'Vineland' online reading group, Chapter 9

 

By OZ FRITZ
Special guest blogger

"Unfortunately for anyone's peace of mind, especially his own, a shaman's behavior will tend to be a blend of his most annoying manifestations, magnifying his complex conflictual relationship with social protocol; nerve-wracking non-sequitur and unexpected blasphemies constantly send ripples of shockwaves through unsuspecting bystanders; he seems utterly unresponsive to the most obsequious blandishments." E.J. Gold, Life in the Labyrinth.

Takeshi reveals his shamanic nature in this chapter beginning at the bottom of page 147: "Through years of stately unfoldings of the deep actuarial mysteries that allowed him to go on making a living, Takeshi had come to value and watch closely in the world for signs and symptoms, messages from beyond, and even discounting the effects of drug abuse, nothing about the city seemed quite right tonight."

"Stately unfoldings" is an interesting phrase; "stately" connects with the beginning of Ulysses,  a novel which unfolds in a way related to shamanic exploration. The beginning of Wikipedia's description of actuary also applies to a shaman: "An actuary is a professional with advanced mathematical skills who deals with the measurement and management of risk and uncertainty."

I see this as an inflection point in the book; from this point on the subject of death increases its presence dramatically. Takeshi is about to experience a series of events that puts him in a position of confronting the distinct possibility of imminent death directly every day. This plot point seems an excellent metaphor for the Sufi advice to die before you die; or for Castaneda's shamanic advice to always keep death just behind your left shoulder. We seem never more alive when faced with the prospect of dying soon.

Not only does Pynchon write about shamans, his writing exemplifies modern shamanism – going out into the unknown, coming back and writing about it; communicating his vision. The unknown includes crossing over to the other side through the veil of death. 

"Even an apparently simple thing like a common language which we are all forced to use in order to communicate with others becomes something different in the hands of a shaman. Shaman always seem to lean heavily toward those tooth- gnashing, fingernail-scraping, annoyingly Ivesian-Stravinskian-Schoenbergian ways of communicating that just don't seem to be able to conform themselves to well-defined human conventions." - Life in the Labyrinth. 

Pynchon was denied the Pulitzer Prize for Gravity's Rainbow in 1974. The jury who decides these things unanimously recommended it but the Pulitzer advisory board refused to give it to him on the grounds that the book was obscene and unreadable. No award was given that year. In Schrödinger's Cat, Robert Anton Wilson asks if his novel might not serve as a shamanic manual. Some of the more adventurous and imaginative Quantum physicists perform shamanic functions, though usually communicating in a very technical way. Writers like Pynchon, Wilson, Joyce and others use literature and literary tricks to bring the attentive and ambitious reader into their headspace, into the non-ordinary territory they've explored.

"A shaman will often seem to make a sudden shift to left field, leaving the linear literal mind holding the bag, so to speak, temporarily off-balance and unsure of its footing, but the shaman knows that nothing is ambiguous; he sees the underlying causes and knows how to attune himself to them. He knows the irony of expectation, and the ecstasy of disappointment; he has learned to follow life as one's vision follows the face of a lover." - ibid.

Pynchon shows great fondness for the letter V; it becomes a tag for him. We can only speculate why. Attentive readers have already observed this in Vineland.  As a shifting signifier, his affinity for this letter likely has multiple explanations. Of course, his first novel is V. Pynchon's most famous teacher at Cornell, Vladimir Nabokov has a narrator called V in one of his novels, The Real Life of Sebastian Knight. Parallels in plot, theme and writing style between the two books have led some scholars to infer Nabokov's influence. Nabokov's full name begins and ends with a V. He claims to have no memory of Pynchon at Cornell. His wife Vera (whose full name also begins and ends with a V) recalls grading Pynchon's papers.

Eric Wagner recently wrote to me: "The Germans surrendered on May 8, 1945, Tom Pynchon's eighth birthday, Victory in Europe Day, V-E Day. I have long suspected that that influenced Pynchon's interest in the letter V and in the end of the war in Europe in Gravity's Rainbow."  That book, his third, firmly established him in the literary world. The V-2 rocket plays a central role in it. So, Pynchon turned 8 on May 8th of '45 - V-E Day. At a critical juncture in this chapter (and the book), shortly following the Vineland quote above and a few steps before Takeshi's life irrevocably changes, he can "hear large V-8 engines idling" (p. 148).

