Chapter 1: Section 7: Page 64: Line 164 (1146)

 Come in out of the pale Invisible, down into this otherwise explainable world, clearer than real.

* * * * * * * * * *

Sometimes I can't help thinking of Pynchon's other works where reading a line from, well, any other of Pynchon's works. That's why I'm sad that can't read everything by him after first reading everything by him. I mean, I can but not in the way I want. I don't want to have to read everything twice! That's ludicrous! The point I want to make which needed me to preface it with the preceding sentences was that this line reminded me of a V-2 rocket. And even though the ghosts of all of my college teachers are screaming, "Expand your thought!", into my head right now, I won't.

Merle's experience of developing photographs speaks of something beyond what can be known (again, more Gravity's Rainbow shouting in my brain with all that stuff with the medium and speaking with the dead). As if the photo developing on the plate weren't a scientific process that can be understood and replicated and instead is simple magic produced by the correct ritual movements and ingredients.

This section that seems to concern Merle having a pseudo-religious experience concerning light (especially when he's just spent the last few months living with, speaking with, and drinking with light worshipers) had me thinking about one of the basic reasons (among myriad reasons) that I cannot believe in God. It simply comes down to adding another link to a chain of the unknowable. I do not understand why matter exists. In my head, I can think of the universe as beginning at the Big Bang and then, well, I don't know. Unknowable. A question mark. What I don't need to do is add another link to that chain by saying, "Before the Big Bang, God. He created it. But where did God come from? Unknowable." See? How does adding God to that chain clarify anything? Sure, for some reason, people seem to accept God as infinite. But if you have to accept something as infinite to explain reality, why do you have to invent the God step? God is an anomaly in the system. You can explain it all right up to the moment before the Big Bang and then suddenly you're going to introduce something unexplainable which doesn't even play by the universe's rules? I just don't see the point. God can climb back into the pale Invisible and stay there for all I care. "Down into this otherwise explainable world" writes Pynchon. Otherwise explainable. As if the unexplained is something that will remain unexplained for all time. The reason postmodernism exists is because too many questions were answered (and also too many atrocities were committed by answering so many questions!) and the answer, "God," just stopped cutting even the blandest mustard.