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 As if light had been witched somehow into its opposite. . . .

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"witched somehow"
See? Black Magic! Maybe I shouldn't have been so down on my explication earlier when I felt I was rambling about nonsense. But I wasn't! Merle confirms it here! Something evil has made its way into this photograph.
    I'm not saying witches are evil! I'm saying that at the time Merle was reacting to this negative photographic plate, he would have been using the idea of something being witched as definitely not good at all and probably sinister and certainly Satan loving! He's the jerk who can't see a witch as having been persecuted and Wicca good and love the Earth and women power and I'll be over here.

"light" "its opposite"
Also remember, Me, to write something smart about light and the opposite of light (which I think is dark although it could be heavy) so that people reading this in the future don't think I'm just a stupid dolt who knows a few pop culture references. Let me put a sticky note on my computer monitor to remind me to get back to this. That should do it! Infallible plan!

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 The sky behind the tall, jagged roofline was nearly black, windows that should have been light-colored were dark.

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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!

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 The whites of their eyes were dark gray.

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Creepy! Are you creeped out yet? Like Merle, you should be but I'm not sure why. Merle went from watching a miracle appear before his eyes to suddenly feeling weirded out by the whole thing. I guess it's a human reaction to witnessing the unknowable? Is this a commentary on scientific ignorance? How everything which you've never witnessed prior, or know nothing about, can seem so mysterious as to be proof of God or proof of ultimate Evil? Has Merle shifted from the belief that he was witnessing a miracle to now witnessing black magic?

Also, is this dramatic irony? We know he's looking at a negative but Merle would have no reason to know or believe or even understand how film development works. Common sense, that affliction of the ignorant and stupid which they believe to be the mightiest power of all minds, would simply think that a developed photo would come out looking exactly like the object the camera took a snapshot of. Why would the light and shadow be inverted? But scientific knowledge is complicated, you Common Sense worshiping buffoons! It's also scary, I guess, which is why we have so many movies like The Gods Must Be Crazy where "primitive" people react to modern technology or scientific experiments as if they're the most intense magic they've ever witnessed.

Oh! Also a negative would be like viewing the evil, dark side of existence! So that's got to be pretty creepy for Merle too.

I'm not happy about this entry. You probably shouldn't read it. I think I might be sick.

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 Something was wrong with the faces.

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It's weird reading a paragraph by Thomas Pynchon that actually has multiple sentences. The usual way is multiple pages that just have one sentence. I'm exaggerating! But I still think he's creating this pace on purpose by using so many short sentences. He's slowing down the narration to mimic the time it takes for the photograph to appear on the clear plates. It's a process. It's discovery. None of that's meant to be fast or easy. And again, he's not just talking about developing photos. He's talking about reading. And not just reading but comprehension. The patience it takes to try to understand what the artist is trying to portray. And sometimes the faces are wrong. Not because of the fault of the writer; not because of the fault of the reader. It's the fault of a disconnect between the two, a mistake in communication. Sometimes what is being said is inverted by the reader because the writer thinks the reader will understand the subtlety, or the parody, the satire or the exaggeration. But the reader will take it literally. They will view the negative as the final work.

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 Merle peered uneasily.

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Look, I really am doing this blog one line at a time. If I knew this line was next, I would have saved the unheimlich stuff for this entry! Just pretend you read it here and let's move on.

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 It happened to be the Newburgh asylum, with two or three inmates standing in the foreground, staring.

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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.

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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.