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

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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.

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 "Unless," Ed pointed out, "it is God."

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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?"

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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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 Strolling among the skyships next morning, beneath a circus sky which was slowly becoming crowded as craft of all sorts made their ascents, renewing acquaintance with many in whose company, for better or worse, they had shared adventures, the Chums were approached by a couple whom they were not slow to recognize as the same photographer and model they had inadvertently bombarded the previous evening.

* * * * * * * * * *

Miles and Lindsay's night at the Fair came to a conclusion between sections which means Pynchon wasn't interested at all in describing the events and exhibitions taking place in The White City at the center of the fairgrounds. The center isn't of concern here. Perhaps I'm getting a little bit closer at understanding the title. Perhaps the day is the center, the status quo, the considered norm. What we see in the day is what the light shines on, and what the light shines on, in a civilization, is curated by desires, beliefs, agendas, motivations, and selfish machinations of the people living in it. But that doesn't mean what happens in the shadows doesn't exist, or isn't important, or isn't equally as valid to those who live outside of that light.

"It's always night, or we wouldn't need light." The quote by Thelonious Monk which opened the novel. "It's always night." An observation by a man who lived in the shadow world, not because he chose to but because society chose it for him. And even when he thrived, they continued to try to stop him from thriving whenever a light was shone on him. His life mirrors every experience Black Americans have tried to explain to white Americans who just simply choose not to believe it. Because living in the daylight is an experience so divorced from those without light that it can hardly be comprehended. And much of the time, white Americans simply choose not to comprehend it when it's plain as day.

I'd be a fool to believe that I understand what this novel is about or where it's headed, thematically, after only reading twenty-five pages of boys' adventure novel. But what's the point of having a brain if you don't use it to think about what you're reading while you're reading it?

"the Chums"
Why "the Chums of Chance"? I haven't asked that question yet, have I? For a group of uniformed boys working by strict rules within a seemingly militaryesque organization, why identify with the word "chance"? Chance could mean "the occurrence and development of events in the absence of any obvious design." What does that say about their view of their 19th century world? We're throwing God right out of the picture with this nickname, are we not? I know they're using it to mean "do something despite its being dangerous or of uncertain outcome." But we have to acknowledge that Pynchon knows the alternate meanings of the word and what they, too, suggest about their name. So if the term chance suggests an "absence of any obvious design" as well as engaging in dangerous activities with uncertain outcomes, it's part of the text and part of the story.
    I think the "obvious" is doing most of the work in this case. God has been the "obvious" designer up until, well, about 1893, if I'm going to go all-in on Pynchon's story and themes. The Chums are living in an era where the "designs" are being discovered little by little and they've been discovered to be obvious in no way at all. That's the thing about science. People who don't really care much about learning and understanding the world around them, so wrapped up in their own gut instincts and personal anecdotes, always seem to think the world can be understood if you just have a modicum of common sense. But common sense implies obviousness; common sense allows for easy understanding of simple things and matters. Science is neither simple nor easily understood. Science often goes against everything our senses say the world should be. In a way, I see the phrase "absence of any obvious design" as a statement that puts God to rest and embraces science.

"approached by a couple"
It's been three sections of mostly the Chums so I'm looking forward to some new characters! Especially the naked lady!

The Title

 If I had read this book previously (and some of you might be thinking, "Isn't this the type of project that should only be attempted on a—at the very least—second reading? And shouldn't the person doing this kind of critical reading of a Thomas Pynchon novel also be intimately familiar with his books written prior to this one instead of just having read the first few pages of Vineland twenty-three years ago, The Crying of Lot 49 only once twenty-five years ago, Mason & Dixon twenty-three years ago, and Gravity's Rainbow, twice in a row, one month ago? Shouldn't you have some—I don't know—credentials?!), I might understand what the title of the book means. It's not as complicated as Gravity's Rainbow (which isn't really all that complicated after you read the book. I mean, it's the arc of the rocket and also maybe something about God's promise to never send another flood to destroy mankind? That's part of it, right?) but not quite as simple as Mason & Dixon (it's the names of the main characters! Also it reminds you of the Mason/Dixon line. And that makes you think of borders. And if you know the only thing anybody knows about Mason & Dixon's line, it might make you think of slavery too. And that will probably make you think of modern race relations and past race relations and imperialism and justice and getting boners in South Africa while attempting to view the transit of Venus. But mostly you'll probably just think, "That was them two guys what explored the Louisiana Purchase, right?").

I don't mean to suggest I don't understand the words in the title! I know that against means either in opposition to or adjacent to. So right there you've got a bit of a quandary! Is Pynchon suggesting we're battling the day, maybe like Don Quixote attacking windmills, or are we just casually leaning on it like a stack of clean laundry knocked over by the cat to lean helter-skelter against the wall without quite falling over?

I'm really beginning to regret not starting this project only on the second reading! Just imagine all of the great insights I'd have about the title if I knew what the stupid book was about! You'd be slapping that like and subscribe button like a Goddamned maniac! And by "maniac," I mean supernatural serial killer and not condemned lunatic because I'm not an unfeeling bastard who uses disease and mental illness simply for dramatic effect! That's the style of way better writers than me!

Should I say something about the concept of "day" or do you think we're all probably on the same page there? Nothing special about the day, right? It's just that thing that happens when it's not night. You know? It's the part of the Earth's rotation which you spend eating doughnuts while watching game shows or smoking pot while ditching class. Pshaw! We all know what the day is! And I've got to say, after the way I've just described it . . . who would want to be against it?!

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Postscript: A few ways to interpret the phrase "against the day" which I can't believe I didn't think about before. One might be the contemplation of mortality and how we have a limited time to get things done; we race "against the day," to finish what we must while light remains. Metaphorically, this works in a number of ways. We race against our finite time to complete what we think might be our purpose before darkness and death engulf us. We struggle to make due or make things better while goodness and light still overpower the darkness and selfishness of those who would end our agency and freedom. The day is a limit on our endeavours. It becomes an opponent which we must struggle against to scrape meaning from our time.
    "Against the day" is also a phrase that comes up in The Bible and since every book in Western Literature is ultimately referencing The Bible, that's probably important. Usually it's used in such a way that we must "prepare against the day" that something awful or aweful will happen. Prepare yourselves against the day of salvation or the day of judgment. Prepare yourself against the day of invasion or acceptance. People in The Bible are always preparing for something yet to come! So "against the day" might just be a way of expressing a need for preparation for whatever is coming. Perhaps to prepare against the day of God being dead. Or perhaps to prepare against the day of the V-2 and atomic bombs.
    I'd probably have a better idea if I'd read the book once through before writing these entries!