"with fog still in the hollows"
By OZ FRITZ
Special guest blogger
"Shadow Ticket is brisker than Thomas Pynchon's other work, but it's full of his usual vaudevillian sensibility and it addresses his favorite theme: how to live freely under powerful systems of control."
– Andrew Katzenstein, The New York Review.
"I still didn't know what to do to develop Jung's fourth faculty . . . Intuition.
That had to wait until I discovered Acid and Aleister Crowley." – RAW, Cosmic Trigger II.
"They were in a penthouse suite high over Amarillo, up in the eternal wind, with the sun just set into otherworld transparencies of yellow and ultraviolet, and other neon-sign colors coming on below across the boundless twilit high plain, and she was watching him now with newly cleansed attention, her light-bearing hair, against the simplicity out the window, a fractal halo of complications that might go on forever . . . one of those moments men are always being urged to respond to with care and sensitivity."
– Vineland, p. 381
Already I see parallels between Shadow Ticket and Vineland without yet reading the former. For instance, when Sasha and Frenesi first reunite (p. 361 - 362) they dance to the same kind of early jazz music featured in the forthcoming release. On a political/sociological level in Vineland, it seems the fascists have the upper hand. On the personal level, it appears that the main revolutionary characters have found a sense of joy and freedom in their lives despite the revolutionary dream having gone bust. Music has a prominent role in that joy and freedom. The "how" in the NY Review quote gets presented in Vineland through various techniques, instructions, hints, suggestions and allusions to Increase Intelligence – to raise consciousness. The lexicon of correspondences playing out through puns, music, TV and film associations, Qabalah, etc. plays a key role.
The Wilson quote is brilliantly elucidated in a piece by Michael Johnson, "23 Riffs On Robert Anton Wilson, Aleister Crowley, Psychedelics, Intuition, and Everyday Metaphysics" found in Lion of Light. Intuition, related to ESP, seems a product of Leary's extra-terrestrial circuits, maybe C6. Crowley, in this context, seems a conceptual personae for Magick. Learning or knowing how to look up the correspondences of the Tree of Life seems a prerequisite for Magick. I began using Cabala after picking it up from Cosmic Trigger I and Illuminatus! Frequent use of this art exercises and grows the intuition or esp like a bodybuilder going to the gym every day to develop their muscles.
The context of the Vineland quote comes about from Takeshi and DL making love after years of enforced celibacy toward each other. Metaphorically, "a penthouse suite high over Amarillo" puts them in the Supernal Triad on the Tree of Life. Amarillo translates as yellow from Spanish; yellow corresponds with Tiphareth on the Queen Scale of Color. This indicates stage 15, tantric sex, in Leary's 8 Circuit (24 stages) Model of Consciousness. Finally, ". . . a fractal halo of complications that might go on forever" makes a pretty good description of Pynchon's writing in general especially the epics like Gravity's Rainbow, Mason & Dixon, and Against the Day.
We've seen several parallels between TP and RAW with one or two more to elaborate upon which we'll get to. But it also appears TP became familiar with Timothy Leary's post LSD philosophy. This isn't surprising. Leary read, reread and raved about Gravity's Rainbow when he acquired a jailhouse copy during his period of incarceration. It seems ironic that he didn't pick up on his own influence in Vineland. He probably didn't read it 4 times like I did before I saw it. Vineland gives Ralph Waldo Emerson "quoted in a jailhouse copy of The Variety of Religious Experience, by William James." Both James and Leary taught psychology and philosophy; both worked at Harvard. On page 339 we find Hector "watching Sean Connery in The G. Gordon Liddy Story." Liddy and Leary debated each other in a tour of America in 1982 that got made into a film, Return Engagement. They first met when Liddy, a prosecutor at that time, led a raid on Tim's house in upstate New York looking for drugs. Later, he became one of Nixon's henchmen, initially leading an illegal break-in of the office of a psychiatrist treating Daniel Ellsberg. Ellsberg became known for leaking the Pentagon Papers which revealed how much the U.S. government lied to the public about the Vietnam War. Not too long after, Liddy organized the break-in of the DNC offices in the Watergate complex that eventually brought down Nixon. In the 2023 mini-series White House Plumbers we learn that Liddy liked to listen to speeches by Hitler. So the G. Gordon Liddy story at the time he debated Leary shows another iteration of the fascism v. freedom dialectic. Having Sean Connery as the lead seems another of Pynchon's jokes as Connery found fame playing the suave and cool secret agent 007 James Bond while Liddy comes up looking just the opposite in his secret agent attempts.
