Zoyd Wheeler AI image generated by Brisa and Clara
This week: pages 3 – 13 (Penguin edition)
By OZ FRITZ
Special guest blogger
“Gotta do what you can just to keep your love alive”
– Jackson Browne, Running On Empty
“Quite simply, one of those books that will make this world – our world, our daily chemical-preservative, plastic-wrapped bread – a little more tolerable, a little more human”
– Frank McConnell, L.A. Times Book Review on Vineland
Reading Vineland feels like eating comfort food to me. Not because it goes down easily or has a straight-ahead plot, far from it. Though much friendlier to digest than the Pynchon Epics, nevertheless, it still requires more than average attention to follow all the plot twists and turns and the constantly shifting time perspective. It takes place in 1984, but with many flashbacks to the ‘60s or 70s and occasionally a
look back into earlier times for background context. It seems, sometimes, to have flashbacks within flashbacks. This period piece comes chocked full of extensive cultural references to recreate the mood and ambience of that era. Trekkies, this is for you! Though I often say, “nostalgia ain’t what it used to be”, the nostalgia within these pages comforts me.
Vineland proves without a doubt that a book can be both highly enjoyable and didactic. Pain management seems one of its great lessons/transmissions frequently coming through the delicious, but often dry humor that pervades these pages like banana peels in silent films. The opening quote from Johnny Copeland reveals the first pun: cope + land. How do we cope with this land in these crazy times? But I get ahead of myself.
I started reading Thomas Pynchon after Eric Wagner invited me to participate in a group about to start in on examining Against the Day. His pitch to me: “I think you’ll enjoy it.” Before accepting, I found and perused the beginning of it online. After reading the first couple of pages, I immediately said YES! I saw clearly that Pynchon uses a lexicon of associations and correspondences familiar to me. This surprised the heck out of me. The only other contemporary fiction writers using a similar lexicon I knew of were Robert Anton Wilson and EJ Gold.
The lexicon derives in part from Hermetic processes, James Joyce, Sufi-style thought like the 4th Way, and all the pop culture references. You don’t need to know any of that to enjoy the allegorical depth of the book. The interested and attentive reader will construct their own lexicon of connections possibly without realizing it. From the music references alone one can come up with a concordance of evocative imagery. These correspondences, associations, connections, inside jokes and “easter eggs” provide a non-verbal, telepathic-like form of communication.
Vineland is a fictional town on the coast of Northern California. Enough references to real places are given to roughly place it somewhere above Eureka. It’s believed Pynchon lived in the area for about a decade sometime during the 70s and 80s. He’s rumored to have spent time in Arcata which is slightly north of Eureka. Most, but not all of the locations in Vineland really exist.
I assert that Robert Anton Wilson had a more profound influence on Pynchon than appears commonly recognized. I have seen more than one resonance between Schrödinger’s Cat and Vineland; meaning Wilson strikes a note and Pynchon tunes into and amplifies the same vibration as if in a literary universe next door (maybe). Pynchon’s dedication to his parents that begins Vineland when transposed to Cabala = the Hebrew letter Daleth which has the English translation “door”. Looked at from the angle of Literary Alchemical Manuals, Vineland appears the universe next door to Schrödinger’s Cat.
RAW begins The Universe Next Door, which begins SC, with (allegedly) a quote from Jesus in The Gospel of Thomas: “Not until the male become female and the female becomes male shall ye enter the Kingdom of Heaven.” Along with Wilson the integration of female intelligence with male to lift off the Earth has been strongly advocated in recent times by Timothy Leary, James Joyce, Aleister Crowley, Gilles Deleuze and E.J. Gold, among others.
Meet Zoyd Wheeler as he wakes up to a new day. Zoyd reminds me of the character Zonker Harris from the comic strip Doonesbury. His “job” is to cross dress as a woman, jump through a window, and act crazy to continue collecting government benefits. Scenes of him interacting with real macho lumberjacks who themselves appear a touch more feminine than usual by being all gussied up emphasize the theme. He pulls out a ladies chain saw; observe the shaman in action surrounded by “men” i.e. earthbound domesticated primates:
“’Easy there cowgirl, now things’re just fine,’ the logger stepping back as Zoyd, he hoped demurely, yanked at a silk cord on a dainty starter pulley, and the ladies pearl-handled chain saw spun into action.” Going one level deeper, pearl corresponds with the moon, a traditional association with the feminine and one that Pynchon explores explicitly later on.
