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 "Why, you will destroy us all!"

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These are prophetic words from Randolph St. Cosmo, right? Miles Blundell, destroyer of worlds.

If not, this is just a moment where we see even Randolph St. Cosmo can lose his composure when the possible destruction of his ship and the death of his crew might be at hand.

This would have been a good time for Pynchon to throw in a purposeful typo so that Randolph exclaimed, "Why, you will destory us all!" I've always loved that destroy looked so much like and visually suggests "de-story" because what better way to describe our destruction than the removal of our story itself?

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 "Blundell, what in Heaven's name!" Randolph exclaimed.

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Exactly the kind of expletive an angel would use! I've got you figured out, Mr. Saint Cosmo!

Unless Randolph's an orc because if you make an anagram of his name (including the full word "saint" and not just the St.), you get "LOST ORC ON A DAMN SHIP." Or maybe "DAMN ORC ON A LOST SHIP!"

No wait! What if we look toward William Blake's America A Prophecy wherein the character Orc is seen as a Luciferian character. In other words, damned, or an angel expelled from (perhaps an all-too-earthly?) heaven! According to Wikipedia—because did you think I actually had this Blake stuff in my head? I barely have that poem about the tiger with laser eyes still up there! Although, thanks to Moore's Jerusalem, I've now heard Blake's poem, "Jerusalem," in song quite a few times (the best time being by Jo Brand on Taskmaster)—Orc is described as a "Lover of Wild Rebellion, and Transgressor of God's Law" and he "symbolizes the spirit of rebellion and freedom." At one point, he "emerges from creative fires to challenge the forces of imperialism" (that was also a quote from the Wiki page about the character Orc).

This all fits in with one of the main themes in Against the Day, right?! Anarchy and rebellion against the empire of the United States of America! America A Prophecy saw print in 1793 so exactly 100 years prior to the start of this book. Coincidence?! Um, probably? But maybe not!

Am I going to have to read up on Blake to understand this book the way I should have read up on Blake to understand Alan Moore's Jerusalem? Although I probably should have read more Joyce for that one too! The characteristics and story of Orc as summarized in the Wikipedia entry on him parallel a lot of the ideas I've seen so far in the first chapter of this book. What's also weird is there were times while reading the first chapter that I felt Pynchon's text was in dialogue with Moore's text, so much so that I had to re-check the publication date on Jerusalem. And as I knew but couldn't remember for sure, Jerusalem had been published nearly a decade after Against the Day. But if both books are heavily referencing themes from some of Blake's mystical and strange writings, wouldn't it seem like they were in dialogue? Oh, and they're also probably in dialogue thanks to James Joyce! But that's a reading for me for another decade!

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 Indeed, the well-meaning but far from dextrous Miles Blundell had somehow contrived to wrap the pull-rope leading to the valve mechanism around his foot, and could be seen moving that extremity to and fro, a bewildered look on his wide, honest face, in hopes that the spring-loaded valve would thus, somehow, close again—for it had already allowed an enormous quantity of hydrogen gas to escape the envelope in a sudden rush, causing the ship to plummet toward the lakeside like a toy dropped by some cosmic urchin.

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Pure slapstick with maybe a hint of comic book culture at the end. Because that image of a cosmic urchin sending a toy airship crashing down to the surface of Earth just appeared in my mind as a Jack Kirby piece in all its 4-color glory. I could also picture it as Steve Ditko art but when the term "cosmic" is used, my mind first sticks Kirby art in there.

Miles Blundell is the blunderer. He's the Curly or the Costello who just can't help screwing up physical labor. I'd also include Stan Laurel but he's skinny and an anomaly to the trope; usually it's the overweight guy who everybody automatically believes is a clumsy oaf. From my own experience being a fat kid in junior high, let me tell you, you'll never see a more shocked look on a kid's face than when the fat kid makes a crazily athletic baseball play when he was, somehow, allowed to play infield instead of being stuck out in right field.

I never understood why it was assumed the fat kid couldn't play infield. It's fucking baseball. You barely move at all! The fat kid's kryptonite was running for long periods not short bursts to catch a passing ball! I totally understood why I was always the goalie in soccer. I probably begged for it! Fuck all that running!

If this scene were on a television show, it would be backed by the most annoying laugh track.

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 The state of reduced attention into which he seemed then to have drifted was broken soon enough by Lindsay, advising, biliously, "As I am sure it has not escaped your attention, Blundell's ineptness with the Main Valve, grown I fear habitual, has increased the speed of our descent to a notable, if not in fact, alarming, degree."

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I'm certain Pynchon meant for "biliously" to work in both of its definitions here, meaning Lindsay was spiteful because he's Lindsay the Vulcan Hall Monitor and also "nauseated" because the airship is now plummeting too quickly to the ground. He's so smart, that Pynchon!

According to Lindsay's prolonged observations about Blundell's lack of skills as a crewman, Lindsay would rather be proven right about his observations that Blundell is inept than prevent the Inconvenience from someday plummeting to the ground in a fiery explosion. He probably noticed Blundell's careless attitude with the Main Valve over time and waited for the exact moment when he realized Blundell had failed just enough to create a dangerous situation but not one from which they could not extract themselves. Simply so he could get a nice smug moment in.

