"But you've seen his picture in the papers."
* * * * * * * * * *
I have not.
Merle's bringing up his photograph as a defense to how he must be connected to the Michelson-Morley experiment. Maybe I'm daft but I don't understand his argument. Hopefully he'll elaborate!
"You might as well head for the deep jungle and talk this over with the trees, for in this town that kind of thinking won't go, nosir not at all."
* * * * * * * * * *
Currently everybody in Cleveland is so rational that the cops keeping sweeping up a bunch of them and throwing them in the insane asylum so Roswell Bounce's point might be a bit less strenuously grounded than he believes.
I think I'm, just now, sixty-one pages in, realizing how heavily this book differs so drastically from the first sixty-one pages of Gravity's Rainbow. Against the Day's narrative relies on science and rationality as a background to the characters' lives and motivations. Gravity's Rainbow begins almost exactly the opposite way (which shouldn't be surprising, I suppose, being that it begins with the Wernher von Braun quote, "Nature does not know extinction; all it knows is transformation. Everything science has taught me, and continues to teach me, strengthens my belief in the continuity of our spiritual existence after death."). In Against the Day, technology is moving people forward out of darkness, leaving behind superstition and ill-formed scientific beliefs. In Gravity's Rainbow, technology is moving people toward death and genocide, madness and enslavement which drives them toward the supernatural and a search for something more, something greater, something beyond the zero of this life.
How does Mason & Dixon fit in then? Something about the measuring of the world changing the way people have been driven spiritually for so long? I'm not as familiar with that book having read it only once when it was first published (and the slight amount I've done on my Mason & Dixon One Line at a Time blog).
Wasn't Pynchon supposed to do four great novels? Am I too stupid to realize what his fourth great novel was or has he not done it yet? If not, he'd better get to work already!
"This is primitive hoodoo," objected Roswell Bounce.
* * * * * * * * * *
Roswell uses the term "hoodoo" to mean nonsense. He doesn't buy into Merle's belief that two spectacularly different experiences are representative of some singular physical law of the universe. But he's also, in his use of the terms 'primitive' and 'hoodoo', evoking, in an imperialist manner, the beliefs of some Black southerners, hoodoo being a sympathetic magic of African-based folk cures. The reduction of another culture's beliefs to a synonym for nonsense expresses the amount of Othering often done to non-white, non-European peoples.
On the other hand, Roswell Bounce, we've learned, is a cynic and a pragmatist. Of course he isn't going to believe in non-Western medicinal beliefs that amount to no more than folklore and superstition! Oh no! Now I'm doing it! Damn my imperialist, cynical nature!
Not that one would cause the other, exactly, but that both would be different utterances of the same principle.
* * * * * * * * * *
What would that principle be? If the end of Æther can be seen as a shifting paradigm, a death of some traditional belief, a frontier, of sorts, then that means Merle sees the capture of Blinky in a similar manner. Is that it? The death of some kind of innocence? The end of some kind of freedom? The loss of a frontier? A massive times they are a'changin' moment?
I know those speculations aren't actually principles but things that happen when a principle falters or is radically altered. But then what is Merle talking about? Is the failure of the Michelson-Morley experiment an utterance of the new principle that science just hasn't figured out yet? That seems plausible. That the failure of the experiment leading to the death of Æther is an utterance of Einstein's theory of relativity (specifically that the speed of light in a vacuum is the same for all observers regardless of the motion of observers or light source) becoming a major understanding of reality, as this very experiment influenced Einstein's experimentation on the theory.
Let's assume that's the utterance: the failure of the experiment was because the universe was vastly different than the one where Æther was needed for light to travel. That means Blinky being capture also, somehow, expresses a post-Æther reality based on Einstein's future theory. Both events portend the future reality by their outcomes.
But how does the capture of a fur-stealing criminal have anything to do with physics? With the speed or transmission of light? With special or general relativity? I could just wimp out and suggest that the utterance is that truth will eventually come out. Criminals found and captured; Æther discovered as a fraud. But that's way too simple, right? Plus, once again, it's sidestepping the idea that Blinky's capture is an expression of Einstein's Theory of Relativity (special or general? I don't know!).
Perhaps the relativistic aspect of Blinky Morgan's case should be looked at. Does it have something to do with observers and how they see the event? The common man sees Blinky as an anti-hero, perhaps hoping he evades the law even though they accept he and his gang committed the crime while the police see it differently. Blinky's capture is an expression of how different people can see the same event in different ways, depending on their "motion" (motion here simply meaning, I don't know, class? Politics? Economic level?).
