Chapter 1: Section 7: Page 64: Line 158 (1140)

 "Hold this a minute."

* * * * * * * * * *

Okay, this is it. The final corn grower of a short sentence because Merle transitions from a person learning a new thing at this moment to simply Roswell's assistant (as Roswell promised him, to be fair). "Here's the darkroom. Here's the ruby light. Here's the dry plate. Now focus your attention on holding this dry plate while I do a whole bunch of other shit that will make your head spin." Okay, maybe I've gotten a little too far ahead of the one line at a time context but remember Pynchon explained during the fire at Newburgh that the context of some lines together must be ascertained to appreciate what Pynchon's saying. It might seem a weird thing for Pynchon to clarify thousands of blog posts later but you need to remember: I'm still only on page 64! Pynchon's taking his time training me to read his book to the best of my ability! And by "Pynchon", I mean "the Pynchon that I made up in my mind to allow me to read his book as closely as possible and to get the most I can out of it." And while, overall, I think it's working, like understanding how all the displays at the Chicago World Fair weren't just appropriated cultures and people put up to gawk at but the natives taking agency over how they'd be presented by acting out and showcasing the moments in their peoples' lives where they defeated or humiliated the imperialists. That's just the one example that's at the forefront of my brain but I've noticed a lot more with the close reading. Other times, I'm just rambling. Like now where I'm taking a minute, standing here with a dry plate in my hands, to think through what the hell I'm doing here.
    I should probably just sit down and read this book already!

Chapter 1: Section 7: Page 64: Line 157 (1139)

 Took a dry plate from a carrying case.

* * * * * * * * * *

Don't worry! Pynchon's getting to the point of these short sentences! Here's the third in a row as Merle begins to learn the process of developing a photograph. The short sentences indicate it's all easy enough for Merle to keep up and process. Door shut. Ruby light on. Dry plate out. The magic is happening! Or, as Merle's finding out, the magic doesn't actually exist and it's all just boring, drawn-out explication.

"dry"
Boring. Dull. Oh, and literally, not wet.

"plate"
Loads of non-literal definitions for this but following on "dry" as "boring", we have an object on which nourishment is served.

"carrying case"
Where Roswell keeps his secrets. He has thus taken them out into the open to give them to Merle as he currently discovers the process of learning how to develop a photograph strips away the easy magic of snapping a photo.

I know I basically said all of that in the first paragraph but I'm making corn grow too!

Chapter 1: Section 7: Page 64: Line 156 (1138)

 Roswell lit a ruby darkroom lamp.

* * * * * * * * * *

"lit"
First and foremost, the beginning of the process. The creation of the light needed in the dark, a light that somehow retains darkness. But second and hindmost, the journey has begun; they have lit out for the territories.

Once again, a short sentence. Perhaps because Merle's learning something new, we're taking it nice and slow. Or, as I mentioned in the previous post, Pynchon's continuing the slow as corn growing metaphor.

"darkroom"
According to Merriam-Webster, the first use of darkroom was in 1841, just thirty-six years prior to this scene. More words coined in 1841: "self-care", "hanky-panky", and, just because it's interesting to me as I'm currently reading Danielewski's Tom's Crossing, "clop-clop".
    The darkroom probably has deep and symbolic meanings in the context of this book which begins with the Monk quote, "It's always night, or we wouldn't need light." Perhaps the darkroom is the antithesis of the quote, even. The idea that it's always light or we wouldn't need a darkroom. We couldn't process photographs, caused by light, without shutting out that same light but seeking to obliterate now instead of create.

Chapter 1: Section 7: Page 64: Line 155 (1137)

 "O.K., here we go."

* * * * * * * * * *

A nice short sentence that's not quite the starting pistol Merle was hoping for when he first decided to cross over the threshold to learn about photography. We're about to witness how the corn is grown. Nice and slow.

"O.K."
As mentioned previously, I believe, "O.K." stands for "Oll Korrect" because people in the late 19th Century had to make their own fun and spelling things incorrectly was just a major hoot. But unlike Cockney Rhyming Slang, most of this era of language obfuscation didn't survive.

Chapter 1: Section 7: Page 64: Line 154 (1136)

 As a mechanic he respected any straightforward chain of cause and effect you could see or handle, but chemical reactions like this went on down in some region too far out of anyone's control, they were something you had to stand around and just let happen, which was about as interesting as waiting for corn to grow.

* * * * * * * * * *

Pynchon forces the reader to contemplate two vastly different aspects of our universe: things in which we can observe directly the way they work and those things we observe through evidence and experiment alone. Is he hinting at the stark difference between general relativity and quantum mechanics? Is he making a sly joke by identifying a "mechanic" with the big trappings of the universe who is mystified by the unseen that he can't get his hands on?

"any straightforward chain of cause and effect you could see or handle"
This feels like an excellent summation of the kind of "common sense" that mediocre people pride themselves in having. It also seems, in the context of the current discussion on light and Æther, a bit of irony in the use of the term "straightforward". Only perhaps in the machines Merle builds and repairs can one look at the universe in this straightforward chain of cause and effect. You can see what moves when you turn a crank. You can follow the path of a belt to see how it causes movement within a structure. In the same way, people might think their observations of the universe can be interpreted just as straightforward. But as Merle goes on to explain, much of the world takes place "in some region too far out of anyone's control."
    But let's get even further into the subtext. Could Pynchon be speaking about writing here? Merle respects plot which happens right on the surface where you can follow characters' actions and motivations which move the story forward. But the subtext, the chemical reactions, need deeper thinking to see and understand. Maybe Pynchon's even hinting at how the author sometimes loses control of the subtext ("too far out of anyone's control"), seeing as how much can be brought to the text by the reader that wasn't intended by the author. Sort of like 85% of what I've written on this blog.