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 Close to sundown, south of the city, as the Inconvenience bobbed in fitful breezes above a sweeping stretch of prairie which was to be the site this week of the great international gathering of aeronauts being held in conjunction with the World's Fair, "Professor" St. Cosmo, spying at length a clear patch of meadow among the vast population of airships already berthed below, had given the order, "Prepare to descend."

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When do we get the entertaining Three's Company-esque misunderstanding that garnered Cosmo the nickname of "Professor"? If you're not familiar with Three's Company because you're young, it was a sitcom in which the premise of every joke was that the landlord only let the guy live with the two gals because he thought the guy was gay but then every time he eavesdropped on the guy and the gals talking, he would think they were talking about fucking and he'd get super upset until he found out they were really just talking about baking a cake or something and then he'd wipe the sweat from his brow and say, "I knew Jack was totally gay the whole time!" Then the audience would laugh and Chrissy's nipples would show through her shirt.

Chrissy's nipples probably accounted for 40 percent of the audience.

I'm not sure it's relevant or, if it is, how but we get a lot of "declining" imagery in this sentence: "sundown," "south," "descend." Maybe it's all a metaphor for the balloons landing at their aeronaut Comic-con.

During the first chapter, the reader may have thought the Chums of Chance were a unique occurrence in Pynchon's 1893. But now we see it's a huge hobby with a "vast population." The world must be filled with fictional books of all of their exploits, right? I wonder if there's another crew called the Lads of Law who travel with a cat who writes poetry?

I bet Cosmo's statement, "Prepare to descend," has a greater meaning than just landing the balloon. The Chums of Chance are not just going terrestrial in the sense that they're leaving the sky and hitting the ground; they're probably also descending into a more vulgar world, filled with vice and intrigue and earthly lusts. They are very much descending from a kind of wondrous and pure heaven into a lawless and (hopefully) sexy world full of sinners!

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 From this height it was as if the Chums, who, out on adventures past, had often witnessed the vast herds of cattle adrift in ever-changing cloudlike patterns across the Western plains, here saw that unshaped freedom being rationalized into movement only in straight lines and at right angles and a progressive reduction of choices, until the final turn through the final gate that led to the killing floor.

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Sure, we get a depressing look at the meatpacking industry here. But we also get a nice metaphor for people moving from rural life into the city.

I wrote this in my recent Gravity's Rainbow entry but since it concerned this line, I'm just going to copy and paste it here too!

In postmodern writing, you encounter a lot of images and metaphors of the Labyrinth. In these two passages [This was the other passage: "Something was done to him, and it may be that Katje knows what. Hasn't he, in her "futureless look," found some link to his own past, something that connects them closely as lovers? He sees her standing at the end of a passage in her life, without any next step to take—all her bets are in, she has only the tedium now of being knocked from one room to the next, a sequence of numbered rooms whose numbers do not matter, till inertia brings her to the last. That's all."], you get the exact opposite. You have people (and cows! But I think the cows really represent the immigrants of Chicago here! (hell, they really just represent us all and the aging process)) whose lives, while starting out full of freedom and choices, have come to that point where the previous choices made have cut off opportunities for further choice, winnowing their lives down to a single path which they can only follow helplessly until death. The cows have been forced into this kind of life just like the people of Chicago (earlier, the city had been described as being a Cartesian grid which the right angles and straight lines of the cow's Stockyard enclosure echo); life on the plains was a kind of freedom while life in the city a trudging journey along a single corridor maze to the killing room floor. Katje has sort of arrived at the same kind of place even though she's still young. But her choices have narrowed her chances at new opportunities faster than most: Blicero's sex slave, Allied spy, obligation to Prentice for rescuing her, Pointsman's tool, and now Slothrop's keeper. Not much choice for her in most of that. Just a roulette ball skipping about from number to number on a circular path, the number where it will eventually come to rest having no real meaning to the journey.

So here Pynchon uses the Chicago Stockyard as a metaphor for life, especially that of the industrial revolution's effect on rural life and the mass immigration to urban centers. In Gravity's Rainbow, he uses the Roulette ball bouncing around a roulette wheel as the metaphor. Apparently anything that describes movement without purpose can be used as a metaphor for life. Like a pinwheel in a graveyard!

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 Indeed, the backs of cattle far outnumbered the tops of human hats.

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In some ways, I've come to believe that Pynchon simply retains every bit of trivia about history and society and cows and phalluses and eras and decades because he always manages to casually write sentences that convince me of it. Maybe I'm just naïve and every author who writes a book that takes place in a past era researches it to such a degree that they also would never make the mistake of saying "the backs of cattle far outnumbered the tops of human heads" in an era where everybody wore hats constantly.

Because in other ways, it's also possible Thomas Pynchon makes tons and tons of mistakes and the magic is how he's convinced me that every single thing he writes is accurate. It's much the same way in that I believe everything he writes about actually happened, historically, until somebody tells me otherwise. So until I see a documentary that expressly states that child aeronauts were not flying airships around the world in 1893, I'm going to go on believing that's the historical part of this novel and not the fiction part.