The passion for V stretches across TP's oeuvre including the little nonfiction he wrote. Evidence for it turns up in the introduction he wrote for his good friend Richard Farina's novel of the '60s Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up to Me. In the introduction to Slow Learner discussing his short story "Entropy" and the origin of this word coined by Rudolf Clausius, Pynchon comments: "If Clausius had stuck to his native German and called it Verwandlunginhalt instead, it could have had an entirely different impact." This is more commonly written as two words, Verwandlung Inhalt and translates as "transformation content." Kafka's most famous short story, "The Metamorphosis" has the German title Di Verwandlung. The reader's transformation or metamorphosis seems one major intent of TP's writing. 

If we may go into the weeds for a moment . . . I was startled by a character in Bleeding Edge that seems to correspond V to the Hebrew letter Feh, a variation of Peh –  "Phipps Epperdew, better known as Vip ...". The difference between Peh and Feh delineates the sound of the letter. Peh gives the hard p sound while Feh gets pronounced more like an f or ph. Phipps has both in one name. Peh and Feh both = 80 in Gematria. Therefore, in traditional Kabbalah both the English P and F letters = 80; V traditionally corresponds with Vau = 6. Crowley changed that in his Qabalah reckonings by assigning F to Vau ostensibly due to F and V sounding similar though it also aided his calculations. I suggest that Pynchon uses the same logic (sound similarity) to reverse Crowley by corresponding V with Feh thus giving it the value of 80, in this instance. What does this have to do with the price of tea in China, or the price of hash in Morrocco? Maybe nothing. It's explored more in my post on Bleeding Edge here: https://oz-mix.blogspot.com/2021/08/bleeding-edge-pynchon-robert-anton.html

In Cosmic Trigger Vol. 1 Robert Anton Wilson describes all the synchronicities he experienced with the number 23 as a key into his Cabalistic lexicon. Pynchon uses 23 as a tag for Wilson in Bleeding Edge– see my blog above. V might be a key into unlocking TP's cryptography. Focusing back on Vineland: though only halfway through we can already observe the predominance of female characters, intelligence, and energy along with the struggles they face. We have the Sisterhood of lady ass-kickers and DL harassing an all-woman motorcycle club. By its shape (the shape of the individual letters holds significance in Kabbalah), the letter V suggests the female reproductive system as well as being the first letter of vagina. Giving V and P the same mathematical identity – Peh and Feh both = 80 – suggests a union of penis (Peh) and vagina (Feh), the blending of male and female as frequently discussed regarding Vineland. Male and female symbolically represented as different aspects of the same general letter suggests Adam Kadmon a symbolic composite being comprised of the balanced union of male and female.

Earlier, in connection with chapter 5 and the TV show Hawaii 5-0, we stated that 5 appears significant to the lexicon of this novel. At the end of this chapter, 5 appears both explicitly: "zigzagging toward I-5" and implicitly:

"DL driving, singing
Oh, kick out the jambs, motherfuck-er,
'Cause here comes, that Stove once again –
You though I was somethin' in Olathe,
Wait till, you see me in Fort Wayne"

Though all the lyrics are different except the first line, to me, this appears an obvious reference to the MC5 song "Kick Out the Jams," a proto-punk rock song. The Fort Wayne reference conjures Wayne Kramer, a co-founder and co-leader of the MC5.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yvJGQ_piwI0

Listening to the first 15 seconds seals the deal about that. Slight digression: Illuminatus! has people carrying signs saying "Kick out the JAMs" which in that case stands for the Justified Ancients of Mummu (Illuminatus! p. 127 -128 Dell omnibus edition - thank-you Vineland wiki). Five pages before that in Illuminatus! a TWA stewardess finds notes left behind by a "John Mason" on his way to Mexico City (where Pynchon lived at one point in the 60s). Wilson and/or Shea begin riffing on 5 a little way into these notes:

"Christianity all in 3s (Trinity, etc.) Buddhism all in 4s. Illuminism in 5s. A progression?
Hopi teaching: all men have 4 souls now, but in future will have 5 souls. . . .
Who decided the Pentagon building should have that particular shape?
'Kick out the Jams' ??? Cross-check.

. . .

