Software and Souls in the Machine

This entry will be a little shorter than usual as it is being dictated due to bugs in Uploaded Mind’s organic substrate – an inflammation in the series of tubes carrying the (neural) network.

I’m very intrigued by my esteemed colleague, unReal Quandary’s, Marxist critique of the Matrix trilogy. While a Marxist critique might be valid for the first Matrix movie, when we move into the 2^nd and 3^rd, humans as a power substrate for the machines becomes lost behind the idea of some kind of balance between humans and machines that must be restored through Neo – the remainder, the one that doesn’t fit in the equations. This is a way, way, more complicated way of controlling humans than is necessary for using humans as batteries – it’s not as if humans need a society along the lines of the end of the20th century, we’ve lived in far worse circumstances. There’s a need to keep the humans not just alive but functioning in a society. While Smith claims revulsion at being exposed to humans in movie 1, in 2 we meet programs who would risk everything to play human. They program themselves to have human emotions like compassion (the family in the train station) and jealousy (the Merovingian and Persephone). Doesn’t Smith himself (honest, if nefarious) provide a counter-critique by claiming that the human mind reject Utopia in favor of life in late 20^th Century capitalism?

Too Many Pills

I love the first Matrix movie, the second one is pretty good, and the last one sucks.  One effect I particularly enjoy is the way it is made clear that the matrix really truly is code, by traveling through television screens whose image is patterned like the code used to make up the numbers, and the several shots that depict the cityscape in code.  These do, however, get to be a little bit excessive by the end of the second movie.
Some interesting threads that the movies drop by the third installment – clearly the idea of gaining energy from humans is completely ludicrous – so what must really be going on (at least, this would be a lot more interesting to me) is the human minds provide for the machines a cyberspace in which to interact socially – because of course we are talking about AI, something that would most likely be very uninterested in a bleak, blasted world with nothing going on but trying to kill the only other sentient beings living there.  That can only be interesting for so long – clearly programs wish to have lives inside the Matrix as and with humans, like the family that have written a program as their daughter and wish to smuggle her into the Matrix.  Machines need humans to provide a playground for their minds… now, if only we could see an installment of the Matrix where it is told from the machines and programs’ point of view… that would be cool.
The theme of every thing being created for a purpose as a common religious motif is certainly something that is hard to avoid in this movie when the entire world is populated and controlled by programs that have all been written for a specific purpose.  It by its own rules creates a religious framework for the actions of the characters in which everything has its place and purpose.  It is interesting that when Smith, a program very bent on purpose, becomes a virus the carefully constructed matrix and the machine world itself becomes threatened with destruction because it no longer acts within this framework – because it does not have a purpose (unlike the One, which is created to restore the balance/status quo of humanity as the slaves of the machines).
This is not unlike the postulation of idea as viral programming in Snow Crash.  The idea that religions with written texts serve the purpose of inoculating a population against memes (for more on memes, if you can stand any more info after reading all so much about the Sumerians, go to http://www.cscs.umich.edu/~crshalizi/formerly-hyper-weird/memetics.html) can be seen as loosely linking to the idea of a ‘the One’ to reset the balance of the Matrix.  However, in the world of Snow Crash, not everything has a purpose – there is no Architect/Oracle dichotomy using existence as its personal playground, for one.  Snow Crash is in this way far more cyberpunk through the creation of a world not based on ultimate control but one of anarcho-capitalism.  One interesting thing shared by The Matrix and Snow Crash is that both have a Eurasian male lead and  seem to deliberately attempt to break away from the mono-racial mould of previous cyberpunk works.  However, as usual, women take on supporting roles, and don’t get to be cool and savvy programmers who know how to manipulate code and do cool things.
To see something really, really cool (although you might not realize how cool it is unless you have tried to do computer animation yourself) – http://youtube.com/watch?v=2LDd-9t1BEQ.

It Just Gets Weirder and Weirder

Due to my sad inability to manipulate technology, I was only able to find the first half of eXistenZ, and so unfortunately can only extrapolate the rest of the movie from online descriptions and reviews. However, I have a lot to say about the first half, so here goes…

EXistenZ has all the great cyberpunk tropes – a dystopian future, illegal bod mod, running from shadowy enemies, and cyberspace and the breakdown of real and unreal. But it also turns some given visual elements of future dystopian cyberpunk worlds on their heads; the boring yuppie clothes without a scrap of black leather or denim and not a hint of chrome or cool sunglasses (except perhaps her pants in the first scene, not sure what they were made of), the complete lack of futuristic metal or cityscapes or, really, high tech machines of any kind. Even the gun, while with out a doubt a very sophisticated mechanism, is literally as far from something like the cobra, chrome shuriken or the Saturday night special in Neuromancer or the katana in Snow Crash as one can get – it has no sleek lines, no shiny bits, and it looks more gross than scary.