"about as interesting as waiting for corn to grow"
But to the layman, subtext is boring. Just get to Merle fucking Erlys already and don't make me think about how that means Merle's fallen in love with light itself!

Chapter 1: Section 7: Page 64: Line 153 (1135)

 Like anybody, of course, he had wondered what happened during the mysteriously guarded transition from plate to print, but never enough to step across any darkroom's forbidden doorsill to have a look.

* * * * * * * * * *

Pynchon has a lot going on in this sentence but first and foremost is his alluding to transubstantiation except in reverse: instead of an object becoming flesh, flesh, in photography, is transformed into an object. He couches it in the "mysteriously guarded transition from plate to print" but that's just allowing Merle to ease into the subject of flesh to print. In the span of two lines, Merle has expanded his idea of photography from an idiot's game to a religious concept.

"mysteriously guarded transition"
Merle will step back slightly from this characterization in the next half of the sentence when he admits that he's in control of where and when he could learn this secret but here, at the start, he sounds like he's a subscriber to the Proverbs for Paranoids. Something guarded must have guards. Rather, Guards, capitalized. As in They. Them. The Masters controlling the information.

"but never enough"
People often become obstacles to sating their own curiosity (and that's if they can even bother to find themselves curious about the nature of things at all). Ignorance comes in many forms but the withholding of information from yourself is the foundation of one of the most common. The most common probably stems from people simply not understanding complex answers to questions and seeking the safety of a simple solution. These are the people who believe they're smarter than the most intelligent people because they have common sense. Common sense feels like intelligence but it's actually just a smokescreen to understanding. Common sense says the sun revolves around the Earth because that's a common and easily digested common observation. But what common sense often just hides is ignorance based on a lack of understanding a complex world where observation isn't the only answer.
    Before you think I've gone off on a tangent, let's observe this: photography becomes an easy allusion to discuss light and vision, a comparative to human perception and observation.

"darkroom's forbidden doorsill"
Pynchon uses "doorsill" purposefully since it's a synonym for threshold, or the point of beginning. The term "darkroom" indicating ignorance and the lack of knowledge, forbidden because the knowledge remains particular to those who study photography and their apprentices. With Roswell's loss of apprentice, Merle has filled the vacuum to be allowed this knowledge. He steps over the threshold to begin his new life as a photographer, a capturer of moments, one who sees and observes particularly well.

"have a look"
Once again, it's observing that's important, with the basic understanding that light is essential for "looking". Perhaps this encounter with photography and the need to understand how light can be used to save images in time and space was needed for Merle to encounter and fall in love with Erlys, a name that means "the light" in Norwegian. Remember, this is the story about how Merle fell in love with Erlys Mills!

Chapter 1: Section 7: Page 64: Line 152 (1134)

 It had always seemed like an idiot's game, line them up, squeeze the bulb, take the money.

* * * * * * * * * *

"an idiot's game"
Weirdly, I could find no etymology on this phrase. Yes, I only used various search engines on the Internet and not hiring a bunch of research assistants or visiting the local library. Partly this is because the Internet is broken and gives weight to popularity of use. So instead of discovering why this phrase seems to have some weight as an actual idiom, I'm overwhelmed by pages and pages of people quoting some character in Red Dead Redemption 2. Being that the phrase is just two common words stuck together which connote an easily digestible idea, the phrase isn't particularly looked upon as an idiom, even if I saw examples of it used in so many diverse spaces that it feels like a common saying.
    Everybody reading this phrase gets the point so I guess it doesn't need an etymological breakdown in the Oxford English Dictionary. Merle's describing a game that only idiots would play, like Three Card Monty or Russian Roulette. He's hinting at the simplicity of people who fall for fads like this. It's his initial reaction to the entire concept of photography, looking down his nose at a budding new technology that seems to serve no purpose other than to bolster the vanity of those paying for their pictures.

"line them up, squeeze the bulb, take the money"
Wait. Is prostitution also an idiot's game?!
    Anyway, Merle first thought of photography as a scam to take people's cash.

Chapter 1: Section 7: Page 64: Line 151 (1133)

 Merle was no hoosier on the subject, he had seen cameras before, even had himself snapped once or twice.

* * * * * * * * * *

"no hoosier on the subject"
Pynchon uses the term here to denote a "yokel" and not a "resident of Indiana". This makes sense in context as the rest of the sentence offers proof to how Merle isn't completely inexperienced with the idea of photography.
    I mean, not a lot of evidence! Merle has seen some cameras and had his picture taken. I'm not sure I'd allow that as evidence as to Merle's expertise on the subject. I suppose, this taking place in the 1880s, just seeing a camera and posing for a photo once or twice makes you leaps and bounds more proficient on the subject than the average American hoosier on the frontier.

Chapter 1: Section 7: Pages 63-64: Line 150 (1132)

 Since Roswell had only been in the asylum for a day or two, they found his equipment untouched by local scavengers or the landlord.

* * * * * * * * * *

Pynchon often shows his contempt for the police. I'm glad to see he treats landlords with the same disrespect. He has only mentioned landlords once before but in a similar context. Landlords hold an inordinate amount of power over people's lives and so they can, on a whim, evict a tenant or, as hinted at here, simply steal from a tenant who hasn't been around for a bit. The suggestion here might be that Roswell pays rent by the week and so just a few days didn't alert the landlord to his absence. But it also suggests that if Roswell had been incarcerated for a little longer, the landlord would have quickly swooped in and claimed his possessions, selling them off to pay for the missed rent. Or even that the landlord simply would have stolen from him if he thought he could, rent paid or not.

The mention of local scavengers points to two things: the general poverty level of the vacancies the visiting Ætherists have taken up and as a direct comparative to landlords. And the term, "landlord", of course, is a term rife with imperialist and capitalist symbolism, indicating that they are one of the bad guys of the novel.

