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 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.

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 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.

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 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.

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 "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'.

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 "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.

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 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.

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 "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.