The game pods as living, uterine creatures with umbilical cords is also certainly a new one on me in the cyberpunk genre (but then again, there is plenty of cyberpunk I have yet to read). While we have seen earlier a connection of cyberspace and the feminine through the label of the Matrix for cyberspace in Neuromancer, I have never yet seen so explicitly a feminizing of the tools for access into cyberspace. While access is usually through a hard, plastic and/or metal box, a computer or deck, that is intrinsically technological, here we see a living, pulsing, uterine creature with umbilical cords as the access point into the cyberspace of the games. However, we also see the continuation of a masculinizing “jacking in” to access the game pod.

The creation of the bio port, a clearly sexualized opening into the body, literally pacifies the recipient by paralyzing them. When his new bio-port is still fresh it is very sensitive, and Allegra tells him it is “excited” and “wants action,” and places her finger into the bio-port. Ted reacts angrily and defensively, telling Allegra that he doesn’t necessarily want action. This scene explicitly sexualizes the bio-port and both creates it as a place of potential sexual exploitation as well as highlights its intrinsically biological and non-mechanical aspects in that it feels and has become part of his body’s sensuality. This seems to play with the cyberpunk idea expressed in Neuromancer that the body is just the meat to be discarded when one enters the matrix; here the body is highly sexualized by the tools for entering cyberspace, and entering cyberspace is an experience that makes Ted very nervous for the safety of his meat. Cyberspace and its tools make him hyperaware of his body as fragile and vulnerable. His fear of being penetrated both by the process of creating the bio-port and later by her finger and the end of the umbilical cord may reflect a fear of his body being feminized and pacified by the creation of this opening into his body.

Its role as a sexual, vaginal type opening is reinforced by the process of jacking in, the insertion of the fleshy phallus-like ending of the umbilical cord into the bio-port. Here there is an interesting mixing of masculine and feminine, that not only makes the “jacking in” to the system a sexual experience but one that also turns the bio-port into a kind of backwards navel. Here, instead of being connected to an umbilical in order to receive life giving energy so that one can eventually interact in the external world outside of the uterus, the bio-port is located opposite of the navel, takes energy away from the body to feed the uterus, and causes the connected user to mentally leave the organic world and enter into an internal world ‘inside’ the uterus. It is almost a reverse birth; so there are two things going on, there is the return to the womb and an almost fetal state, as well as a sexual domination of the user who is placed into a traditionally female sexual role. The umbilical is the feminine penetration at the root of all life, but as a sexualized penetration it becomes masculinized as well, creating very interesting dynamics.

I found very interesting the trope of a creation of a new reality that is regarded by the populace as infinitely preferable to organic reality, or even as more real than organic reality. The film makes it clear that the world is a strangely formulaic place devoid of creativity – all the places are labeled just as they are with no innovation (“Motel,” “Country Gas Station”), and are explicitly removed from any idea of futuristic machine based technology – the gas station looks like it was taken out of the 40’s or 50’s, with full service which has been unseen for decades (except in New Jersey, but they’re special), and they hide out at a ski chalet (a place for outdoorsy fun and a chance to get away from technology) where surgery is performed on a simple tray on a wooden work table with scissors and a distinct lack of high tech-y type equipment. There is certainly no chrome, and even the surgical instruments look dull and used.

One thing this does is make organic reality seem boring and obsolete, with the film color tone almost sepia like an old picture. Also, this technology, while exciting for the populace, is completely mainstreamed, with the demonstration taking place in a church (thus proving that it is accepted for the more conservative elements of the culture) for an audience that ranged across all ethnic, age, and gender types without a single outcast type in sight. The real world is boring, the only fascinating thing in it the pulsing flesh of the game pod and the refreshingly unpredictable world it promises.

There is also a definite, strong Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch influence. When I saw the fast food bag with the words “Perky Pat” on it, I knew it was time to start tracking reality, and when she said that the game really needs to be played by two people I recalled the very interesting and certainly rather unique trope of TSPE, not really present in the other cyberpunk we have read, of a virtual space designed to be entered simultaneously by two people so that they can take roles and interact with each other in a pre-designed game setting. TSPE also utilizes an organic means for entering into the cyberspace, one which we haven’t seen in other fictions, where cyberspace is accessed via some non-organic technology.