The window Zoyd crashes through, an annual televised tradition to collect benefits, represents the forces that oppose the integration of Female Intelligence, the resistance that has to be jumped through – unbalanced, destructive, fascist male energy; the kind that starts wars. Pynchon will directly connect penis with a gun more than once as we climb the vine. Window is the English translation of the Hebrew Ayin which corresponds to The Devil in the Tarot. This card represents unbridled male force which can be creatively used. TRP, as he gets signified on the internet (Thomas Ruggles Pynchon) gives a clear image of this male force opposition near the end of the chapter. The establishment where Wheeler jumps through the window in front of TV cameras is the Cucumber Lounge: “News-crew stragglers were picking up a few last location shots of the Cuke and its famous rotating sign, which Ralph Jr. was happy to light up early, a huge green neon cucumber with blinking warts, cocked at an angle that approached, within a degree or two, a certain vulgarity.”
Again, one level further: Cucumber Lounge, C + L = 38 = “To make a hole, hollow; to violate”; the alchemical process as it concerns the formation of bodies in the Higher Dimensions (Circuits 5 – 8 in Leary’s model). The creation of these bodies involves an accumulation of substances until they crystallize into a more stable form which isn’t easy. Prior to this crystallization, these accumulated substances can be taken, stolen or lost. This explains why Leary (a great TRP lover as has been mentioned) calls extended awareness in the higher circuits volatile. 38 signifies this “spiritual” substance getting lost or stolen. This theft, occurring either internally or externally, can often be traced to subtle or brutal unbalanced male force. A prominent theme in Vineland concerns this dichotomy or battle between unbalanced yang and receptive yin and the resolution in their marriage or partnership . . . or not. An image of this resolution begins Vineland with TRP’s dedication to his parents. This battle appears most evident between the two primary characters, Brock Vond and Frenesi Gates. Vond enters the picture in chapter 4, but is mostly spoken of in the third person until the end. Frenesi, frequently present by her absence (a Joycean technique I learned about from RAW) shows up in the first person at the beginning of chapter 6. Zoyd Wheeler, the protagonist in the first five chapters, exits stage left when Frenesi comes on set and doesn’t really substantially return until the end of the book.
Some further notes on chapter one: we meet another primary character, Zoyd and Frenesi’s daughter Prairie, in the second paragraph. Like her mother, Prairie’s presence gets introduced by her absence. She leaves a note saying she left with her friend Thapsia. To my recollection, which could be incomplete, Thapsia never gets mentioned again in the book. The name comes from a plant found in North Africa along the Mediterranean Sea and the Atlantic coast of Morocco and Portugal, thapsia, used in ancient medicine as a pain reliever. The chemical compound derived from it is currently in clinical trials for cancer treatment. It’s been shown to kill tumor cells.
Pairing Prairie with Thapsia underscores the pain management theme. Prairie will experience some of the deepest and most obvious pain in the novel with the search for her mother whom she never knew. The search for Mother in the archetypal sense appears a main theme of Vineland. Like Finnegans Wake, and probably many other profound works of literature, Pynchon introduces his main themes right away.
The squadron of blue jays stomping around the roof that morphed into carrier pigeons bringing subconscious messages to Zoyd in his dreams connects with Binah, the qabalistic sphere home to the Great Mother archetype through its correspondence with the color blue. This association, blue = Binah, gets affirmed when we learn that Frenesi has “eyes of blue painted blue” as Pynchon writes to emphasize their blueness. Both Frenesi’s mother Sasha and Prairie have startlingly blue eyes. Crowley as Aiwass describes Nuit, his Goddess figure as “a lambent flame of blue.” Pynchon connects blue in this way in other instances my favorite being when he randomly brings up: “from faraway Anaheim Stadium, came the sounds of a Blue Cheer concert” (p. 247). Heim is German for home making Anaheim the home of Ana connecting Blue Cheer with Joyce’s Mother archetype in Finnegans Wake, Anna Livia Plurabelle. All that being said, I don’t think that every time the color blue comes up that it necessarily points to Binah; skepticism and intuition seem integral to reading these semiotics.
Possible synchronicities: with Zoyd dressing in drag I find it significant that we start this voyage on the last day of Pride month. Yesterday, someone used colored chalk to draw a ladder-like hopscotch type of thing on the sidewalk by the kids area of the gym I go to. They captioned it: “climb the vine.” I have a gig in Fort Bragg on the northern California coast coming up on July 3 rd and 4th . It’s a little south of the novel’s titular location, but in the same relative neighborhood and physically the closest I’ve come to staying in Vineland. Pynchon is rumored to have lived in Fort Bragg for a spell. I’m there to do a live recording of a local band called Queer Country.
Fans of the original Star Trek series will love all the references to it throughout the book. These begin in the first chapter. The show Wheel of Fortune makes a pun on Zoyd’s last name and a tarot card at the end of this chapter. Vineland has been accurately called a black comedy. I find “black comedy” synonymous with “pain management.”