Chapter 1: Section 7: Page 63: Lines 148-149 (1130-1131)

 "Better than that, my apprentice ran off when the coppers showed up. How'd you like to learn the deepest secrets of the photographer's trade?"

* * * * * * * * * *

Not only was Roswell just rescued from Hell, it's possible he was actually a devil too? Here he's offering Merle a Faustian deal to learn the "deepest secrets" of his vocation. You don't offer somebody a job by offering to teach them not just deep secrets but the deepest secrets. This sounds like a deal with the devil more than an offer of apprenticeship.

We still haven't gotten to the point of the story (Merle falling in love with Erlys) but at least we've now gotten the secret origin of Merle becoming a photographer. And that's probably an important part of how he met Erlys being that we know Merle loves to photograph naked ladies. Wait. Is that the deepest secret of photography? Women will readily take their clothes off so you can take sexy pictures of them? The amount of naked women I've seen based on my writing that doesn't include taking breaks to look at image searches of weird Rule 34 stuff pales in comparison. Maybe I'll drop the writing and pick up a camera? Or re-pick up a camera since I still have that fancy camera that I bought for my cross-country VW bus roadtrip off  of an office cubicle installer when I was managing the Netscape Warehouse back in the '90s (which include a huge bag of funny mushrooms thrown in the case because he loved me so much!). Knowing my luck, I'm already 135 years too late for women casting their clothes aside simply because a man points a newfangled camera in front of them. Stupid me being born so late into the 20th Century!

Chapter 1: Section 7: Page 63: Line 147 (1129)

 "Buy the next round, we'll call it even."

* * * * * * * * * *

Roswell Bounce purchases redemption easily enough. He goes from sinner to righteous with the purchase of a round of whiskeys. From Preterite to Predestined, as Pynchon might say.

Yeah, yeah. I know you can't go from Preterite to Predestined, theologically! The whole point is that each is already decided before you were even born! But, being that human beings are incapable of attaining that knowledge in life, they can still go from believing they're saved or lost from any moment to the next. Obviously they'll never actually know until they die. Although, they won't really know then either because they'll be, you know, dead. Non-existent. Back to the material from which they came. Deletion of the ego. The end. Kaput. That's all she wrote, folks.

Chapter 1: Section 7: Page 63: Lines 145-146 (1127-1128)

 "I could've been in the chapel at that dance where the fire broke out. Guess you saved my fundament, there."

* * * * * * * * * *

"the chapel at that dance where the fire broke out"
The Northern Ohio Insane Asylum has been painted as Hell and the fire which broke out began in the one possibly holy place in the entire complex. A chaotic reaction of evil against the holy trying to purify it.
    Roswell points out that he "could've" been in the chapel but wasn't. Probably because he's cynical. He's merely reacting as anybody might react when they've fled a dangerous situation: "It could have been worse. I could have died. I was just lucky enough to be where I was in the midst of the danger." But we all know Roswell never actually would have been in the chapel.

"saved my fundament"
Literally, "You saved my ass." But the word "fundament" is probably meant to make the reader think of fundamentalist religions, just to keep the "Insane Asylum as Hell" and "Saloon as Church" analogy going. Merle not only saved his ass but the continuation of his belief system.

Chapter 1: Section 7: Page 63: Line 144 (1126)

 "What a hell of a night," Roswell said.

* * * * * * * * * *

Just more evidence of the subtext in the previous line. Roswell describes the actions of the night as "a hell of a night" meaning it was crazy and exciting. But this can also be literal in that Roswell escaped from Hell, an insane asylum where he was held prisoner for his sins and which was, as they escaped, covered in flames.

Chapter 1: Section 7: Page 63: Line 143 (1125)

 Back in Whiskey Hill, they made a beeline for Morty Vicker's Saloon.

* * * * * * * * * *

Aside from the reiteration that Roswell and Merle spend much of their time drinking in various saloons around Whiskey Hill in Cleveland, I don't get much more from this sentence. My poor attempt at research turned up nothing on a Morty Vicker of Cleveland in the 1880s. So I guess I'll just have to pick apart his name for some clues?

Morty is short for either Morton or Mortimer. Let's go with Mortimer because it has a more interesting meaning: dead (or still) water. The name Vicker probably references "vicar", a priest in the Church of England. Could Pynchon just be having a bit of sly fun on a name equating one of the local saloons to a church, since all the discussion of Æther has revolved around talk of faith and God? Morty Vicker can be thought of as Priest Dead Water, the dead water being a reference to alcohol (with "Whiskey Hill" being a bit of help toward that interpretation?). Merle and Roswell have fled chaos, fire, and damnation to spiritual safety, to their church and its member with whom they spend most of their time.

Chapter 1: Section 7: Page 63: Line 142 (1124)

 By the time the fire was under control, the exhaustion and confusion were too advanced for anyone to notice as Merle and Roswell slipped away.

* * * * * * * * * *

Notice Pynchon never alludes to how the fire started. But if you follow the money (the money in this case is just somebody benefitting from the fire), we must assume it was set by Merle or Roswell. Probably Roswell since previous mentions of Merle rescuing other Ætherists (like Ed Addle) without a story of a fire leads one to assume Merle could handle it without nearly killing everybody. Also, Roswell seems like the kind of cynical jerk who would risk other people's lives, limbs, and properties to gain something he desired, like, um, freedom.
    But I don't think that's the point of this line, to encourage the reader to see Roswell Bounce as an arsonist. I'm sure the fire is a metaphor for Michelson and Morley's null result, the exhaustion and confusion a metaphor for the scientific community's response to the mortal wounding of Æther, and Merle and Roswell slipping away a metaphor for life going on in spite of drastic changes to one's environment, lifestyle, or culture.

