"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.
"Just like what's in your pocket."
* * * * * * * * * *
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!
"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.
The sky behind the tall, jagged roofline was nearly black, windows that should have been light-colored were dark.
* * * * * * * * * *
Remember the beginning of the television show Tales from the Darkside? It simply showed some normal natural scenes with some really creepy Casio keyboard music playing. Then some deep voiced guy was all, "Man lives in the sunlit world of what he believes to be reality. But there is, unseen by most, an underworld, a place that is just as real but not as brightly lit. A dark side." Then the image flips and BAM! we're viewing everything as its negative. Man, that used to terrify me as a kid. And I was twelve when that show first aired!
Well that feeling is what Merle's feeling right now. Getting his first glimpse of a negative world, a dark side. He might as well be twelve (or younger!) while experiencing this because unlike twelve year old me, Merle has no idea what a negative even is. What he's seeing can only be described as a dark version of the well-lit world he knows, an evil version, probably! And making it even creepier is that it's of the unheimlich place they've all been tossed into a few times that summer, the Newburgh Asylum. And even creepier yet, the slipped-from-reality inmates staring strangely out at him.
I just watched the opening to Tales from the Darkside to transcribe what the man said during it and I broke out into gooseflesh even now! At not even close to twelve!
You know what other intro scared the hell out of me as a kid (much younger than twelve, to be fair)? Doctor Who! That fricking music, man! Chills!
It happened to be the Newburgh asylum, with two or three inmates standing in the foreground, staring.
* * * * * * * * * *
The picture that suddenly appears to Merle, the picture that he describes as "clearer than real", is of the place in Cleveland where reality is the least clear. Nobody can say what the two or three inmates were staring at when this photo was taken, and nobody can absolutely sure that they weren't staring back at Merle himself.
What Merle is questioning with the development of these photographs how reality works and so the first picture he observes coming into being like magic, out of the pale Invisible, is of a place where reality is not only questioned but denied, disbelieved, unstable, un-understood.
What this sentence screams at me, in German, of course, is "unheimlich". It's uncanny. It's strange. It's a photo of the most un-home-like place you can be, a place that you must call home although you do not want to. Different from a prison in that the inmates, presumably, can not even know why they're here. And the inmates staring out from it makes them feel trapped, as they are in the photo. They are not looking back. They are not merely looking out. They are staring. They are longing. They are not home.
"I could've been in the chapel at that dance where the fire broke out. Guess you saved my fundament, there."
* * * * * * * * * *
"the chapel at that dance where the fire broke out"
The Northern Ohio Insane Asylum has been painted as Hell and the fire which broke out began in the one possibly holy place in the entire complex. A chaotic reaction of evil against the holy trying to purify it.
Roswell points out that he "could've" been in the chapel but wasn't. Probably because he's cynical. He's merely reacting as anybody might react when they've fled a dangerous situation: "It could have been worse. I could have died. I was just lucky enough to be where I was in the midst of the danger." But we all know Roswell never actually would have been in the chapel.
"saved my fundament"
Literally, "You saved my ass." But the word "fundament" is probably meant to make the reader think of fundamentalist religions, just to keep the "Insane Asylum as Hell" and "Saloon as Church" analogy going. Merle not only saved his ass but the continuation of his belief system.
By the time the fire was under control, the exhaustion and confusion were too advanced for anyone to notice as Merle and Roswell slipped away.
* * * * * * * * * *
Notice Pynchon never alludes to how the fire started. But if you follow the money (the money in this case is just somebody benefitting from the fire), we must assume it was set by Merle or Roswell. Probably Roswell since previous mentions of Merle rescuing other Ætherists (like Ed Addle) without a story of a fire leads one to assume Merle could handle it without nearly killing everybody. Also, Roswell seems like the kind of cynical jerk who would risk other people's lives, limbs, and properties to gain something he desired, like, um, freedom.
But I don't think that's the point of this line, to encourage the reader to see Roswell Bounce as an arsonist. I'm sure the fire is a metaphor for Michelson and Morley's null result, the exhaustion and confusion a metaphor for the scientific community's response to the mortal wounding of Æther, and Merle and Roswell slipping away a metaphor for life going on in spite of drastic changes to one's environment, lifestyle, or culture.
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.
* * * * * * * * * *
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).
Gusts of hot red light swept the grounds, reflecting brightly off desperately rolling eyeballs, as shadows darted everywhere, changing shape and size.
* * * * * * * * * *
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.
Sparks and coals blew and fell.
* * * * * * * * * *
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!
Crowds of onlookers from the neighborhood had gathered to see the show.
* * * * * * * * * *
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!
This was the second major fire at Newburgh in fifteen years, and the horror of the first had not yet faded.
* * * * * * * * * *
"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!
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.
Lunatics and keepers alike ran around screaming.
* * * * * * * * * *
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".
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.
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.
By which point uniformed guards were approaching at a clip you could call moderate.
* * * * * * * * * *
"uniformed guards were approaching"
The guards of the Newburgh asylum. Ed Addle might know how light travels through the Æther but he apparently has no understanding of how sound travels through the air. Some employees at the asylum might not care about losing a patient or two but I've seen One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest so I know the guards would rather have one more patient to beat on than less work.