Next week: Please read chapter 2, pages 14 – 21.
12 comments:
Vineland is such a hoot! I'm a few chapters in and really digging the scene.
It's like Tom Robbins writing Lebowski in the Reaganite future of Gravity's Rainbow.
I've been listening through the entirety of The Simpsons TV show, using it as background noise while I draw TOI, and then taking breaks to read Vineland. I was already noticing some stylistic overlap when a friend happened to text me this Pynchon quote, "Homer is my role model and I can't speak ill of him." (This was in regards to an edit request on one of his lines from one of his two guest starring roles on the show.)
I suspect Thomas Pynchon and the famously surreal and mostly reclusive Simpson's writer John Swartzwelder are on similar wavelengths.
There have already been several moments in Vineland that I would categorize as Schwartzweldian.
I enjoy how TV watching is a vice associated with whimsically debilitative properties in the world of Vineland.
Looking fwd to more!
Perhaps not particularly relevant, but RAW also lived in the area at one point. The RAW biography by Prop has a list at the back of many of the places where RAW lived, and an entry for January 1973 says, "Ford Bragg, California. 'Big House in Mendocino'."
Oz, when you pointed out the possible pun around Cope+land, were you cheekily implying that the answer as to how does one cope with this land could be 'with vine'?
"To worship me take wine and strange drugs whereof I will tell my prophet, & be drunk thereof!"
Wine sure has been used by many through the ages for 'pain management.'
You also say that you see Pynchon as writing in a "telepathic-like form of communication."
Zoyd himself in this first chapter wonders if he's having ESP, "one of those gotta-shit throbs of fear."
From the second paragraph:
"You got a call from Channel 86, they said urgent, I said, you try waking him up sometime. Love anyway."
For one meaning of 86 in Sepher Sephiroth, we find: "a name of GOD, asserting the identity of Kether and Malkuth."
As if "channel 86" was a direct transmission from the highest spheres, urging Zoyd to wake up, presumably from the nightmare of history, or the general sleepwalking state of the average human being.
Love ANYWAY.
I also noted "Calvin doesn't cut nothin' bigger than a 14", this number corresponding to the Art card in the Thoth tarot, with its androgynous figure very much fitting in with the theme of blending the male and the female that you mentioned already in your post.
Finally, we see "it's become your MO, diving through windows."
Now, I suppose that MO stands for Modus Operandi, but I find that given the context, this sentence works just as well if we take it to mean Mindfuck Operation.
Great description, Bobby:
"It's like Tom Robbins writing Lebowski in the Reaganite future of Gravity's Rainbow." Pynchon wrote Vineland in 1990; the first episode of The Simpsons came out in Dec. 1989. Maybe they were smoking the same strain?
Tom, it's interesting to me that RAW and Pynchon were relative neighbors to one degree or another. Especially in 1973 which proves to be an intense year for Wilson.
A major Kabbalistic error appears in my post when I wrote that Ayin = Window when actually it translates to eye. The letter Heh translates to Window giving an interpretation of what I said about Zoyd crashing through the window basically exactly opposite to what I wrote. Tetragrammaton, the four-fold name of God = Yod, Heh, Vau, Heh. Yod = Father, first Heh = Mother, Vau = Son, second Heh = Daughter. Hence, I would now interpret this pretty much exactly opposite to what I wrote above with the mistaken attribution. Thank-you Eric for bringing it to my attention.
Most welcome, Oz. Great post. I remember when I first read this book back in 1990 the fact that it starts with a dream made me think of Finnegans Wake. Rereading the novel in 2025, its Northern California Return of the Jedi setting makes me think of Rafi Zabor’s wonderful Street Legal. When Zoyd started the chainsaw, it made me think of Elon Musk. The book Author Unknown: On the Trail of Anonymous by Don Foster, a Shakespeare professor who works for the FBI doing textual analysis, has a nice chapter on a book of letters some people mistakenly thought Pynchon had written while living in Northern California and published under the pseudonym Wanda Tinasky.
I like that we started to read Moby Dick last November, and the book itself starts in " a damp, drizzly November."
Now we are starting this Vineland reading group in late June, and the story begins "one summer morning."
I enjoy this type of correspondances.
In my previous post, I forgot to note that the jukebox used to feature "half a dozen covers of 'So Lonesome I Could Cry'."
Half a dozen means six, which corresponds to Tiphareth. Maybe a gentle nudge towards the idea that, no matter how alienated one might feel, it can be good to keep in mind Love anyway.