A few things to say about “Rise of the Video Game”

I thought that the approach to videogames as representing the beliefs, attitudes, questions being dealt with at the time of their production was a fruitful approach to videogames throughout the documentary, and I liked the comment that one of the interviewees said, that videogames will be rich social documents but that the challenge will be how to read them because unlike a movie in which the director makes a statement that is a unified whole, a videogame changes with the player’s decisions. Perhaps now that people do screen captures of their games those documents will reveal more about our society.

If games give a perspective on our existence just like books, movies, etc do, as the documentary claims, I wonder what can be said about how texts or films that play with the possibilities of games or cyberspace give a perspective on our existence (or EXistenZ).

Not being much of a videogame player I was interested in the discussion of how good characters and good story become the way to improve a video game, and how the question the developers began to ask themselves was “can emotion be present in a videogame?” I agreed with their point that this is necessary to transform videogames from the realm of an amusement to an entertainment competitive with movies – the idea that being able to connect to characters, to feel for them, and to care about the ‘mission’ as what makes a videogame more than just a mathematical puzzle.

The final discussion about how people, especially children, have with hyper-real videogames, particularly war scenarios, begun to mentally and emotionally blur the boundaries between fiction and reality, with war games creating a problem with the distinction between real and simulated, a very interesting segue into “EXistenZ”. For an interesting radio show on the effects of videogames on the behavior of children, check out http://soundprint.org/radio/display_show/ID/226/name/Game+Over.

This week was my week of media incompetency – each person who swore up and down that their computer had the right graphics card to play Bioshock was mistaken in their assertion, and when my last hope fell through on Sunday I turned to the net and watched hours of other people playing the game instead. I now think I could kill a Big Daddy in my sleep and find my way around the game with my eyes closed, but this is probably like watching so much poker on tv that you end up convinced that the players are idiots and you could win with your hands tied behind your back (an erroneous and potentially bankrupting delusion). Fortunately my dad has a computer so tricked out I shouldn’t even be talking about it, and I will get to play the game over the weekend. I was very interested in the introduction of a moralistic slant to the game, since one of the things we have seen in cyberpunk is the protagonist as the anti-hero operating outside of any particular code of ethics. BTW, for the cutest thing you will ever see associated with Bioshock, check this out: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YEqZkglTVYE.

questions

I thought the development of the idea of the city from a concrete place to “a continued participation in the circulation of information permitted by the new electronic technologies of telecommunications” (82), the city as intangible web of information and not the tangible grid of streets and buildings. I hadn’t realized how Gibson was playing with this theme in Neuromancer until I reread the quote Bukatman points to on p.97, with the city as pixels of information – way cool.
Bukatman’s reading of the cityscape of Blade Runner made it clear why the film was so crucial to the development of a cyberpunk aesthetic. His examination of the scene in which Deckard examines the photograph electronically, thus changing the approach to ‘reality’ from one of physical, three-dimensional space to one in which the space beyond the screen is just as real, allowed me to see the sequence, and what it said about a greater understanding of the potential of the screen as a digital space for reality to expand into (88). I’m not so sure I understand what Bukatman means when he refers to a terminal space, however, or what he means when he says “urban space begins to complete a trajectory toward terminal space” (89). Does he mean some kind of end space, or is he referring more simply to space existing inside of a computer terminal?

Hackers

I was fascinated by Turkle’s descriptions in The Second Self of the ways in which interactions with machines alter the way in which children develop their concept of what s alive and what is not alive.  I unfortunately have no background in child psychology, and so cannot compare what she has to say with the research of any other psychologists, but much of what she says seems to make sense.  I was particularly interested by the way in which she tried to demonstrate how children are forced by the “marginal” status of computers (35) that do not possess physical markers or behaviors that can be construed as being linked to life (movement, sense organs, etc), but possess the psychological markers of life in that they can speak and seem to react to stimuli in a social manner.