Chapter 1: Section 7: Page 63: Line 141 (1123)

 Merle and Roswell went down to the creek and joined a bucket brigade, hoses were run from hydrants, and later some engines showed up from Cleveland.

* * * * * * * * * *

Maybe this is Pynchon recontextualizing his opening line: "Now single up all lines!" Sometimes, one line itself won't be enough to provide the needed context. Sometimes you have to line them up like a bucket brigade to fathom out the subtext within an entire paragraph (like this one about the chaos of a fire at a dance in an insane asylum). Lines need to be linked like hoses to hydrants. "Sometimes you need a few sentences from the surrounding community to line up and pass the subtext along, one to the other," says the imaginary Pynchon in my head. And, in rarer cases, you'll just have to wait until the engines show up from Cleveland, meaning "You should finish the fucking book before you can get the help you need understanding this." Also maybe the engines from Cleveland are Pynchon's ultimate meaning behind any subtext in the book and if we think they're going to arrive in time to save us, we'd better have another long, hard think.

Maybe this is just some standard action that's occasionally needed to get the plot from one point to the next. If that's the case, that's okay too. That doesn't bother me and my mission because, ultimately, I'm delving into each line as deeply as I can to understand as much of this book as I need. I'm taking it slow so that I catch the historic references and why Pynchon added them to bolster the novel's themes. Sometimes you have to do the hard work, like Merle and Roswell here, to accomplish a task. Other times, you're practically fed the answers by the author and the text, like a hose attached to a hydrant. And often, many people simply choose to wait for the Cleveland fire engines to do the work for them (as in visiting a website that explicates the text for them, taking away any mental agency they could have put forth themselves and leaving them with the knowledge that maybe they could have understood the text themselves but they allowed a hot, shirtless firefighter to do it for them).

Chapter 1: Section 7: Page 63: Line 140 (1122)

 Gusts of hot red light swept the grounds, reflecting brightly off desperately rolling eyeballs, as shadows darted everywhere, changing shape and size.

* * * * * * * * * *

It's like a living, life-sized version of the Michelson interferometer. The fire the source of the light. That light traveling across the grounds and reflected back in various directions by the eyes of the lunatics and their keepers. The shadows changing shape and size analogous to the fringe patterns detected by the refracted and split beams of light. As theorized by Merle earlier, each split beam from the light source becomes a different person, a different way of viewing the world. We get that literally in that the light splits away from itself via the eyes of various individuals, which also becomes a metaphoric expression of the relativistic idea of observing the same event from various points.

Chapter 1: Section 7: Page 63: Line 139 (1121)

 Sparks and coals blew and fell.

* * * * * * * * * *

Pynchon's subtext in this line is vague. Is he making a comparison between the coal burning of the industrial revolution and the sparks of the upcoming electric age? Is this the punch line of an old vaudevillian dirty joke? I know it's not just a descriptive line of the fire because that would indicate this blog has been a disastrous waste of my time. Instead, I'll just assume I'm too dumb to understand it. Or, better yet because this makes me less dumb, I just can't understand it until I've read the entire book. Perhaps even Pynchon's entire library!

Chapter 1: Section 7: Page 63: Line 138 (1120)

Crowds of onlookers from the neighborhood had gathered to see the show.

* * * * * * * * * *

 According to the article I posted in the previous blog entry, Pynchon chooses to misrepresent the asylum's neighbors. In the article, they supposedly helped evacuate the burning building with one neighbor, Benjamin Burgess, losing his life in his efforts to help. It's understandable, though, because Pynchon occasionally needs to remind readers of the concept of an "audience". It's just a fun little postmodern wink at the reader's sloth and inactivity spent as a passive observer to the story. Stupid readers. Get active already! You're always just sitting there judging characters' actions while you do nothing at all!

Chapter 1: Section 7: Page 63: Line 137 (1119)

 This was the second major fire at Newburgh in fifteen years, and the horror of the first had not yet faded.

* * * * * * * * * *

"second major fire at Newburgh in fifteen years"
The first major fire was in 1872 after which the entire complex was rebuilt, larger and with more capacity to hold inmates. This second fire may just be a creation by Pynchon to set up whatever's going to happen to Merle to pull him out of his "void of course". I'm not much of a researcher but didn't find any evidence of a second fire when searching for fires at Newburgh. I decided not to even mention the earlier fire in 1872 when the fire was first mentioned because I was merely assuming that Pynchon was using the first fire as a historical basis for this second fire. But now that he's mentioned the first fire, I'm forced to believe that this second fire actually happened as well in 1877. Why would I have even doubted it in the first place?! I've already mentioned that I will only disbelieve any historical context in a Pynchon novel if shown proof that it never happened. And even then, being an American male, I'll probably still not totally be convinced. But the new proof will at least get me to shut up. Double but, I'll probably resent you for giving me the obliterating truth of a lie that I believed.

"horror of the first had not yet faded"
Read about it for yourself!

Found at Hoosier State Chronicles.

A quick search for a second fire in 1887 turned up nothing which means Pynchon manufactured the second one or I'm terrible at research. Both of those are entirely plausible.

Chapter 1: Section 7: Page 63: Line 136 (1118)

 Lunatics and keepers alike ran around screaming.

* * * * * * * * * *

We are all the same (although the lunatics might be screaming about things other than the massive fire). Also, try to remember that many of the "lunatics" in this asylum are simply people placed here because the police didn't understand things they were saying or the police didn't like the way somebody disrespected their supposed authority or the police simply didn't like the way they looked. Sometimes crazy simply means acting, behaving, or believing in something outside of the cultural norms set by the civilization you're living in (as seen (and will probably be seen even more) through Pynchon's criticisms of imperialism, capitalism, and cultural obliteration throughout the novel).

So far, the only named examples of lunatics are Roswell Bounce and Ed Addle. We've seen that, at worst, they're Æther crackpots. So, as Pynchon said and I repeated, "lunatics and keepers alike".