"at a clip you could call moderate"
This is a pace chosen to indicate that the guards aren't curiously investigating the sounds but excitedly moving toward a victim of their future violence. They're excited for what's about to come! One might argue with my characterization of the "uniformed guards" as overly critical but have you read Pynchon's other novels? Pynchon agrees with me: cops and guards are violent bastards who love violence for the sake of violence.
"Shh! Will you just—"
* * * * * * * * * *
"Shh!"
Instead of mocking the amount of time this project would take me, why couldn't Redditors have simply said, "What a dumb project. You know one of the lines you'll have to explicate is simply 'Shh!'?" They could have saved me so much time by simply pointing out that Pynchon couldn't have possibly meant for the reader to think critically about each line both in and out of the context of the entire text if some of his lines were just one word responses to other characters. Fucking jerks.
Although this line could mean something on its own if I stretch the limits of my academic imagination! When somebody shushes you, they want you to listen. They want you to hear what's being said. This is just a reminder to shut out all the noise and really listen deeply to the words Pynchon is saying. Like, say, each word individually, maybe! Is that where I went wrong?! Should this blog be One Word at a Time?!
Ha ha! I was just kidding! I might be stupid but I'm not "your mom" stupid!
"Will you just—"
Merle's simply trying to get Ed Addle to shut the fuck up for once in his stinking life. Which is maybe a good time to ignore this line and talk about Ed Addle. He's Pynchon's prime example of the Æther fandom. One of the non-academic Everymen who come to their theories through non-scientific means. While speaking, they're the smartest guy in the saloon and they can't stand a guy like Roswell Bounce who pipes up to ask them to show their work. These kinds of losers proliferate in Tech Bro and have turned Twitter into a rancid mess (not that I'm on Twitter anymore but I hear things). They're now the sort of guys who spend hours every day discussing their genius with ChatGPT because ChatGPT's number one line of programming is to fellate the user. They're the kind of person who make society better when they're tossed into an insane asylum because most of their "genius" is delusional thinking. But, when you get right down to it, they shouldn't be locked away. They should be hanged.
Ha ha! I was just kidding! I might be violent but I'm not "your mom" violent!
"Free! Free as a bird!"
* * * * * * * * * *
Ed again. Squawking his fool bird head off just outside the asylum gates.
Is it interesting that birds are the animals that we most think of as free yet they're the ones we cage the most? Is that because human beings are envious and bitter jerks? Or is it not interesting and I'm just trying to get to the end of this sub-section as quickly as possible while refusing to figure out why these lines are so important to the overall text and themes? Was I crazy to "single up all lines"?! Or just too free? Maybe I need some discipline and meaning in my life so I stop doing shit like this. I've been doing this kind of thing for so long that I had a Geocities page where I wrote about whatever I was reading. Whew boy! Good thing that's lost now!
"Ed, they'll hear you, try not to holler quite so—"
* * * * * * * * * *
When I said I'd read ahead after the last sentence, what I meant was I glanced ahead without actually parsing it very well because why would I do extra work by parsing future sentences when I'll just need to parse them again when I'm writing the blog entry? So now that I'm paying more attention, I understand that Merle has just helped Ed Addle to escape and Ed, having just possibly slipped through the gap cut in the wire fence around the asylum, begins to shout in exuberant joy that he's escaped. And Merle, here, is simply pointing out that maybe wait until they're snugly set up in the Oil Well Saloon or lounging on a chaise lounge at Nelly's before wildly celebrating.
And, once again, this little drama has simply materialized out of thin air after Pynchon mentioned that Merle sometimes helps inmates escape the asylum. Not confusing at all, Pynchon!
"Escaped!"
* * * * * * * * * *
I believe, cheating and looking ahead at the next few lines, this was said by Ed Addle who Merle just recently helped escape Newburgh. I did not skip any lines, I assure you, no matter how much it seems like I skipped some lines. It's just how Pynchon writes! He'll be writing some bit of linear mundanity that you've convinced yourself you're following like a grade-A Mensa member (although your anxiety keeps piping up insisting that if it seems so easy to understand, you must be missing something) and then BLAMMO! Pynchon switches camera angles while spinning you around five times and kicking you in the nethers. At that point, you stagger forward trying to piece together the narrative to the best of your ability. He does this so well in Gravity's Rainbow that I had to re-read pages and pages of text once I realized the narrative had returned to the present while I thought we were still in a flashback. And being a reasonable person who wants to make sure the time I spent reading something while I could have been having sex wasn't entirely wasted, and even though I understood everything I read, I would have to go back and re-read the entire passage until I understood where I missed the move from flashback back to the present. Or from hallucination to reality. Or from story about a sentient light bulb to the light bulb not being sentient anymore.
This bit in Against the Day isn't exactly that. It's just Pynchon writing, "Sometimes Merle had to help inmates escape. Now I'll just go into an example of the aftermath of Merle having helped somebody escape. And it would be boring to explain what I'm doing so I'll just do it and the reader can figure it out themselves. Or not. What do I care? They already paid for my fat-ass book!"
Getting ahead of this line a bit, as I noted, Ed Addle says it. But I don't know if it's Ed who has escaped or if Ed is exclaiming, "Escaped!", because Merle just brought an escapee into the Oil Well Saloon, or, even, if it matters at all. Reading a few lines further ahead, I'm sure it's Ed. Besides, Ed's name is "Addle" which means "confused". Seems the type to get thrown into Newburgh!