More irony: right before the Liddy sequence we meet two film investors, Sid Liftoff and Ernie Triggerman, who sign up Hector to make the first anti-drug movie. "Cid," a homonym of Sid, became a slang term for acid - LSD - in the 60's. "Liftoff" seems pretty self-explanatory if one has the slightest inclination for deconstructing signifiers á la James Joyce. Ernie's initials are E.T., the common abbreviation for extraterrestrial. Leary regards the four lower circuits in his model as terrestrial and the four higher circuits as extraterrestrial.
Weed Atman meets Prairie and tells her about his Bardo. He tells her he almost reincarnated as her which I find interesting as earlier I called Weed's name a symbol of the being of Vineland. Weed Atman represents stage 13, the first stage of extraterrestrial consciousness. Leary and Wilson connect that with the Tarot card The Hanged Man in The Game of Life. Stage 14 corresponds with the Death card. Stage 13, like Weed Atman, has to go through death to get to the next stage. Weed describes Rex, the dude that killed him as a "ceremonial trigger-finger" which recalls Ernie Triggerman, ET. I mentioned an illustration of stage 15, tantric sex, above. At the start of that passage Takeshi calls it "Oriental love magic."
At the Becker-Traverse reunion, Prairie gets involved in a "nonstop crazy eights game" with her uncle Pinky. I first got into Pynchon when invited to participate in a reading group looking at Against the Day. The first character in it, Randolph St. Cosmo reminded me of E.J. Gold. I told Gold that a famous writer seems to have based a character on him and that also wrote bardo-like sequences like he did. When I said it was Pynchon, he replied that Tom used to come to his classes down in L.A. and that he thought his name was pronounced "Pink-on." One of the more infamous places Gold gave classes was in a building on Cosmo Street, a street in the heart of Hollywood. St. Cosmo's partner is named Heartsease and she is the first to get pregnant in the novel.
Timothy Leary felt young people held the keys to the future because they appear more open to innovation and change. They seem more adaptable, their belief systems less calcified. Chapter 14 radiates a sweet quality from Zoyd's devotion to baby, then toddler Prairie. After being set-up, Zoyd goes through a metaphorical death/rebirth at the prospect of going to jail for years separated from his daughter. He starts acting like a baby crying all the time. Another metaphorical birth into a higher stage of evolution occurs when DL and Takeshi start being lovers. Extraterrestrial levels of consciousness seem extremely volatile until stabilized through repeated exposure and exploration. Pynchon alludes to that here (p. 383):
". . . though you could tell the Head Ninjette was interested at least in a scientific way in whether the Baby Eros, that tricky little pud-puller, would give or take an edge regarding the unrelenting forces that leaned ever after the partners into Time's wind . . ." He continues by illustrating some of the specific impedances or resistances to staying high. Timothy Leary, following Aleister Crowley, persistently applied scientific principles and techniques to the personal evolutionary process. The initials of "Baby Eros" spells BE. Hamlet's famous line" "To be or not to be that is the question" definitely applies to residencies in the extraterrestrial territories of the brain and nervous system.
This recalls a scene from Monty Python's The Meaning of Life more effectively communicated through a video clip. It's titled "People Aren't Wearing Enough Hats" and clocks out at 1:40 in length. " Wearing Hats" can serve as a Cabalistic metaphor for trying to reach the ET circuits.