Chapter 1: Section 7: Page 63: Line 135 (1117)

 The asylum was in chaos.

* * * * * * * * * *

Because of the fire or because they threw a dance party for their insane inmates? This feels like a job for Batman.

Chapter 1: Section 7: Page 63: Line 134 (1116)

 For Merle it had been a sort of directionless drift, what Mia Culpepper, who was devoted to astrology, called "void of course," which went on till mid-October, when there was a fire at the Newburgh asylum, where Merle happened to be that night, taking advantage of an inmates' dance to break out Roswell Bounce, who had offended a policeman by snapping his picture just as he emerged from the wrong sporting establishment.

* * * * * * * * * *

"For Merle it had been a sort of directionless drift"
Merle has reached the Gen-X portion of the program. Pynchon really accelerates the run through modernity into postmodernity in this section, a section purported to be about how Merle met Erlys but so far has concentrated on the Michelson-Morley experiment, Blinky Morgan, and the loss of Æther. Perhaps Pynchon's setting up the idea that "love at first sight" is just "discovering a new purpose." Love as the rudder of one's life. At least until Zombini the Mysterious dismantles your boat to leave you drifting in the current.

"Mia Culpepper"
One of the sisters Merle was "courting" at Nelly Lowry's brothel.

"devoted to astrology"
I can't help but read this as a flaw or a negative character trait of Mia Culpepper. But I guess astrology hasn't left her at loose ends or directionless so what do I know? Perhaps loyally believing in nonsense provides one with a more joyous life experience? You don't have to be constantly disappointed and let down by change if you hitch your ride to a belief that can't be disproven. Mia's love of astrology is not mentioned as backing for her coming statement so Pynchon must have placed it here as a referent to her character and mindset. I'm not an earnest person but I'm far less cynical than I once was, preferring to let people simmer in their beliefs without my added snarky commentary (at least in person! My blogs are testament to my lifelong pursuit of being a hater), so maybe I'm less apt to judge Mia as a ditz, more open to see her as optimistic, jovial, and just trying to retain some kind of control over the chaos of daily life.

"void of course"
Just another way of saying "directionless drift" but with the added stinging reference to the recent loss of Æther. While "directionless drift" hints at the quality of Æther filling the universe, "void of course" hints more at a vacuum. It's not that Merle doesn't just know where to go now or what to do; Merle simply has nothing moving or motivating him to even find a direction. He's currently a blank, a cypher. An analogy without a referent.

"which went on till mid-October"
I believe the Michelson-Morley experiment concluded in June or July so Merle's been lost for the entire summer. And he still hasn't met Erlys! Get to the story already!

"there was a fire at the Newburgh asylum, where Merle happened to be that night, taking advantage of an inmates' dance to break out Roswell Bounce"
Even directionless, Merle continues to break his Ætherist companions out of the asylum whenever they've been picked up by the police. I feel like Erlys should be coming into focus soon because the structure of this sentence indicates that Merle was about to find direction due to being at this place at this time. His funk is about to end. And probably not due to saving Roswell Bounce's hide.
    I'm going to ignore the idea of an inmates' dance at an insane asylum. I just don't currently have the bandwidth to imagine what that was like. Although, being that a fire broke out, I'm guessing my first impression that things would not go smoothly at an Insane Asylum Prom wasn't far off.

"Roswell Bounce, who had offended a policeman by snapping his picture just as he emerged from the wrong sporting establishment"
Pynchon has never had any blinders on when it came to what makes police tick. They're corrupt, violent, arrogant bastards who believe no limits to their powers exist other than their own desires. I've often said, "The only weapon you need to provoke a cop to violence is scorn," and here Pynchon gives us an example of the same. Roswell took a photo of a corrupt cop doing corruption and he was tossed in the insane asylum for it. I'm sure he was also served a fairly comprehensive beating as well.

Chapter 1: Section 7: Page 63: Line 133 (1115)

 Somehow this escalated into a general free-for-all, in which furniture and glassware didn't come out much better than the human participants, a rare sort of behavior among Ætherists, but everybody had been feeling at loose ends lately.

* * * * * * * * * *

Being Pynchon, I'm surprised the eruption of a barroom brawl was handled so succinctly. I expected a tray of cream pies to have been rolled into the room just as somebody emptied a bin of banana peels onto the floor. Pynchon's never above a popular trope that modern audiences can easily recognize to regain their attention after wading through paragraphs of high-falutin' philosophical and scientific talk.

Here, we have rational, scientific-minded thinkers breaking into complete and utter violence. It could be commentary on how scientific disputes aren't usually as logical as we common people might think. Passions can erupt when some super smart ass jerk comes along and changes the whole rules of the game so eloquently that it can't be denied. What else can you do but bust them over the head with a whisky bottle?

This could also be one of Thomas Pynchon scant allusions to nuclear proliferation. I wouldn't bet on it but it could be there if you remember how Gravity's Rainbow was all about technology screwing over the masses so eloquently that they could be killed by it before they even knew they were in danger and yet the novel has exactly one scant mention of the atomic bomb. Just a mostly obliterated headling about Hiroshima being bombed. Mostly it's about how plastics got us here and not nuclear fission! That took place during World War II so this bit of Against the Day taking place in the late 19th Century, maybe the only way to allude to nuclear bombs is a barroom brawl between science-minded philosophers and the use of the word "escalated".