D.E.A.T.H. – Don't Ever Antagonize The Horn. Does Pynchon know?" 

                                                                    – ibid. p.123 (italics in the original).

The way I read this: Wilson & Shea wink at Pynchon in Illuminatus! and Pynchon winks right back at them in Vineland through the shared rubric of "Kick out the Jams."

V also = the Roman character for 5. Vine = 133 in its Hebrew spelling. 

133 (vine) x 5 (V = vagina) = 665 = "The Womb" in "Sepher Sephiroth." Adding the upright 1( a phallic symbol) gives us 666, a solar number (Tiphareth thrice), the number of THE BEAST and "The Name Jesus." DL briefly refers to Takeshi as a beast when having sex in this chapter. The other city mentioned when DL sings her version of "Kick out the jams" is Olathe, Kansas. Olathe is a Shawnee word for beautiful, another reference to Tiphareth

 Circling back and speaking of reversals, we find an example regarding V in this chapter with Brock Vond (BV) balanced by Vato and Blood partners in "V & B Tow company." Vond and Vato = two proper names starting with V with an opposite qabalistic sense. Vato  = 86 = "A name of God asserting the identity of Kether and Malkuth" as we saw earlier with the channel 86 TV station. Blood describes a Hermetic metaphor for how an individual might go about uniting Kether with Malkuth aka uniting the macrocosm with the microcosm. This gets made evident and put into the student's body and heart along with the intellect through practicing "The Mass of the Phoenix" (takes about 10 minutes), chapter 44 in The Book of Lies; 44 = blood.  

Tow recalls "Fascist Toejam" (kick out the fascist jams) as well as "Cheetos" = Chi (Chinese vital energy = Kether; mentioned a few times in this chapter and key to what DL does to Takeshi)) + toe or toes (Malkuth on the Tree of Life) as I elaborated earlier. Vato = V + a (aleph = The Fool, an androgenous symbol) + to (pronounced toe).

Vond, on the other hand, = 130 = The Devil (raw male energy) = the 5 of Cups (disappointment, trouble, pain, grief and represents a lack of fulfilment or non-attainment of expected results which we get told is Brock's situation regarding Frenesi. Both Brock and Prairie search for Frenesi). But it doesn't seem all black and white. 130 also = "Deliverance" and "The Angel of Redemption" a version of which may or may not happen to Brock during the novel's conclusion; the reader will have to decide.

* * * * * *

A comment I couldn't get to last week: the emphasis on attention in chapter 8 reveals the strong influence of Gold's school. Prairie sees the Head Ninjette emerge from invisibility and asks if she can learn how to do that. "Takes a serious attention span." . . . "Common sense and hard work's all it is. Only the first of many kunoichi disillusionments – right, DL? – is finding that the knowledge won't come down all at once in any big transcendent moment." There's also a short phrase about attention, great  shamanic advice, in chapter 9.

Chapter 9 Notes:

p. 141, a passage covering most of this page got me considering Frenesi = a manifestation of Eris. Hail Eris!

P. 142, "Wawazume Life & Non-Life" seems the first introduction to the bardo chambers up ahead.

p. 147, "shabu" – Japanese slang for speed.

Back on p. 128 Pynchon makes a connection to his first novel, V. In that book, one aspect of V turned out to be Victoria Wren. In Vineland, the Sisterhood's financial consultant is "Vicki down in L.A. who moves it all around for us." – the only mention of her in the book.

In Straight Outta Dublin Eric Wagner writes of the importance Robert Anton Wilson placed on masks and their various ramifications. Chapter 9 brushes upon the subject of masks in a few different places – chapter 8 too, I believe. The chapter in Life in the Labyrinth following the one with the quotes above talks about masks. It's called "Shapeshifting Up the Totem."

Chapter 9 has two or 3 very subtle allusions to the Sufi classic, The Conference of the Birds by Attar. It seems very related to shamanic voyaging if not identical or close to it. Also at least a couple more music references: "People Are Strange" by the Doors when DL assembles a mask and disguise for herself and "Louie Louie" by the Kingsmen with the lyric commonly misheard as "Me gotta go" (p. 190). That lyric seems a shamanic prerequisite: you gotta drop the ego, at least temporarily, to access the higher dimensions. 

Next week: please read Chapter 10, pages 192 - 203