'Vineland' reading group, Chapter One

 

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.