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

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"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.

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 Roswell lit a ruby darkroom lamp.

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"lit"
First and foremost, the beginning of the process. The creation of the light needed in the dark, a light that somehow retains darkness. But second and hindmost, the journey has begun; they have lit out for the territories.

Once again, a short sentence. Perhaps because Merle's learning something new, we're taking it nice and slow. Or, as I mentioned in the previous post, Pynchon's continuing the slow as corn growing metaphor.

"darkroom"
According to Merriam-Webster, the first use of darkroom was in 1841, just thirty-six years prior to this scene. More words coined in 1841: "self-care", "hanky-panky", and, just because it's interesting to me as I'm currently reading Danielewski's Tom's Crossing, "clop-clop".
    The darkroom probably has deep and symbolic meanings in the context of this book which begins with the Monk quote, "It's always night, or we wouldn't need light." Perhaps the darkroom is the antithesis of the quote, even. The idea that it's always light or we wouldn't need a darkroom. We couldn't process photographs, caused by light, without shutting out that same light but seeking to obliterate now instead of create.

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 For word was circulating that Michelson and Morley had found no difference in the speed of light coming, going, or sideways relative to the Earth speeding along in its orbit.

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This is one of those nice "Science Without Math" statements that we can all use from time to most-of-the-time. It simply sums up the experiment without getting in the weeds of the details (although the details are what make this whole Blinky Morgan and Edward Morley are the same person theory interesting). What was the experiment about? It was about measuring the speed of light in several different directions to see if the movement of the Earth changed the speed. A change would indicate that the light was moving through something which was also traveling at those speeds. It should be faster going in the direction of the Earth while slowing down going perpendicular to that direction (or against it, obvs!). Who needs to know how it's done? How the light from one source is split into different beams and bounced in different directions to eventually arrive at the same destination? And how arriving at the same destination in phase (since light was suspected to be simply a wave as sound (which is why is was suspected that it needed a medium to travel through)) would indicate that direction didn't hamper its speed. Only if each beam arrived out of phase would there be an indication that the movement and inertia of the Earth would be affecting it. And that out-of-phase bit was what made Merle's theory into a lengthy philosophical sidebar that Pynchon has spent an awful lot of time on. Which he doesn't do with all of his strange little tales so it must have been especially important to the overall themes of the novel. I suspect it backs up the idea that Lew has been split from another Earth to find himself on one where he has become a pariah among those he once knew and loved. But then I could be biased because that was my initial impression of my first reading of the Lew Basnight sections.

Maybe as Mark Z. Danielewski says in his new novel, Tom's Crossing, in the section where the mortician does the autopsy on Russell's body, I need to uninstall my initial bias of Lew's possible dimension hopping. Or, if I want to remain loyal to Thomas Pynchon here, I need to get beyond the zero to rid myself of not just the bias but the idea of the bias too. I think. Remember how not smart I am? I still have trouble with the idea of "Beyond the Zero"!