I’m not so sure of how to respond to her analysis of hackers.  She seems to make many generalizations based on a few interviews.  Her observations that hackers seems to try to replace social relationships with a relationship to the machine, which is controllable and predictable and requires no complex emotional input in order to work effectively, mirrors the approach through much of Hackers to hacker psychology.  But both of these books seem to brush off the question of the gendering of hackers into an interchangeable sea of white hetero-normative males.  In her footnote, Turkle states that while more women have entered the field of computing, “but the particular style of relating to technology that is the focus of this chapter remains a male-gendered style” (184).  She doesn’t explain why this is a “male-gendered style” that excludes ‘female-gendered’ behavior, or why she doesn’t bother to look into the behavior of female hackers; perhaps because if “hacker” is already a gendered term, there are can only be women who program, not female hackers.  She takes the opinions of male hackers as explanations for why the female hacker is invisible in the wider hacker community, most of which boil down to ‘women are not intense or crazy enough to be hackers.”

Levy in Hackers takes a similar tack to answer the question, and comes to a similar conclusion – women just aren’t intense enough to handle hacking or to even be interested in doing so.  Levy states “The sad fact was that there never was a star-quality female hacker” (84).  This is simply not true; perhaps they were unable to gain access to the exclusive club of MIT hackers as anything but potential mates, but to deny their existence entirely is simply bad journalism.  Levy, like Turkle, also provides the opinions of the male hackers as explanations backing up his declaration.  These explanations are incredibly misogynistic, and simply leaving the issue at that seems to me to be a flaw in Levy’s examination of hacker culture.  This is a problem that persists into the 21st century; check out http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/gate/archive/2001/10/11/womhackers.DTL.

Turkle’s examination of the hacker’s self image as a response to how they view themselves in society is interesting, especially in the context of the Ugliest Man on Campus competition (which appears to have expanded far beyond its roots as a hacker phenomenon celebrating personal ugliness… see http://www-tech.mit.edu/V118/N54/umoc.54n.html).  This celebration of the rejection of what is seen as the imperfect or the uncontrollable, the body, and the distaste for personal relationships that may possibly include elements not directly under the control of the hacker, seems to link to this rejection of the idea of female hackers in the quote “‘Women, even today, are considered grossly unpredictable… How can a hacker tolerate such an imperfect being?’” (Levy, 83).  The female is linked to the body, to the uncontrollable and imperfect; the only control the hacker has over the body is to reject it.

True Names and Tetsuo: the Iron Man

Tetsuo: the Iron Man
The first thing I noticed when the film began was the grainy, black and white, 20’s German art flick look.  I checked the date on the netflix sleeve, but that didn’t really help me (very few things helped much with this film, to tell the truth…).  However, there is no doubt that this would be a very different movie without the sharp, overexposed black and white footage.  One very striking thing about this technique for the film was that it made it very hard to discern what was flesh and what was metal.  Although according to the director’s notes on the special features for the dvd said that the black and white footage was the result of budgetary constraints, this visual inability to discern the boundaries between metal and flesh necessary for the visual impact of the film.  What is the film expressing by using this technique?  I’m not exactly sure.

I’m not exactly sure what is going on with the Metal Fetishist and the rust, and the Salaryman and the stainless steel razor… I think they become machines because they have been touched by metal (the Fetishist because of the metal he puts in his body, the Salaryman because he cuts himself shaving) as the Fetishist points to the Salaryman’s stainless steel razor as the reason that the Salaryman is not rusting like the Fetishist.  Why this is the case, and what it could possibly mean beyond being cool I don’t understand.  Perhaps it is because humanity has begun to take on the characteristics of the metals they are associated with – the Salaryman is sharply dressed and very clean like a razor blade, while the Fetishist is clearly falling apart (otherwise why would he be putting metal bars into himself, I ask you).

By using the image of an unnamed everyman type Salaryman, the Salaryman seems to come to symbolize the average male in society.  Thus his experiences can perhaps be seen as symbolic for a wider societal experience, in a way that the story would not be able to convey if he were named or given a specific job.

I am curious about the role the erotic plays in this film.  I’m not quite sure yet what to do with the Salaryman’s nightmare of his girlfriend anally raping him with a huge metal penis, except that he actually seems to be turned on by the dream as they have sex when they both wake up.  What role does he place her in by imagining her thus?  What does this dream fulfill for him, what makes it erotic and stimulating instead of simply terrifying?  In following scene in which he kills her with his crazy power drill penis, what is his motivation for doing so?  I’m not sure if he tries to have sex with her and kills her that way or if he simply drills into her torso, but the shot juxtaposing her crotch and his drill phallus clearly delineates the fact that she does not have the equipment that she did in the dream that he found so erotic.  Is this perhaps why he kills her, because she cannot fulfill his erotic fantasy?