Something Bobby wrote in one of the Pynchon comments inspired me to consider the "soul" as in a box similar to the one Schrödinger placed a cat in his famous thought experiment where it's unknown whether the cat survives a quantum process that potentially releases a poison gas. The outcome appears uncertain until the box gets opened and a measurement taken. The soul's development looks unknown until we open the box (C1-4) at death – either literal . . . or metaphorical as in the death of the ego. Sorry for the digression, I got distracted.
* * * * * *
I've outlined a number of congruencies between the writings of Bob Wilson and Tom Pynchon. However, I missed the Nixon Monument image that appears in both Illuminatus! and Vineland. Thank-you Tom Jackson for showing it the light of day. Cabalisticaly, they both use the word "colossus", but Pynchon alters course slightly. Illuminatus! signifies the former president by his full name, "Richard Milhous Nixon." RMN = 290 = "Thine enemy." Vineland has: " . . . on how the work was going on the new Nixon Monument, a hundred-foot colossus in black and white marble at the edge of a cliff . . ."(p. 205). NM = 90 = The Emperor (tarot) qualified by 100 = The Moon (tarot). In a classic Pynchon technique, he mixes black and white for a symbolic chiaroscuro effect. The darkness of Nixon blends with "the odor of marijuana smoke" in the next sentence; young people ("student body") getting high. Then there's some word play with statues and "statutes about Being In A Place." BIAP = 93. Illuminatus! remains an important work in the canon of the 93 current, i.e. Magick and Thelema. As a student with a body I first learned about Aleister Crowley and his philosophy through Cosmic Trigger I and Illuminatus! I definitely wasn't alone. Grady McMurty, the Outer Head of the O.T.O. gave Lon Milo Duquette a copy of Illuminatus! after his initiation into the order. Duquette tells the story in Lion of Light. In Gold's school "Being" aka the Voyager replaces the soul as a term for what survives death. Crowley uses the word "place" magically in chapter 57 of the Book of Lies. Pynchon gives us a hawk, a symbol of Horus and the 93 current in the penultimate sentence of the book.
Pynchon circles back to this chiaroscuro image in chapter 14 referring to: "the increasingly mysterious activities necessary to get Hector's colossal dopechunk out of the house again." Colossal connects back to colossus; much much more marijuana in the picture. I consider this a form of magic realism.
At one of the talks they gave together at the 1980 Cosmicon Convention in San Francisco E.J. Gold and Robert Anton Wilson got into a discussion on the trope that the original script for the TV series Star Trek had been written by Gurdjieff; the main characters represented the different centrums with the whole ship being a composite terrestrial human voyaging out into extraterrestrial territories. Scotty, the ship's engineer personified the physical centrum, Leary's C1. Leonard McCoy, the ship's doctor aka Bones stood in for the emotional centrum, C2. Spock, obviously, portrayed the intellectual centrum, C3. Captain James T. Kirk represented the personality, C4. I haven't heard this talk in a number of years, but do recall Gold and Wilson disagreeing on one of these attributions; not sure which one. This trope seems part of Star Trek lore, it wasn't originated by them, I don't know where it came from, but it was out there in the underground buzz. References to Star Trek appear in Vineland more than any other show. This esoteric, albeit fictional interpretation perfectly suits the theme in Vineland of being on the edge of humanity's next big cosmic step. The valorization of surf as in the College of the Surf fits this model too. The surf exists at the edge of sea and land. Going out into space represents humanity's next big evolutionary step according to Leary and Wilson comparable in scope to life emerging out of the ocean to evolve new land dwelling biological forms. In the 1970s, 80s and 90s it felt like we were on the edge of this; that's what was advertised. The College of the Surf seems a humorous stand-in for Vineland itself considering the idea of educating young people for the next big evolutionary step.