"everybody had been feeling at loose ends lately"
Here we return to the idea of loss of faith or, in general, simply loss itself. The peak elation of the people who gathered in Cleveland for the experiment that would prove the existence of Æther has dropped beyond the zero to the trough of disappointment. What they had come for had not been delivered and now they don't know what to do. The end of the world, so to speak, did not come about and now they had to pick up the pieces and find a new path. Loose ends. Feeling lost. A foundational belief about the way the universe worked has been destroyed. Here in the late 19th Century, these cracks and failing are beginning to happen more and more rapidly. Æther has just crashed out and burned. The Frontier's waning. Imperialism is turning back in on itself as the nationals of oppressed nations emigrate to their oppressor's homelands.
    Modern readers in the 21st Century can easily identify with the rapid collapse of seemingly foundational institutions. Feeling at loose ends no longer qualifies as a brief disruption in a long stretch of stability; it has become the stability itself.

Chapter 1: Section 7: Page 63: Line 132 (1114)

 "Unless," Ed pointed out, "it is God."

* * * * * * * * * *

Don't take what Ed says too seriously. He's addled, remember?

Except we probably should take what he says seriously since Pynchon wrote the dialogue and every line matters, remember? That's the whole premise of this Godforsaken blog!

As we've seen, physicists, especially in the first half of the 20th Century, had no problem using the term "God" when discussing basic universal scientific laws. They didn't mean it literally (I don't think! I hope not!); it was just shorthand for the foundational laws of physics and the way the universe works. Perhaps there was a nod or an allusion to the idea of a Creator in the idea that somebody made these rules. But for the most part, it's just an easy shorthand modelled on language and culture steeped in religious belief and allusion. It's like when I stub my toe on the coffee table. I don't scream, "Fucking Universe!" I scream, "Fucking Jesus Christ!" Okay, sometimes I'm even more vulgar than that. But I've never been religious in my life! I was raised as areligious as a person can be and yet I'm still coated in the slime of religious dogma and vocabulary!

Also, Ed's entirely serious, probably. If God has to be something, why not Æther, the thing that allows light to travel? It's right there in the third most read part of the Bible (i.e., the third line). Æther is an undetectable, unproveable answer to a question that can't be answered. Could God be represented any better? Plus, the great part about Ed's line is that Æther is discarded, forgotten, and unneeded in the 20th Century. So the analogy just keeps right on truckin'.

Chapter 1: Section 7: Page 63: Lines 130-131 (1112-1113)

 "What I worry about," Roswell at last, "is that the Æther will turn out to be something like God. If we can explain everything we want to explain without it, then why keep it?"

* * * * * * * * * *

Hmm. I think I've already covered this whole God slowly disappearing as an answer to our understanding of the universe as we learn more and more about how it all works scientifically. Sorry that I got there before you, Roswell, and ruined your paranoid revelation. Although, why worry about it at all? If God isn't needed, He isn't needed! Discard that Trash!

This line of reasoning, by the way, is precisely what happened to Æther. By the time somebody (Hendrik Lorentz, I believe?) had come up with a theory of Æther that mostly worked with our understanding of light's movement through space (and all that matter moving through the Æther as well (also magnetic waves!)), Einstein had come up with special relativity which explained everything similarly to Lorentz' theory but without the need for Æther. So, you know, why keep it? Einstein basically stated that he didn't kill Æther, really. His theory just took away any need for a physical thing that filled space; he just assigned all the attributes that affected light and other bodies in the universe to space itself. You know, allowing space and time to be curved and altered itself by the things inside of it.
    Once again, my clumsy understanding of all this isn't even close to a rigorous, academic understanding of how it all works. But I think I've got some of the concepts figured out in a murky, Vaseline-smeared understanding of them.

Chapter 1: Section 7: Page 63: Line 129 (1111)

 Everybody took a moment of silence, as if considering this.

* * * * * * * * * *

This feels like a "do not encourage nor insult him" tactic of the other Ætherists at the table. It could also just be general befuddlement and incomprehension of Chandrasekhar's argument being that they've merely heard it once while drinking in a probably noisy saloon while I had plenty of time to read and re-read the statement, hours, days, and months to contemplate it, and also the entire Internet at my fingertips to bolster my limited understanding of everything. I suppose the "as if" part of that statement clarifies exactly what's going on here.

Chapter 1: Section 7: Page 63: Lines 126-128 (1108-1110)

 "Taking a contrary view," said O. D. Chandrasekhar, who was here in Cleveland all the way from Bombay, India, and didn't say much, but when he did, nobody could figure out what he meant, "this null result may as easily be read as proving the existence of the Æther. Nothing is there, yet light travels. The absence of a light-bearing medium is the emptiness of what my religion calls akasa, which is the ground or basis of all that we imagine 'exists.'"

* * * * * * * * * *

"Chandrasekhar"
According to Wikipedia, "the name comes from the name of an incarnation of the Hindu god Shiva. In this form he married the god Parvati." But Shiva had over 10,000 names so that's probably meaningless. I have convinced myself it is meaningless so that I don't have to learn all about Shiva to provide some context to a man named after one of his incarnations. The literal meaning in Sanskrit of "chandra" is "moon" and "sekhar" is "crown". That's probably more to the point although what that point is is anybody else's guess because my guess might sound a bit insensitive: Chandrasekhar is king of the moon. Luna is the root word of lunacy. Chandrasekhar is the king of the insane. Which could be where Pynchon was going with this since Pynchon points out that whenever he speaks, nobody understands him. Plus "OD" is something that sometimes happens when you take too many drugs. But when you take just the right amount of drugs, you could sound crazy to sober people.

"Taking a contrary view"
You would think the view contrary to Roswell Bounce's view might be that discovering Æther doesn't exist doesn't leave them in a quandary about where to go next but leads them directly to where they should head. But you'd be wrong. Because O. D. here has decided that by proving Æther doesn't exist, Michelson and Morely have merely proved that it does.

