Pynchon, Python and PKD Attend the Paris Olympiad

Pynchon, Python and PKD Attend the Paris Olympiad

A screaming comes across the sky. It has happened before, but there is nothing to compare it to now.

It is too late. The Evacuation still proceeds, but it’s all theatre. There are no lights inside the cars. No light anywhere. Above him lift girders old as an iron queen, and glass somewhere far above that would let the light of day through. But it’s night. He’s afraid of the way the glass will fall—soon—it will be a spectacle: the fall of a crystal palace. But coming down in total blackout, without one glint of light, only great invisible crashing.^⁠1

—Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow, 1973

Inspiration, move me brightly, light the song with sense of color,

Hold away despair.

More than this I will not ask,

Faced with mysteries dark and vast.

More than this I will not ask.

Statements just seem vain at last . . .

Some rise, some fall, some climb, to get to Terrapin.

—Robert Hunter, second invocation to the Muse, Terrapin Station, 1977

There runs an intellectual debate as to whether we live within an Orwellian or Huxleyan world, and of course elements of Nineteen Eighty-Four and Brave New World abound, as we teeter between socialist and technocratic tyrannies. Or, more accurately, the melding of the two. They are compelling readings of our cosmos, yet maybe a tad superficial compared to those of the most important of American novelists, Philip K. Dick and Thomas Pynchon.

We all just experienced a couple of dizzying weeks navigating a most unprecedented hieroglyphic newscape. Beginning July 13^th,shots fired in Butler PA pierced Trump’s ear, killed one rally goer, Corey Comperatore, who covered his family, and wounded two others. Either there was a lone gunman named Crooks who flew drones, climbed an amazingly unoccupied rooftop, had bombs with timers he must have just learned to make that day, bought a five-foot ladder that morning (but footage is of an eight-foot ladder) and managed to Hermetically clean his home and scrub all internet presence before he left; or maybe there were several shooters, from a water tower and a tree; or maybe it was not Crooks, but antifa veteran sniper Maxwell Yearick^⁠2 whose rather elaborate ear formations matched those of the blood-caked intact head on the roof (witnesses on the ground all mentioned the sniper’s “head getting blown off”); not to mention the body on the roof wore shorts with a wide black belt, while the footage by the crowd trying to alert clueless authorities to Crooks show him wearing long pants; a secret service that forgets to show up at the morning coordination meeting between the various security factions; and an unscripted turn of the head that could only have come from an invisible angelic chiropractor as the bullet whizzed by. Or was Trump provided a squib as he went down, setting him up as the god-saved messiah leading the coagulation of a new christian reich?

Then Crooks suddenly appears in a Black Rock commercial filmed at Bethel High School, the odds which are somewhere around those of me winning a medal in the high jump. Here is the true revelation of the method: look here to see who your purported masters are. “Bethel” means “house of El”. El is not my god, but theirs.

Then followed by a meaningless congressional shaming ritual, first, of now-resigned director of the Secret Service and 9/11 protectress of Dick Cheney, Cheatle^⁠3 (watch for the announcement of a multi-million $ book deal with money launderers Simon and Schyster), touchingly concerned about snipers on the gently-sloped roof, followed by FBI coverer-in-chief Wray, who doesn’t give a shit since he has been dog paddling in the latrine so long.

Thereupon whoever the Biden thing is “gets covid”, is med-evaced from Vegas to Johns Hopkins (who brought us Event 201 with Bill Gates), spends a few days in the basement, decides to quit the presidential race, on X of all places, shows up in DC several days later bounding down the Air Force One stairs on miraculously-cured knees, six inches taller,^⁠4 and nearly cogent.

Horatio: My lord, I came to see your father’s funeral.

Hamlet: I pray thee, do not mock me, fellow student. I think it was to see my mother’s wedding.

Horatio: Indeed my lord, it followed hard upon.

Hamlet: Thrift, Thrift Horatio! The funeral baked meats

Did coldly furnish forth the marriage tables.

Would I had met my dearest foe in heaven

Ere I had ever seen that day, Horatio.

—Edward DeVere, Hamlet I.2

“Hard upon” came the marriage of Kamala Harris (whose vast avuncular popularity had 94% of her staff quitting and setting olympic track records running from her abuse), into the welcoming tentacles of the DNC, all animosity evaporated like her “border czar” status.