There are two other instances of possible ‘eroticism’ outside of the Salaryman’s relationship with his girlfriend.  The first, in a shot that is shown twice over the course of the film, is a panning shot of the front grill of the car that the Salaryman was driving when he ‘killed’ the Fetishist.  This shot seems to me to be indicated as ‘erotic’ by the very strong shift in music to something kind of ‘sexy’ during the shot.  I’m going to put that one one the backburner for now, though, as I’m not sure yet what is going on there besides a sexual fetishism of the machine.

The other moment of eroticism is when the Salaryman and the Fetishist are joined together into one being, and they sort of swim together.  They are also, although I may be mistaken (as I may be about this entire thing…), joined together by the drill phallus.  Perhaps the film is trying to say something about an erotic shift from the organic female (since she is only part metal in his fantasies, and ends up recoiling in horror from his drill penis), which cannot truly satisfy (or sexually understand) the modern man, to the mechanical male, or technological masculinity, which allows males to come together through technology to become something greater than the sum of its parts (a fantasy which excludes the female as unnecessary).

Of course, there is the whole revenge scenario, so I’m not sure where that fits in…

True Names

When I first read True Names I was a bit bothered by Vinge’s apparently flagrant disregard for the elementary writing rule of maintaining a single tense throughout the narrative.  On this second read, I think there is an actual purpose to this technique, and an interesting manipulation of textual ‘rules’ to blur the reader’s experience of the text as purely text.

This is particularly apparent when the text changes tense in mid sentence, as on page 255, when the text enters the present tense and shifts from a third person narrative to a second person narrative… “But he [Alan] was certainly one of the best, probably the product of many hundreds of blocks of psylisp programming, and certainly superior to the little ‘companionship’ programs you can buy nowadays, which generally become repetitive after a few hours of conversation, which don’t grow, and which are unable to counter weird responses.”  This is like the dungeon master explaining the properties of an item in the dungeon; all it lacks is the price that the reader can pay to obtain a ‘companionship program.’  The story is in third person past tense, while these ‘excerpts’ are in second person present tense.  The text is stepping out of the story to address the reader and tell the reader about the world they are now inhabiting, the world described in the text, in the same way a dungeon master may tell the players about the world they are playing in.  This brings the experience of the reader closer to that of the characters, who are only able to navigate through the traps of their cyberspaces by an intricate understanding of arbitrary rules.

Another interesting phenomenon found in True Names is something I have been interested in more broadly in SF.  Cyberspace, and the creation of cyber-entities, changes the formula of SF in interesting ways that the text delineates.  Within the story, the mantle of ‘alien’ is removed from the shoulders of the invader from space and placed on the shoulders of the humans themselves.  Both Slip and Erythrina, through their experiences on the net, become the dominant threat to society, and cease to be human; their bodies, and more importantly their minds, become the thousands of “communications nodes” (291).  This experience of becoming more than human is delineated on p.285.  When they return to their human bodies, they are alienated from their experiences as cyber-gods; Pollack describes the sensation as going from “day to day feeling a husk of what he had once been and trying to imagine what he could barely remember” (305).their ability to interact with and control cyberspace is greatly enhanced and when not connected they no longer are able to comprehend the beings that they are when they are in cyberspace.

Even the artificial intelligence as the dangerous other, or non-human alien force, is supplanted by the end of the text.  Erythrina literally comes to inhabit the code of the Mailman, a human supplanting a bit of code that has evolved dangerously outside of the control of humanity.  By the end she is envisioned by Slip as coming to occupy a possibly god-like role in cyberspace… not quite sure what to do with her becoming cyber-god yet… that is an idea requiring more thought, perhaps others will come up with something… more on True Names later…

