Merle found himself more often than not the monkey in the middle, trying to calm the dangerously fervid, find work for those who ran short, put people up in the wagon when landlords got mean, trying meantime to stay reasonably unentangled with moneymaking schemes which, frankly, though plentiful as fungi after the rain, verged all too often on the unworkably eccentric, ". . . amount of light in the universe being finite, and diminishing fast enough so that damming, diversion, rationing, not to mention pollution, become possibilities, like water rights, only different, and there's sure to be an international scramble to corner light.
* * * * * * * * * *
Merle came to Cleveland as a neutral observer of a historic moment. As an observer, he doesn't have much to do until the thing he came to observe. So he hangs out at bars, brothels, and other bars. While he's waiting, these are things he's involved in, things that shine some light on his overall character. And probably things that are analogies for physics ideas that I'm not smart enough to comprehend.
"monkey in the middle"
A children's game although most often used to bully kids by taking one of their possessions and throwing it over and around them while mocking them for actually wanting their property back. I don't see how this is a metaphor for becoming a person trying to solve problems in other people's business. Perhaps it's meant to call up the visual of a person (the monkey) surrounded by other kids (the non-monkeys) so that the reader accidentally pictures an atom.
"trying to calm the dangerously fervid"
Okay, now that you're picturing an atom, you have to picture what happens when some other atom, or monkey, becomes dangerously hot or glowing. See? Now you've remembered there's a thing called the atom bomb and you've shat yourself.
On the literal side of things, we just see that Merle's a good guy who knows the cops are out on the street looking to throw overly excited, fervently manic Æther lovers into the asylum. So he's trying to calm them down before they get thrown in Newburgh.
"find work for those who ran short"
Now he's also willing to give off electrons to help out other atoms that are short electrons. He's out here in Cleveland bonding with other people. Oh, and also helping them out with a little cash. If you realize that the cash Merle's using to help others might otherwise be spent on Mia and Madge, you'll start to really get a sense of how honorable Merle is!
"put people up in the wagon when landlords get mean"
Merle's atom is also willing to take on electrons! Plus Pynchon gets a nice dig at landlords, reminding people that they're the least empathic people in America who are willing to throw you out on your arse at the drop of an exorbitant rent payment. Or if you call them too many times to deal with your apartment's rat problem.
"trying meantime to stay reasonably unentangled with moneymaking schemes"
Merle's atom is also trying to avoid quantum entanglement lest he find himself somewhere he wasn't meant to be. Like Lew Basnight, maybe! But also, we see that Merle's not been captured by Capitalism and doesn't easily fall for get rich quick scams.
". . . amount of light in the universe being finite, and diminishing fast enough so that damming, diversion, rationing, not to mention pollution, become possibilities, like water rights, only different, and there's sure to be an international scramble to corner light."
The most capitalistic thing in the world is to privatize natural things that everybody needs to live. Here, Pynchon imagines those capitalists at the forefront of a new understanding of light trying to come up with ways to own and control it. To corner it. To monopolize the whole thing so that if you can't afford it, you'll be living in total darkness, baby!
The phrase "international scramble" might also be meant to invoke the imperialist "Scramble for Africa" that was currently taking place by nearly every Western nation in the world. Corner water. Corner light. Corner land. Corner people. Corner populations. It's all imperialist and capitalist thought and it's destroying the world. There's a good passage in Gravity's Rainbow about this:
"Kekulé dreams the Great Serpent holding its own tail in its mouth, the dreaming Serpent which surrounds the World. But the meanness, the cynicism with which this dream is to be used. The Serpent that announces, "The World is a closed thing, cyclical, resonant, eternally returning," is to be delivered into a system whose only aim is to violate the Cycle. Taking and not giving back, demanding that "productivity" and "earnings" keep on increasing with time, the System removing from the rest of the World these vast quantities of energy to keep its own tiny desperate fraction showing a profit: and not only most of humanity—most of the World, animal, vegetable and mineral, is laid waste in the process. The System may or may not understand that it's only buying time. And that time is an artificial resource to begin with, of no value to anyone or anything but the System, which sooner or later must crash to its death, when its addiction to energy has become more than the rest of the World can supply, dragging with it innocent souls all along the chain of life. Living inside the System is like riding across the country in a bus driven by a maniac bent on suicide..."
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