Also hard upon the bullet’s red glare came the catasterism of JD Vance, who is either the Maga’s Maga, converted from nadaTrump to full articulator of his policies; or a crypto-tool of the British Pilgrim Society complete with Clinton-tied Indian wife handler.^⁠5 Did I mention they met at Yale?

And then the Paris olympic opening ceremony.^⁠6

And then Netanyahu’s seal clapping exercise before his US congressional puppets, just as the latest bombing demands the latest retaliation, because lex talionis is the law of yahweh, which the Christos purportedly came to change, which Christian Zionists (i.e. Christians in name who are really Jewish apocalyptics) conveniently forget.^⁠7

And then . . . Quite a lot for two weeks, eh?

One of the books that understands this dynamic really well is Philip K. Dick’s The Simulacra (1964). The US president is an android, the first lady is the handler/actress. Dick is the master of pulling the rug out from the shifting narratives we keep investing in as real. And his books are fun.

On another level of relevant phrenic hilarity is Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49 (1966), a masterpiece of paranoia, but paranoia in it’s original sense of seeing everything connected to everything else. The protagonista, Oedipa Mass, is party to a vast conspiracy involving everything from military tech companies, 19^th century science, to a secret alternative postal system. She hovers between a paranoia where the meaning of all these connections and coincidences quiver just out of reach, and an “anti-paranoia” where nothing connects to anything.

Either way, they’ll call it paranoia. They. Either you have stumbled indeed, without the aid of LSD or other indole alkaloids, onto a secret richness and concealed density of dream; onto a network by which X number of Americans are truly communicating whilst reserving their lies, recitation of routine, arid betrayals of spiritual poverty, for the official government delivery system; maybe even onto a real alternative to the exitlessness, to the absence of surprise to life, that harrows the head of every American you know, and you too, sweetie. Or you are hallucinating it. Or a plot has been mounted against you, so expensive and and elaborate, involving things like forging stamps and ancient books, constant surveillance of your movements, planting post horn images all over San Francisco, bribing of librarians, hiring of professional actors . . . So labyrinthine that it must have meaning beyond just a practical joke. Or you are fantasying some such plot, in which case you are a nut Oedipa, out of your skull.

(pages 170-171)

This where we are, where they want us, crossroads of meaning and emptiness, either emotional flambée or demoralized incapacity, fitting and starting on any path but one towards the within. As Kṛṣṇa tells a paralyzed Arjuna between the two forces in the Bhagavad Gītā: “But of what use is this detailed knowledge to you, Arjuna? I keep continually pervading this world.”

Death and Money make their point once more

In the shape of Philosophical assassins

Mark and Danny take the bus uptown

Deadly angels for reality and passion

Have the courage of the here and now

Don’t take nothing from these 1/2-baked buddhas

When you think you got it paid in full

You got nothing—you got nothing at all

—Shreikback, Gunning for the Buddha (1986)^⁠8

There is no meaning, no truth in the narratives presented to us. Just contradictions and smelly herrings. Leave the truth to Tucker Carlson and his acolytes who think they can acquire it like internet followers. Then recalling the Greek word for truth is aletheia, remembrance, to not forget what you already have within. So when they mock us with their sardonic grin, laugh at their childish antics, or at least practice dispassion. Even if the ritual becomes painful or deadly. If we have to, like Arjuna, we must pick up our bow to defeat not only our enemies, but also our friends and relatives.

A screaming always comes across the sky . . .

When presented with something like this:

Remember this:

(Of course Monty Python messes with us in the DaVince painted The Last Supper.)

When they force this upon you:

Remember this:

When they do this:

Watch this:

And if you ever need a tutorial on the difference between monarchy and communism, look no further:

¹ Opening two paragraphs. Certainly one of the three greatest 20th century novels.

²

The Antifa Blood Trail To Butler, PA

³ Cheatle, Crooks, and Yearick? “Alas, poor Yorrick, I knew him Horatio. A man of infinite jest,” says Hamlet holding the skull. The joke is on us.

⁴

How Many Joe Bidens Are There?!

⁵

The Case Made For Usha Vance As Handler And Pilgrims Society Operator: Aim4Truth Exposé

⁶ Good take on this, and pujtting suiccinctly what I am tring to get to here, from Jason Breshears of Archaix:

⁷ Matthew 5:38: You have heard it was said, “Eye for an eye, and tooth for a tooth.” But I tell you, do not resist an evil person.” The I Ching: Do not fight evil with evil, but make energetic progress in the Good.”

⁸