Opioid Reality

Wow, PKD does it again. The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch has so many permutations of reality that by the end of the novel I was listing the levels into which our heroes had delved. One of the things about PKD though is that he does not leave anything up to chance – there is no way that a reader would miss that he is referring to Christian (specifically Catholic) theology, with the transubstantiation and the Eucharist, and the Buddhist philosophy/ies regarding the nature of reality, to name a couple, because he lays it all out there on the table in the text. His characters argue most of the points he is trying to make and come to various conclusions, although it is fun to read and think is he setting up Eldritch to be some kind of god figure? and then bam! he is (a) god(like figure)…[I like how both mature and immature Eldritch ended up being... both far wiser than Barney in some ways and also very self-preservationist, and easily frustrated by Barney's lack of desire to be one with him at all times... echoes of Mercerism in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep]. I have to say that I was rather expecting Eldritch to be some form of the Devil; he tempts people into a loss of connection with reality but cannot force them to take the Chew-Z (except for Leo, so… still working on it), they must take it of their own free will (he has to compete in some way with Can-D, he can’t just put it in the water) and then once they have chosen to ‘sin’ he has their souls under his control (for instance, both Leo and Barney experience an overdose of Chew-Z as turning them into some kind of phantasm, a ghost or a soul if you will) and he can subvert reality for them. I hold out for the possibility that everything after Leo is first injected with the Chew-Z is actually taking place in his mind (or rather Eldritch’s); I intend to return to this particular novel and reexamine the ending, especially Barney’s merger with Eldritch. I noted some similarities between this work and some of PKD’s other novels, in particular it shares the paranoia and the breakdown of solid reality in Ubik and the constant search for oneness with others to survive unbearable and post-apocalyptic existences (and how those artificial experiences are just that – artificial) with Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep. Some other works that bear a similarity can be found at the wikipedia page for The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Three_Stigmata_of_Palmer_Eldritch. The Bladerunner movies shared with The Three Stigmata a fascination with eyes. There is a shift in focus from the book Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, in which the test looks at the eyes but primarily describes involuntary capillary responses as the prime reaction being studied to a focus on the eye. There are also several shots of the ‘replicants’ where something that appears to be a tapetum lucidum is reflecting in their pupils. This is a very interesting choice because while that structure is found in the eyes of many animals, it is not found in humans (as our eyes are adapted for daylight). This links the replicants to animals, and recalls Deckard’s comment in the novel that being hunted and being a hunter changes those who take on those roles into something not human, something animalistic and primitive. Also, the cinematic choice to focus on looking into the eyes can be seen as a search for a soul. This idea of the eye and the soul can be seen in the scene where Deckard is driving his car through a tunnel, and the shot through the tunnel is almost exactly like one of the opening shots where the lights are reflected into an eye; meanwhile, in his car as it is traveling though the tunnel, is reviewing tapes of Nexus 6 interviews, trying to get a better handle on his prey, to understand the replicants, to understand them – to get a grip on their souls, perhaps. The greatest difference between the book and the movies is the removal of Mercerism from Bladerunner, although that is a rather obvious cinematic choice to get down to the meat of the story. Also, the animal theme is greatly reduced, with the primary retention of the symbol of the owl. For more on the symbolism of the owl (http://www.thewhitegoddess.co.uk/articles/owls.asp?SID=Mythology). That the owl is seen to symbolize the darker side of human nature makes it an apt symbol for a story about creating slaves with human intelligence and then killing them when they use it, and a story about hunting and killing (also, the owl is of course a formidable predator.

And here is a site I just found on eye symbolism in Bladerunner, don’t know if it is any good yet… http://scribble.com/uwi/br/tkarantinos.html.

Pynchon and Burroughs

I first attempted Gravity’s Rainbow when I was about 15 and absolutely failed to understand a word of it. Rereading it, however, I think it just might be my favorite book of all time. Unfortunately I had to massively accelerate my reading of GR after about page 150 or so (difficult with so dense an object), and much like the stars outside the Falcon when you toss her into hyperdrive the words have blurred into long streams of almost indecipherable light. That said, my comments in this post will mostly pertain to that portion of the book which I read at subluminary speeds.

I am becoming very interested in the color symbolism in GR. The liner notes for p.106 on the Pynchonwiki (this is potentially a quite useful resource, the Pynchonwiki’s Gravity’s Rainbow section – http://gravitys-rainbow.pynchonwiki.com/wiki/index.php?title=Main_Page) mention “whiteness as the color of death.” Starting from this supposition, I am finding myself asking questions about the meanings and relationships, binary or otherwise, between black and white.

