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 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.

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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).

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

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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.

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 Sparks and coals blew and fell.

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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!

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

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 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!

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

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"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.

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 Lunatics and keepers alike ran around screaming.

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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".