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 Damn.

* * * * * * * * * *

Who is speaking this?! It's like the omniscient narrator has been invested in how much money Merle has. Oh, and also isn't omniscient since the narrator just found out Merle was broke and couldn't help cursing. The only other option, and probably the most logical, is that it's Merle's own internal monologue. As if Roswell mentioning the silver in his pocket got Merle to fish around in his pockets, realize there's nothing there, say, "Not lately," and think, "Damn." But it's still fucking weird. Really weird.

Chapter 1: Section 7: Page 64: Line 183 (1165)

 "Not lately."

* * * * * * * * * *

Merle's broke. He's been in town without a real job while often visiting the brothel and going on drinking jags for too long. He no longer has silver, just deadbeat friends who keep getting picked up by the police and thrown in the loony bin.

Chapter 1: Section 7: Page 64: Line 182 (1164)

 "Just like what's in your pocket."

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Is this Roswell expressing hope that Merle will be able to pay him for his tutelage? Not outright asking, of course, since Merle helped him escape the asylum and he kind of owes Merle. Or is this just more preparation for some silver themes upcoming? "Hey, reader! Did you know coins were made of silver? Do you know what coins are? You do know money has existed as an actual object for millennia, right? It's not just numbers in a computer!"

Maybe this is a reference to The Hobbit?

In reality, I should discuss this line and the two that follow it together. But I made the rules earlier and I'm sticking by them! Until I don't!

Chapter 1: Section 7: Page 64: Lines 180-181 (1162-1163)

 "All right, all right. And you swear this is made of silver?"

* * * * * * * * * *

"All right, all right"
Obviously Thomas Pynchon had a specific actor in mind when casting for the Against the Day movie were scripted.

"you swear this is made of silver"
I'm not sure why Merle's so intent on making sure the photograph has a basis in silver. Is he having werewolf trouble? I suppose this is just more photography speak as Pynchon walks us through the literal process as well as the metaphor.

You can look up the entire process as I did right on the Internet! If you don't know what the Internet is then how are you reading this? Did some jerk print it up to make 'zines that he's now selling somewhere for profit? That rascal!

Oh, I did learn what the fixer in the hypo from earlier was for! The fixer causes the silver halides to lose their sensitivity to light (which is why this happens in a dark room) and thus fixing the photo in place before it gets exposed to more light and washed out. Then the "fixer" is removed by the water bath and left to dry. And then voulez-vous! You have a picture!

I wonder if the mention of silver is also to prepare us for Lew Basnight's move to Colorado and later discussions of the Sherman Silver Purchase Act of 1890?

Chapter 1: Section 7: Page 64: Line 179 (1161)

 "Photography, this is Merle, Merle—"

* * * * * * * * * *

It's a joke! Not a great joke. Like one of those jokes where our uncle says, "Working hard or hardly working?" Oh, a dad joke, I guess. Is that what they're called these days? My dad is a joke so I'm not familiar with the form.

But on the non-joking side of this statement, Roswell infuses Photography with life and identity. As if Photography were a demi-god of great power. And also Roswell's chum and/or side piece.

Chapter 1: Section 7: Page 64: Line 178 (1160)

 By the time the sun rose over Shaker Heights, Roswell Bounce had introduced Merle to photography.

* * * * * * * * * *

In other words, Merle had received the power of vision, the clarity of light, and the, um, maybe, ethical morality of a Shaker? I'm not sure about that last part. Merle has learned to see the world in a better, clearer light. His understanding of the world has changed. For the better, I believe. He has learned to take his time while studying the world developing around him. Roswell has granted him patience and the willingness to see, to study, the world surrounding him.

Chapter 1: Section 7: Page 64: Line 177 (1159)

 So the night went on, spent mostly washing things in different solutions and then waiting for them to dry.

* * * * * * * * * *

I keep mentioning photography simply because that's the language with which Pynchon has chosen to discuss the actual problem. Here, night is history or civilization. History goes on. Society continues to bumble along. Washing things in different solutions is probably two-fold: trying to correct the problems we, as a society, care about and have the ability to solve; and "washing" away those with which the men in power don't want to deal. "Waiting for them to dry", of course, means observing if efforts were successful (either to fix the problem or hide/get everybody to ignore the problem).

Sometimes the "washing things" part of the equation, when it's people in power doing it, becomes "making up a problem" as the solution to whatever they're trying to hide, or whatever power they're trying to grab. So they go on and on and on about immigration and how terrible it is and make it into a problem in the eyes of scared, xenophobic morons. This has been part of the playbook for the entirety of civilization, this othering to control the masses. It has the added effect of causing problems that wouldn't exist without the "solution" and soon the new problems need a new "solution" that's even worse than the first "solution" that caused all the problems.

Also the main thing currently being washed and hoping to dry into forgetfulness, of course, is The Epstein Files. Surprisingly, the conspiracy theorists were right for once: it's pedos all the way down. Except the reason they were right isn't as surprising as one might think. If you're a pedo, you accuse other people of being pedos not just because you're projecting but because you think what you do and enjoy must be what other people also enjoy. So you figure that if you love CSAM, everybody else must love it too! So you accuse people you dislike of being into it. What you don't realize is that people not into CSAM (meaning, hopefully, most people?) is that they don't really think about it all that much until it's brought up by either some conspiracy theorist or their local priest gets nabbed for it.

