heck, Steinbeck just used the letters "C" and "A" to clue the reader into everything they needed to know about every character in East of Eden (the title alone saying a thousand or more words).
Maybe I'll start at the back simply because the phrase "pétroleurs of Paris" gives me something to research!
"infamous pétroleurs of Paris"
When Pynchon wrote Against the Day, academics had already determined that the idea of arsonists burning Paris out of spite at the end of the Siege of Paris was propaganda (it's also worth noting that Pynchon uses the male gender of the word while the main point of the propaganda was to demean lower class women by painting them as vicious vandals acting out of spite. Seeing that it's Darby explaining these things to Chick, I'm certain he wouldn't have an entirely clear historical perception of the events of twenty years previous. I'm surprised, as I pointed out in the last entry, that he even knows this much!). But in 1893, Darby would certainly have heard of the women burning buildings as the end of the Paris Commune was in sight and as Versailles forces were violently restoring the old regime (or setting up the new regime, anyway, since the Third Republic never could figure out who to put on the throne to reestablish the monarchy and so just stuck around as the Third Republic).
The point of calling up these arsonists and vandals is to show the kinds of acts humans can be driven to because of the way civilization acts as a siege upon humans. And yet Pynchon certainly knows Darby is using state propaganda as evidence of man's intolerance for vandalism, destruction, and incivility. The propaganda outshines the hope and optimism of the people attempting to change their world for the better. Although, really, you don't need propaganda to point out that some leaders in the Paris Commune wanted to reestablish the Committee of Public Safety. I mean, yeeshers!
"how much the modern State depended for it survival on maintaining a condition of permanent siege"
By observing the Siege of Paris from above, these balloonists were forced into a new perspective of the world, one which literally had never existed before. You might think it would be an optimistic and uplifting new perspective because they're balloonists in balloons and the metaphor is just floating there. But instead, it was a pessimistic view of civilization as a kind of jail rather than a necessary tool for human advancement. The balloonists are like a character in a Philip K. Dick story. They're all, "Hey! Check this new technology out! It's so much fun and carefree and could probably really change the world!" And then they experience the reality of the new technology and they're all, "Oh no! What is happening?! Is this the same world I used to know? Am I the same person?! How did I not see the iron cage that surrounds us all?! How do we escape this prison?!" And even though the balloonist was just sitting right there inside the thing needed to escape the prison, he was too tied to life in the prison to do much but philosophize about it. Meanwhile the little apple cheeked balloonist off to the left who kept crashing all of his balloons knew the answer!
Speaking of Catch-22, some of these balloons used for communication did land, accidentally, far from their intended locations, like Norway! So see? The reference didn't totally come out of thin air.
I don't know exactly how to visualize a "condition of permanent siege" but if I take the word of these balloonists, I suppose I can just walk outside and check out my local bank and supermarket and police station and hospital and watch some political newscasts and, well, that's what it would look like!
"through the systemic encirclement of populations, the starvation of bodies and spirits, the relentless degradation of civility until citizen was turned against citizen"
I mean, it's 2021. I was born in 1971. And while lots of young people think nobody ever fought the good fight until they themselves arrived and the world before was just a bunch of people shrugging their shoulders and not constantly struggling against the powerful who either owned all the capital or were in a position to grant endless political favors to those people, I've got some super sad news for them. We've been attempting to resist and change things for a long time now! They're just better at stopping us from doing it, what with their power and their endless piles of cash and their ability to distract most of us with opiods and The X-Files. So things just kept getting more and more terrible (like the degradation of civility and the starvation of spirits and the encirclement of populations by warmongering police forces) no matter how much push back there's been. Oh, sure, sometimes the pendulum begins swinging in favor of equality for everybody. But the idiots who see equality as some kind of zero sum game which causes them to lose something always ensure that the pendulum swings right back to hatred and bitterness and injustice.
My guess is that the balloonists saw all of this and saw how terrible it was and saw how it was all waved away as the status quo and obfuscated as the rewards of civilization so they decided to live in the sky forever and drop their poop on the world below. And that's the origin of Aeronautic Clubs!
Or there might be a more important point to Penny's story. I'll get to it eventually, I'm sure!
I'm sorry to say I can't quite tie together all the things I wanted to tie together in a long essay because I lost one of the threads in my head somehow. Somewhere along the way in my reading of Gravity's Rainbow, I looked up and learned about Mikhail Bakunin. But for some reason, I thought it was tied to Leni Pökler and her dream of Rosa Luxemburg becoming president of a socialist Germany. It wasn't. So while I wanted to tie Rosa and Leni and the November Revolution in Germany to the Paris Commune and Mikhail Bakunin's philosophies helping motivate the attempted restructuring of society during that time, I can't. I don't know where the connection is anymore!
Lacking the connection, let me at least point out that Mikhail Bakunin is the founder of collectivist anarchism. So even if he's not specifically important to the rest of this book, his ideas and philosophies almost certainly will be.
But what part of Gravity's Rainbow led me to look him up?! At least now, because of this Siege of Paris digression, I've learned quite a bit about the Franco-Prussian War and the Paris Commune and Mikhail Bakunin. And in trying to tie Bakunin to Rosa Luxemburg, I've learned a lot about the November Revolution and the Weimar Republic and socialism and both Rosa and Mikhail's objection to Marx's "dictatorship of the proletariat." Hopefully I can keep it all in my head as I read the rest of this book over the next fifteen years!