Six also corresponds to the Chariot in the Tarot, and thus to the zodiacal sign of Cancer, the sign under which we are right now. Cancer starts in June, the sixth month of the year and the one during which the Sun is at its peak in the Northern Hemisphere.
Perhaps Vineland indeed also begins in late June/early July.
Spookah, you wrote: "Oz, when you pointed out the possible pun around Cope+land, were you cheekily implying that the answer as to how does one cope with this land could be 'with vine'?"
No, I meant to imply that Vineland has techniques for coping with this land, one of which you mentioned and I'll get to that. I connect "vine" with marijuana. Though it's not a climbing plant so literally not a vine, weed does come into this story as a plot element. Mendocino county, part of the Vineland geographical territory has a reputation for great cannabis cultivation. Some other plants in the same Cannabaceae family do climb like a vine. Also through human intervention cannabis plants can be trellised to grow like a vine. This book does satirically cover the war on some drugs, marijuana, through a crackdown on growers – humans manipulating weed growth so it doesn't seem too far from metaphorically considering weed a type of vine.
I stated that one main theme of this novel concerns a search for Mother, literally and archetypal. You're hip that Pynchon uses Gematria. The Hebrew spelling of "vine" = 133 and is listed in "Sepher Sephiroth. We find that 5 holds significance for Pynchon in this story. The old TV show Hawaii 5 - 0 has a special role. V also has a special place, we'll get into that more later. V = Roman numeral 5. Also 5 = The Hierophant. 133 (vine) x 5 = 665 = womb.
I like what you said about channel 86. I planned to mention that also and will elaborate later. I'm getting ready to leave town for work at the moment.
How did you arrive at the correspondence that The Chariot = 6? I'm unfamiliar with that one.
I arrived at Chariot = 6 by the same way that you connected ayin to window, that is by making an extremely basic mistake... The Chariot is of course the seventh card, and The Lovers the sixth. My apologies.
That said, the Lovers connects to Gemini, which covers most of June, so my argument still works.
I also forgot to mention that Return of the Jedi is episode VI of the Star Wars saga.
The Lovers also connects more directly to the Art card I previously mentioned since it is its exact opposite on the zodiacal belt. The solve to Art's coagula, with the masculine and feminine not yet integrated.
To stay with the Tarot, the Thoth's Fool, amongst his many attributes, does carry large grapes.
Regarding 5, in this first chapter we see Zoyd putting "five dollars' worth of gas" at the pump.
'V' was of course also the title of an early Pynchon work.
And Wheeler (as in Zoyd) starts with a W (interesting by the way that in English it's called 'double U' while in French we say 'double V'), which is 2xV. 2x5=10, indeed the number of the Wheel of Fortune card.
Finally, credits where credits are due, I am hip to Pynchon's cabbala only thanks to you. Your posts made me look for this type of details with a more attentive ayin (wink wink).
Living on the Oregon coast, while most of my family still lives in California, I drive through (and occasionally stay in) in the scene of this book regularly.
As a prog rock fan, Zoyd makes me think of French Rock In Opposition band, Art Zoyd, who blended free jazz, avant Electronica, and psychedelic rock,, and were formed in 1969.
The pearl-handled chainsaw reminded me of pearl-handled revolvers and, therefore, Westerns and detective novels.
"Five bucks" are also jokingly being asked of "Wheeler" for reading him his "fortune." "You will have a long life because of your common sense and grasp on reality."
There might be something to this advice...
And I had missed another 6 in "played together with the old Six Rivers Conference."
Tiphareth indeed stands as a meeting point of many Paths on the Tree of Life.
River also connects with the Mother archetype Oz talks about, or the Joycean ALP.
Now, I wouldn't necessarily assert that every one of these instances of 5s & 6s 'is' an occult transmission, but there does seem to be a significant amount of them in this fairly short first chapter.
Thank you Kickaa23 for bringing up the band Zoyd, I vaguely remember them but somehow never really got into them. Would you recommend a specific album or two?
I'm not an expert on that particular band (or RIO, in general). I would recommend checking out their entry on https://www.progarchives.com/artist.asp?id=858
Spookah, at then end of The Book of Thoth Crowley has instructions for giving tarot readings. When the cards are laid out he says to make up a "story" about about them for the querent. When one achieves a certain degree of maze-brightness to the hermetic transmission in the book one can make up a "story" and imagine this as possible instructions from a Guide like the HGA, or whatever you wish to call or model it. The conversation begins when you act on the instructions by doing experiments of one kind or another and getting feedback on the results. Skepticism and intuition seem key;
Six Rivers National Forest is an area not too terribly far from where Vineland would be.
The band is called Art Zoyd. There's a Pynchonian easter egg with that in the text not long after Frenesi gets her story told.
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