What I never would have understood if all of this QAnon weirdness hadn't cropped up in the world was how much of a language and experience in the world these CSAM pedos shared. They knew what they were up to so figured everybody else was up to it too. But more so, whenever you hear about one of them getting caught, they have so much CSAM material. People don't usually know how to find that stuff and yet there are people all over the world networked into this marketplace. They speak a common language and live in a shared world. They also believe that world is the normal world! They are living in the negative and assuming the rest of us see it too. But, like Merle, most of the world has never seen it, never thought much about it, and certainly wouldn't have believed in how deep-rooted this shit is.

This idea that a person lives their life in such a way that they automatically assume other people live the same way brings to mind something slightly off-topic but maybe still having to do with "washing history". My theory is that Donald Trump believes the 2020 election was stolen for a number of reason. One of those reasons, a simple one, is that he doesn't understand how votes are counted and how Democratic majorities reside in large urban centers while Republican majorities are usually many, many rural localities. So when voting begins, if all votes come in at the same pace, one per minute per precinct, say, after one minute, a state with 9 strong Republican rural precincts and 1 strong Democratic population dense center, the vote would be 9 Republican to 1 Democrat. This would keep going: 18 to 2, 27 to 3, 36 to 4, and so on. It would look like a rout underway! But soon enough, the small rural populations would run out of votes while the large Democratic population center would just keep on, minute after minute, ticking up one vote after another. Right up until it overwhelms the other votes and takes over. Which would happen much later that night, possibly in a day or two. So a dumb person who doesn't understand anything, like, say, Donald Trump, would think something was fishy.

But! The more pressing reason I think Trump believes his opponent cheated is that he cheated as well. And if he cheated and still lost, obviously his opponent had to have cheated to win! But he obviously can't use that as his explanation: "How did Biden win if I cheated? Well, he must have also cheated!" So instead, he just proclaims, without any proof, that Biden cheated. Because he must have, right?

Anyway, Fuck Trump. Fuck ICE. Fuck Republicans. Read a book, you violent dimwits!

Chapter 1: Section 7: Page 64: Lines 173-176 (1155-1158)

 "It's a negative. When we print this, it'll all flip back to normal. First we have to fix it. Reach me that bottle of hypo there."

* * * * * * * *

"It's a negative"
Yeah, Merle already figured that out. It's evil! It's the opposite! It's light's dark side! Oh, wait, yeah, um, so Merle just learned the technical term. Right. Okay.

"flip back to normal"
As if it's so easy for those trapped in their madness to return to "normality". There's a reason why this first photograph that Merle lays his eyes on is of the Northern Ohio Insane Asylum. It's one of those metaphors or analogies. While Merle has physically been helping inmates escape (presumably because they didn't actually belong there and were just dumped their by lazy and/or angry cops), the truth is that it's much harder, impossible even. How do you flip a lunatic back to sanity? Perhaps Pynchon hints, through the taking of a photograph of these inmates, that the way to help them back, to flip them to normal, is to actually see them. To listen to them. To understand them. Simply locking them away for the good of "decent citizens" who don't want to be irritated or annoyed, who don't want to pay the high cost of caring, as Pynchon once said in another book. Insane asylums are a symptom of a society that only has room enough for a narrow scope of thinking.

"First we have to fix it"
I guess this is photography lingo for developing a photo but we know Pynchon's actually talking about society. First we must see the problem. Then we can fix the problem.

"Reach me that bottle of hypo"
Or we can drug it into senselessness so we don't have to think about it at all.

Chapter 1: Section 7: Page 64: Lines 171-172 (1153-1154)

 "What is it? They look like spirits, or haunts or something?

* * * * * * * * * *

"What is it?"
Much has been said through the years about Merle's reaction to this photograph. Daniel Sweetgrass and his friend, Joan Thompson, as well as even Thor Jessennvolk often discussed his reaction when they'd meet two weekends out of every year in a cozy cabin in Aspen. "It was like he was looking into another world, as if light's ability to showcase reality had been twisted to expose something dark and sinister beneath when seen through this miraculous middleman known as photography," said Joan as she sipped her cocoa around a raft of tiny marshmallows. "A glass darkly, one might suppose," murmured Thor sitting on the floor against the couch as Daniel, legs tucked up underneath him on the couch behind, casually stroked Thor's hair. Decades later, after Daniel and Joan both in the ground for some years, Thor would lament, "There were times when we felt like we were trying to see that world, experience the shock and intensity of Merle's first experience with a photographic negative. Like we knew the world wasn't truly as good as we all pretended it should be."

Sorry! I recently read Danielewski's Tom's Crossing and it must have infected my frontal lobe. Although writing just that small paragraph, I can see why Danielewski was so enamored with the narrative motif. I can't promise I won't do that again!

"spirits, or haunts"
The negative, in a way, captures the true essence of these suppose mad men locked inside the low-tier prison of a mental asylum. Wiping away individuality, the halls of the asylum become haunted by the figures shuffling about, screaming, terrified, bored, lost. Visitors, doctors, security, and staff lose the ability to distinguish one person over another. They are simply the spirits of those lost to reality. They have become the negatives of the "sane" people who remain outside the asylum's grounds.