"didn't say much, but when he did, nobody could figure out what he meant"
A few ways to interpret this description of old Chandrasekhar's explications of things.
    First, the things Chandrasekhar says are complete nonsense. He sounds crazy. He rambles and speculates in a non-logical manner.
    Second, he's much smarter than everybody else. His ruminations pass above the mental acuity of those listening to him. He is logical and rational in his thought but he is not comprehended by the drunk dimwits at his table.
    Third, Chandrasekhar comes from a foreign place, not just in geography but in ways of seeing, believing, and expressing the world. His Hindu background allows him to understand the world in a way that is so outside the thinking of the Americans at his table that they simply can't follow his train of thought. This, to me, seems the most logical. Partly because Pynchon is always interested in how imperialism silences views that fail to see the world in a Eurocentric way. But also because I read Chandrasekhar's contrary opinion, read the definition of "akasa", and my mind refused to understand it because it's clogged with Western European assumptions.

"this null result may as easily be read as proving the existence of the Æther"
I mean, it doesn't. But it also doesn't disprove the existence of Æther! It strongly suggested that Æther doesn't exist. The problem then, what with everybody still thinking light was merely another wave that needed a medium for its propagation across space, was that the experiment did not suggest another alternative. Many clung to the idea that it must still exist because their ideas on how light traveled were now untethered. They had no theory to explain it. So maybe, since light still travels somehow, the experiment, um, proved Æther existed? No, no. Let's hear O. D. out a little more for his explanation of how this contrary opinion makes sense.

"Nothing is there, yet light travels"
Right. This is the observation that has broken so many minds! So you either figure out how light travels without the Æther, or you cling to your quickly dying theory (as many scientists will do for another half century, even after Einstein was all, "Here's how it probably works and I didn't need to fudge any numbers with a non-existent, invisible space goo!"

"The absence of a light-bearing medium is the emptiness of what my religion calls akasa, which is the ground or basis of all that we imagine 'exists.'"
Ouch my brain.
    Before trying to untangle Chandrasekhar's comment, I'd like to return to an important part of the death of Æther theory that I've discussed somewhat previously: how and why special relativity usurped it and why that's important to this novel. One of the concerns with Æther and how light and matter traveled through it was determining a standard frame of reference. As a metaphor, we can view this as Western Civilization trying to force their view of things on everybody else. But special relativity posited that measurements differ based on the observer's velocity and position. Note that special relativity doesn't change the facts which the observer's observe: it just creates a different equation to determine equal outcomes from each different point of view. Again, metaphorically, we have different cultures viewing the same historic events but interpreting them in different ways, even if the event still just happened one specific way (if it could be seen by an unbiased neutral observer). Does that make sense? Because it needs to make sense because what we're about to delve into is Chandrasekhar's observation of the Michelson-Morley experiment from a relativistic non-Western point of view. Or should I say, my poor attempt to explicate it?
    Let's start slowly.

"akasa"
Wikipedia has multiple definitions of ākāśa (or akasha) but I'll stick with the one that feels important in this context: how it's defined in Buddhist philosophy. I know, I know. Is Chandrasekhar Hindu or Buddhist? Does that matter? Am I the wrong person to discuss this? I can't answer two of those questions so we'll just ignore them all and plow ahead.
    Wikipedia states that ākāśa has two primary meanings (which I'll quote from the article below):
    The first meaning: "Spatiality: Ākāśa is defined as the absence that delimits forms. Like the empty space within a door frame, it is an emptiness that is shaped and defined by the material surrounding it." Light's ability to travel is like the door frame shaping the emptiness. The emptiness provides the passage; the door frame merely a sign that the passage exists. Nothing, in its way, can be something. And so the null result of the Michelson-Morley experiment simply points to the passage which light uses to move through space.
    The second meaning: "Vast Space: Ākāśa is also described as the absence of obstruction . . . because it remains unchanged over time. In this sense, it is likened to the Western concept of ether—an immaterial, luminous fluid. . . ." So, what we'd expect. It is the same as Æther but, as in the first meaning, it is also nothing. A null result only proves it exists.

"the ground or basis of all that we imagine 'exists.'"
Here we get reference to the Hindu concept of "akasha": it is the "basis and essence of all things in the material world." But the word in this sentence that strikes me is "imagine" (with exists following in quotation marks also being important!). Here we sense one of the themes I've been discussing throughout: the general consensus of reality makes reality in the novel. How people imagine the way the world is is the way the world is. If it can be imagined, it exists. So even if an experiment proves that Æther doesn't exist in 1887, it doesn't mean it's dead and done for. People still believe in it, even if fewer and fewer will as time goes by. And again, speaking of faith, we see in this loss of faith in Æther the same loss of faith in God (as well as many other things which Pynchon will probably get to (and which I might be able to speak on if only I'd read this novel one time through before writing about it)).

There's probably more here that I'm not ferreting out (and probably a bunch of speculation that I got wrong) but I'll leave it at that for now.
    

Chapter 1: Section 7: Page 63: Lines 122-125 (1104-1107)

 "So with this Michelson-Morley result. We've all had a lot of faith invested. Now it looks like the Æther, whether it's moving or standing still, just doesn't exist. What do we do now?"

* * * * * * * * * *

"We've all had a lot of faith invested"
With so much discussion of scientists (and science loving nerds) having faith about scientific theories, I should probably give it more thought than I've done (or have I? I don't remember). Pynchon purposefully infuses several discussions about scientists having faith when that's exactly what scientists shouldn't be having about anything scientific. Faith should not be a part of the equation. Sure, I understand that theories in science and mathematical functions can work to explain something that's observed without actually proving how that observed thing actually functions. So there's a certain amount of "faith" that the theory or equation isn't just a tottering piece of shoddy scaffolding holding up the explanation for the end result. But Pynchon's playing a different game by constantly including the word. Roswell references religious thought for a reason in the previous paragraph. He's making a one-for-one comparison between religious faith and scientific faith, and the fallout for those not ready to abandon an idea when the idea proves faulty.
    The point I'm failing to get to is this: Pynchon isn't talking about one scientific idea (Æther) failing and how people will move on from the loss. He's explicitly discussing the death of God and religion in our civilization's growth. Every discovery about the way the universe works murders an old belief. Many of those "old beliefs" boil down to one simple answer for the unexplainable: God. But every time some unexplainable thing whose answer was God gets explained, it tilts the balance on the scales that maintain the existence of God. At some point, so many discoveries will be made that destroy yet another unexplainable thing, belief in God becomes nearly impossible. How many times does something whose answer was "God" need to be shown that there's an actual answer before the whole idea that God was ever an answer is just discarded? "Well, we'll never answer X so it must be God!" continues to fall to somebody eventually answering "X".

