'Vineland' online reading group, Chapter 11

By OZ FRITZ
Special guest blogger

"The informal slogan around 24fps was Che Guevara's phrase 'Wherever death my surprise us.' It didn't have to be big and dramatic, like warfare in the street, it could happen as easily where they chose to take their witness, back in the shadows lighting up things the networks never would ..."– Vineland, p. 202-203

"Those thinkers in whom all stars move in cyclic orbits are not the most profound: whoever looks into himself as into vast space and carries galaxies in himself also knows how irregular all galaxies are; they lead into the chaos and labyrinth of existence."

– Nietzsche, The Gay Science 

The character Weed Atman has an interesting name. Sometimes Pynchon goes opaquely occult with his signifiers, other times he's screamingly obvious. Atman is a Sanskrit term for the True or Deep Self. It's the part of you that survives obliteration in death and gets reincarnated, according to Hindu doctrine. Atman can also get thought of as the essential nature of something. In philosophy they talk about the being of this or that. To give one example, Deleuze wants to find the being of the sensible in his philosophy of difference. Weed Atman could signify the being, or the essential character of Vineland given that various forms of cannabis consumption - weed - run throughout the book. Not necessarily the character Weed Atman, but his name, the only name in the book with this blatant a definition.

To state the obvious, marijuana has an explicit role in Vineland. After breakfast, Zoyd begins his day (and the book) smoking half a joint. If a reader proved highly suggestible, they'd already be stoned in the second page of text. We find two or three amusing cannabis references in the working practices of the 24fps enclave in chapter 10. There's another weed reference in chapter 11; I think a character turns up with a joint in their mouth. To state the less obvious, marijuana has an implicit role in this book. In chapter 10 we find DL's initials given a number of times and at least once in chapter 11.

DL = 34. Chapter 34 in The Book of Lies is called "The Smoking Dog".  Pynchon seems quite fond of both smoking (weed) and dogs. Vineland starts (the Copeland quote) and ends with a dog. I'll leave that for the reader to unlock.

DL's initials appear capitalized (although reversed) as Love and Death in "The Smoking Dog." I highly recommend reading that chapter and commentary as an adjunct to reading Vineland. It's easily found online and clocks in at less than two pages long. Crowley calls Love and Death "greyhounds" that chase us. Pynchon puts us in a greyhound bus station with Zoyd and a baby Prairie in a later chapter, 14, I believe. DL herself seems all about death and love with the vibrating palm delivering death and her love for Frenesi, Takeshi, and the gesture of love she showed Prairie. Also, D = daleth = Venus, the goddess of love.

Apart from entertaining his audience in such a delightful way, Pynchon provides keys for establishing a presence in the higher dimensions – Leary's brain circuits or systems 5 through 8. Weed Atman appears as one of two characters who starts out living but ends up dead, in the bardo as a Thanatoid. In general, the bardo can be thought of as the territory "in between." Metaphorically speaking, an explorer of higher modalities (brain circuits 5 - 8) needs to temporarily die to their conventional self image, their mundane identity (as determined by their experiences and actualizations in C 1 - 4) in order to establish a lasting awareness in C 5- 8. We can think of that presence in the higher circuits as our Atman, our True Self. Weed Atman, the being of Vineland, seems an obvious key for getting there. According to Wilson and Leary, marijuana activates C5. Though I suspect Pynchon doesn't care much for Bob Dylan (I could be wrong) the 24 fps slogan 'Wherever death may surprise us' reminds me of "Rainy Day Woman #12 & #35."

Weed Atman, the being of Vineland. I submit that atman symbolizes the land of the vine, the territory of the higher dimensions. Ingesting cannabis seems one easy way to start off in that direction when somewhat adhering to set, setting and dosage guidelines. According to Google AI's Overview: "A true vine is a long-stemmed plant that uses other objects for support as it climbs to reach sunlight. It develops specialized climbing structures like tendrils (eg., grapevines) or clinging aerial roots (eg., ivy) to attach to surfaces." This seems isomorphic to connecting more consciously with the inner galaxies that make up the atman.

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This appears the 4th chapter in a row giving an emphasis on attention: "Then, in a shot of the whole crowd, she noticed this moving circle of focused attention as somebody made his way through, until a tall shape ascended to visibility. "Weed!" they cried, like a sports crowd in another country, the echo just subsiding before the next Weed!" This quote also could serve as an illustration of someone moving into the higher dimensions ("another country"). It will be observed by those who pay attention to these things that Pynchon's use of the SC combination has noticeably increased in frequency since Prairie made her Spinach Casserole with its UBI (universal basic ingredient though universal basic income works just as well in the occult symbolism of SC). Most of this chapter takes place at the College of the Surf; the quote has "sports crowd."

Earlier someone mentioned family as a recurring trope or theme in Vineland. In Chapter 11 we hear about "Weed's infamous family weekend get-togethers, when everybody was supposed to wallow in retro-domestic Caring and Warmth ...". Vineland ends with a big, annual family reunion. The only other main character who dies (maybe) in the book does so at the end. I have no idea if this has any relevance.

The storm that occurs when Frenesi and Brock are in Oklahoma that they also track on the Tube shows parallels with Pynchon's first published story, "The Small Rain." It's set in the aftermath of a weather event responsible for a lot of death. Like Wilson, Tom spreads his characters and themes throughout his written output. For instance, 86 has come up a bit in the Vineland discussion. Speaking of his younger self in the 3rd person on page 1 of his introduction to Slow Learner: "I mean I can't very well 86 this guy from my life." In the same introduction Pynchon explicitly connects the SC code with "The Small Rain" by informing us that the characters in it comprise a branch of the military called Signal Corps. The SC combo doesn't appear in the story at all.

The College of the Surf recalls a brief but scintillating adventure in my younger days. In 1978 a friend and I hitchhiked down to California from Western Canada. We spent a few days at Isla Vista, the locale of the University of California at Santa Barbara. One evening we hung out around the small night life area buying beer for underage students. We were underage too, the drinking age was 21 at the time, we were 18 but I guess we looked older due to our scruffy appearance from living on the road. The night before, we had tried staying in Santa Barbara on the beach, but were accosted by the police with their guns drawn on us – the only time that's happened to me. After searching us and failing to find any drugs, they took us to an area where homeless people camped and told us to get out of town before sundown the following day. After helping the students obtain their drug of choice, we dropped some acid and had a wonderful all night adventure finally crashing at dawn by the ocean. LSD gets a mention in Chapter 11.

The chapter ends with an interesting passage showing Frenesi reflecting on life, time and the way of service: "...time was rushing all around her, these were rapids and as far ahead as she could see it looked like Brock's stretch of the river, another stage, like sex, children, surgery, further into adulthood perilous and real, into the secret that life is soldiering, that soldiering includes death, that those soldiered for, not yet and often not in on the secret, are always, at every age, children" (p. 216). We see a lot there – Frenesi comparing her life to a river recalls Finnegans Wake; maybe a reference to Chapel Perilous; soldiering for children aligns with some lines from The Book of the Law, etc.  What struck me the most was that I had never considered surgery as a stage in life. But I guess as you get older and the body starts to fall apart all the medical stuff one has to go through does become a stage in life. I can relate to that.

Synchronicity: when researching atman I found out that the root word it comes from means breath. On Wednesday, someone I know very well went in for a lung biopsy and relayed a coincidence. One of the nurses asked what kind of music would he like to hear during the procedure. He said older Pink Floyd, please. When they wheeled him into the operating room the song "Breathe" from Dark Side of the Moon was playing. It couldn't be a more perfect choice, he thought.

Next week: please read Chapter 12, pages 218 - 268.