Pynchon tweaks the Star Trek memes for his own purposes. He creates a fictional offshoot, Say, Jim (p. 370) where all the actors are black except the communications officer, Lieutenant O'Hara, an Irish twisting of Uhura. This harkens back to the Black Panthers acquiring Rex's precious wheels and naming it Uhuru – another example of the author mixing white and black. In this spinoff, whenever Spock comes on the bridge they all make the Vulcan hand salutes "and went around high-threeing" suggesting Binah. Chapter 15 shows multiple references to the Mother archetype both implicit and explicit. Hector, Sid and Ernie dine at Ma Maison. Interpreting the first word in English, the second in French gives "Mom's House." House = beth = The Magus (tarot). One of my favorites comes when Zoyd's lawyer brings up luck and chance culminating in the phrase "... life is Vegas." Vegas = 75 = Nuit. When Crowley was asked what life is he answered "a play of Nuit" (Tobias Churton, Aleister Crowley: The Beast in Berlin)
The riff on luck and Vegas ties in to Nietzsche's philosophy of valorizing operations of chance and random processes. "Nietzsche means that we have managed to discover another game, another way of playing: we have discovered the Overman (ET consciousness) beyond two human-all-too-human ways of existing; we have managed to make chaos an object of affirmation instead of positing it as something to be denied."
(Gilles Deleuze, Nietzsche & Philosophy).
When the three female Traverse descendants, Sasha, Frenesi and Prairie meet up at the reunion, Grandma Sasha breaks the ice by treating Prairie like a young child. They reminisce over baby Prairie (less than 4 months old) first noticing the Tube with Gilligan's Island. This appears another show where a ship enters the unknown away from most humans though this time unintentionally, only because they hit a storm and got lost. They have to learn to survive by their wits. It seems a little analogous to a new life coming into the world and having to learn all the basics of survival. In one of the MLA online courses RAW had Eric Wagner provide the Leary brain circuit correspondences for the crew on Gilligan's Island. I don't remember them all. The Professor obviously appears C3 and I remember the Skipper as C2. The name Gilligan when Cabalistically analyzed fits in with the lexicon and themes of Vineland. I'll save that for another time.
It delighted me to find a clear Bob Dylan allusion. Right near the end Prairie meets a young Russian fisherman looking for American rock and roll. He has an acoustic guitar "with Cyrillic stenciling on it, as if he'd been preparing to use it as a weapon." This alludes to the sign Woody Guthrie had on his acoustic guitar, "This machine kills fascists." Alexi asks Prairie if she knows the Vomitones "'83 Garage Tapes."
suggesting Bob Dylan and the Band's quite famous Basement Tapes. Dylan began his performing life imitating Woody Guthrie and hitchiked to New York to meet him. Pynchon even gives the genealogy of a brief music reference.
Desmond the dog seems to have been named after a character in the Beatles' "Ob la Di, Ob la da" song. Listen to it and you'll hear themes from Vineland. In one verse Desmond watches the children while his wife Molly does her face then goes singing with a band. In the next verse it's Molly who watches the children while Desmond does his face then sings with a band. Pynchon clearly loves to reverse things. In this chapter alone he reverses the orientation of Heaven and Hell, the skin color of the crew of the U.S.S. Enterprise and makes the Woody Guthrie-like character a Russian.
Hector throws out a number when negotiating with Sid and Ernie: 2.71828 (p. 342). This is known as Euler's number. It's used to calculate compound interest, but also appears fundamental in differential calculus which measures rates of change. This might be another reference to Deleuze's philosophy of difference. He goes into differential calculus looking at how things change to become different though he never brings up Euler's number. Eula Becker Traverse is the matriarch of the Becker/Traverse clan. Make of that what you will.
Fog comes up repeatedly in Vineland, almost like a non-human character. The Sufis use that word as an acronym for "face of god." Most, but not all of the time, fog just seems like fog. Sometimes the Sufi pun works. It's also in the penultimate sentence.
I suspect Pynchon tricks the reader in the final paragraph of the novel. It seems ambiguous.
Vineland and RAW's Schrödinger's Cat end the same way: with something beloved returning home.
Thank-you everyone for your presence and attention.
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