For instance: what can be understood by comparing the black feather given to Dumbo by the crows, magical only through the belief that Dumbo invests in it (137), to the single person of Jamaican origin, the “black bellwether,” in the church visited by Jessica and Roger (137) (a wether is a castrated sheep, a bellwether was a wether that was given a bell and was used to locate the flock… the Christian religious imagery here of the flock… might there be something also in the castration implied in calling the black man the bellwether?)? His voice is not a false “falsetto” but is instead “honest,” a “high voice…riding above the others” (131). The emphasis on his voice as “high” leads me to believe that there is indeed something to the castration connection in the bellwether metaphor… What role is “black” playing here? Does “honest” mean it possesses some kind of truth, or only that it does not claim to be something it is not? Does black represent some kind of truth that is tamed or controlled (through castration)? Dumbo’s black feather is compared to a grasping after some kind of Truth that is inextricably tangled with death, like a Miraculous Medal held, as a good luck charm, in a frozen dead hand (137) (for an explanation of what a Miraculous Medal is, see the Pynchonwiki). Is this a belief in a truth that is invested in an object that has no power of its own connected to “black”? A bellwether has no power of its own over the location of the flock, it only provides information about that location… There is an amazing amount of stuff here that will have to wait until it is not 4 in the am for me to actually pull apart and not just ramble incoherently about…

Can this dichotomy of black and white, with a look at white as a symbol for death (a connection made particularly obvious in the “white-painted tanks” and lots of white snow hiding mines and frozen corpses described on p.137 along side Dumbo and his magic feather), be compared to the sexual fantasies of Captain Blicero and his ideas of black and white doubles? Also, what about the connection the Herero boy makes between sex and god (sex seen by Blicero as blasphemous and thus in opposition to god) (102)? When he is with his white sexual ‘partners,’ their relationship, as seen by Blicero, is based on old fairytale archetypes (98), and a fascination with death (death and lack of reality? And death in the Oven (98), a method of death which has a very important connection to WWII through the Holocaust and might almost be seen as a symbol for WWII and its eventual consumption of Blicero… also, come to think of it, the oven could be seen as a symbol for the womb of the war, which is referred to by several characters as their mother… the Oven as a womb of death instead of life, where one enters to die instead of exiting to begin life… this is all connected to his sexual fantasies with his white sexual partners whom he sees explicitly as doubles of black partners (103-104)).

There is also the interesting case of Project Black Wing based at “The White Visitation”. The only thing the townsfolk get from “The White Visitation” is a suicide (75), so in that way it is linked to death. Project Black Wing is a “‘strategy of truth’” (76), but not a full truth, but based on something real – the “real Africans” in Germany (76). A way to demoralize the Germans, a claim at truth, but in almost all ways a falsehood – white men in blackface (and one actual, real-life black man) portraying the fictional Schwarzkommando for staged and planted reels to demoralize and confuse the Germans. Again, in this situation of ambiguous truth, like the singing in the church and the clutching of a Miraculous Medal, is the presence of a single black man… So here we have black and white again.

How does this tie in with the theme of binary truth (black and white) versus a statistical probability approach (shades of gray) to truth found in the searchings of Pointsman and Mexico?

Also, the one time Slothrop actually almost gets nailed by a rocket (while he is nailing his latest squeeze) occurs after he is “hunting across the zero between waking and sleep” (121). He has entered the paradoxical phase; while previously, probably due to “a silent extinction beyond the zero” (86) it was the “ominous buildup” that preceded the rocket strike that induced the conditioned response, it is now, through the trauma (caused by the godawful British candy) needed to induce a transmarginal change within Slothrop’s cortex and concordant change in response to conditioned stimuli (92), he now gets a hard-on when he hears the actual explosion instead of at the “ominous buildup.” This is what happens when “you weaken this idea of the opposite;” (49) when you destroy the concept of binary, transmarginal states are achieved. Is this weakening of “the idea of the opposite” and loss of his ability (whether he was aware of it or not) to predict missile strikes a reflection on the truth contained or not contained in a binary system? More thought is needed… if any one has an idea, let me know…

Here is a very pertinent and interesting article on Pynchon and cyberspace (http://www.pynchon.pomona.edu/gr/bsto.html) (although I would like to point out that coral is an animal and not a vegetable, and that perhaps the fact that it is an animal makes it more pertinent to his argument, as it is an animal that mechanically constructs parts of itself… also, what we see are the parts that it constructs, and so this self-construction can be seen as information exchanged with the viewer about what is being viewed).

As for Burroughs… hm. Interesting. I can’t wait to see what we discuss regarding The Soft Machine and Bladerunner, A Movie. I particularly liked the devolving narrative style when used in the chapter in The Soft Machine, “Public Agent,” and I guess I am on a color kick because I am very interested in what is going on with the Green Boys and the red crabs.

(Please forgive the extreme ramblyness and possible incoherence of this…)