"just doesn't exist. What do we do now?"
And this is the modern (postmodern?) question. God is dead. What do we do now? Aside from celebrate, I mean!

Chapter 1: Section 7: Page 62: Lines 118-121 (1100-1103)

 "It's like these cults who believe the world will end on such and such a day," Roswell opined, "they get rid of all their earthly possessions and head off in a group for some mountaintop and wait, and then the end of the world doesn't happen. The world keeps going on. What a disappointment! Everybody has to troop back down the mountain with their spiritual tails dragging, except for one or two incurably grinning idiots who see it as a chance to start a new life, fresh, without encumbrances, to be reborn, in fact.

* * * * * * * * * *

First things first: I did not forget the end quote punctuation. Roswell continues to speak in the paragraph which follows this one which explains how Pynchon and I didn't make a mistake to those who understand the idiosyncrasies of written English dialogue. To those who don't understand it, well now maybe you do.

"It's like these cults who believe the world will end on such and such a day"
Young people of every generation probably think the first time they hear about a particular day being the end of the world, it's the first time anybody has ever declared that. But as you learn more and more history, across the whole expanse of human civilization, you realize somebody out there constantly thinks they know the end point of that civilization. But what's even more funny is that, as in the case of the Romans, nobody recognizes the end of your world even months and years after it already happened. You just go about your business not realizing that your world is dead until you find you're somehow living in another world that you hadn't planned on. But since that's only going to affect one generation, it's barely noticed or remembered, especially since it basically happened to the previous generation and your generation just has to be all, "Oh, wait. How come this world isn't anything like what mom and dad said it was?"
    That bit about not realizing your civilization is already dead but you continue to live in it? That's not just like Rome; it's also like relationships! If you've never been in a relationship before and you're wondering what it feels like to have one end even before either person truly knows it's over, you should read "Melenctha" by Gertrude Stein! Although maybe you shouldn't read it because if I know the kinds of people who read my blogs, you would absolutely hate it and then hate me for suggesting it. So never mind. Maybe go read Sam and the Firefly instead. That was my favorite book in elementary school.
    And just for clarification before I move on to the next bit, the "it's like" part should be acknowledged as it means Roswell's comparing the Ætherists loss of their belief system regarding how light works to these cults. I just want to make sure the pronoun's antecedent is clear before I go entirely off the rails talking about end of the world cults. This isn't directly about them. It's about the Ætherists and, more generally, anybody who must face the consequences of a new discovery in science and all which that discovery winds up destroying.

"they get rid of all their earthly possessions"
This is the closest a person living in a capitalist system can get to death. Material possessions are like your video game health bar. When you've lost them all, the next loss is your life. Or, as we'll see by the end of Roswell's thought, a clean slate through a kind of materialist reincarnation. We are our memories and our experiences. But in a capitalist system, many people are merely their seemingly endless collection of horrible Funko Pops.

"head off in a group for some mountaintop and wait"
If you do this alone, you're a crazy hermit. If you do it with a group, it's a religious movement.

"and then the end of the world doesn't happen"
I like the tense of this sentence, or whatever you call it. What am I? A grammarian?! Oh, sure, I knew how to use antecedent correctly. I think. But that doesn't mean anything at all! Anyway, I like that Roswell's not just rebuking end of the world cults of the past with this statement but all those in the future as well.

"The world keeps going on. What a disappointment!"
I mean, yeah. You don't need a cult to have this revelation five or six times per day. But I suppose it's worse for those who not only burned every bridge in their life because they didn't think they'd need to cross any more rivers ever again but were probably really self-righteous while doing it.
    These two lines bring to mind The Entertainment from Infinite Jest. Himself's terrible, possibly-actual-world ending movie that destructively takes away the "what a disappointment" part of the equation from the people who watch it. One of my lifelong rants has been how I never asked to be born into this world of pain. I didn't give my parents consent to suffer this turmoil! And so when I finally got to the description of Himself's "Infinite Jest" film, I found I would probably have readily succumbed to it. A movie filmed with a special holographic lens that puts the viewer in the mind of a baby while its mother repeatedly apologizes to it? Yes please.

"except for one or two incurably grinning idiots who see it as a chance to start a new life, fresh, without encumbrances, to be reborn"
Speaking of Infinite Jest, I think Pynchon just wrote it in three lines here (minus all the drama about how parents shape their children's lives and with fewer allusions to Hamlet). This is Don Gateley's story! Shedding all material possessions (past traumas and addictions most definitely included) to be reborn a free man, able to experience life and feel actual human emotions again! Plus Don gets the added benefit of getting as close as possible to dying so he can be reborn. Plus we get to see how Himself continues to direct movies from the afterlife due to Gately's near death condition. I think.
    Anyway, that's a different book that I need to re-read! What these "grinning idiots" understand is that they don't have to be tied to those stupid fucking Funko Pops! You can throw them in the trash and be free! You can give yourself a second chance at actually experiencing life! Stop cosplaying a dragon! Let the dwarves take your ugly treasures! Let their theft awaken you from your gold-hypnotized slumber! Be angry or joyous but whatever you do, fly! FLY, DAMMIT, FLY!