The Light Over the Ranges, Chapter Six: Merle's Travels!

This is the longest chapter yet, and also probably the richest and most mysterious, and as such, this is also the longest blog entry yet. I don't know why I broke chapter two into two parts if I'm just dealing with this whole thing in one go, but here we are. The focus now is on good ol' Merle Rideout. It's a little hard to piece together at first when this is all taking place, but it makes sense when you realize that he's gradually moving west. He starts out in Connecticut, where he's apparently some sort of tinker (it's sort of hard to tell), and gradually moves, first to Cleveland, then Chicago where he meets the Chums, and thence to Colorado where he meets Webb Traverse. His initial impetus to go to beautiful Cleveland is that there's a lot of talk about luminiferous Aether, which supposedly serves as a conductor for light, and can alter its speed and trajectory. Your ears have to perk up when you hear talk of light: here we have this intangible thing, though Merle isn't so sure about the point of all this: "being on the more practical side of things, he couldn't see much use for it. Exists, doesn't exist, what's it got to do with the price of turnips basically" (58). Maybe this is pushing things, but we can perhaps think of "the price of turnips" as capitalism more generally, and the light as presenting, maybe, a sort of potential alternative--but this is all very allusive. It's all maybes that never resolve themselves, and that's how I like it.

Anyway, it's off to Cleveland to learn about this Michelson-Morley Experiment--a real thing--that's meant to demonstrate what if any effect this Aether has. At the same time that this is going on, there's an outlaw gallivanting around whom everyone's talking about, Blinky Morgan, and I know that name sounds like a Pynchonian invention, but he too was a real guy, who was eventually caught and executed. We'll see a few examples of this throughout the book, things that seem made-up but aren't.

Everybody in Cleveland is crazy about Aether and light; it's all they're talking about! "Some claimed that light had a consciousness and personality and could even be chatted with" (59), of which we'll see evidence before the chapter is out. Merle too seems to be going a bit nuts here; "somehow [he] got the idea in his head that the Michelson-Morley experiment and the Blinky Morgan manhunt were connected. That if Blinky were ever caught, there would also turn out to be no Aether" (62), and indeed that "Professor Edward Morley and Charles 'Blinky' Morgan were one and the same person" (63). More doubling, and more intriguing connections between criminal behavior, which we can loosely associate with anarchism, and light. There's something in the air: something that might indicate a world other than this one, and connections like these are obscure yet vital.

Merle has a friend, Roswell Bounce, who is a photographer and who ends up learning the trade from him. He's fascinated by the way images can just appear like that, with the aid of silver and various other minerals. Here's light connected to metals which are also connected to mining and the exploitation and violence associated with it; remember that Webb is going to appear at the end of this chapter. It's about this time that he meets Erlys Mills Snidell, with whom he has a daughter, Dahlia, usually known as Dally. Alas, she soon leaves him for Luca Zomboni, this Italian stage magician, abandoning her daughter into the bargain. I know this seems like it could be just the sort of misogynistic trope of the woman cheating on our protagonist to change his life, who cares about her, but that's not the case; we'll see more Erlys and the Zombonis later, and she's (if I recall aright) a sympathetic character.

Anyway, he waits around for some news of her, but when none is forthcoming, it's off to Chicago, where we first encountered him. From there, they travel west (the Sun sets in the west, as we often hear: is he traveling, literally, against the day?), with some gorgeous descriptions of the scenery and people that I'm not going to get into because otherwise this entry will go on FOREVER, and there's just SO DAMN MUCH beautiful writing, it would be impossible to get to it all. My recommendation would be to read the book if you haven't.

Merle gets a job for a while as a lightning rod salesman--this may make one recall Melville's short story "The Lighting Rod Man;" the guy there isn't much like Merle, but the sort of fascination and terror with the idea of lighting--and from there light in general--may have resonances. That's where he meets Skip, a sentient piece of ball lightning who travels with them for a while. This may make you recall the tale of Byron the Bulb--the seemingly immortal sentient lightbulb in Gravity's Rainbow--but they're really serving different purposes; if I recall, Byron was there to demonstrate the essentially random nature of devices (and people?); some die quickly, and some seemingly go on forever, with no one really able to tell the difference. Skip, on the other hand...well, it's not clear. On the one hand, it's clearly just a bit of Pynchonian whimsy (something we should never underestimate); on the other...well, there are certainly heady metaphors for life and death; when he leaves the Rideouts--called back, by could say, the ball lightning collective--they ask if he'll ever return, but "you get sort of gathered back into it all, 's how it works, so it wouldn't be me anymore, really" (74). Sort of transcending? I don't know, but it's definitely part of the light metaphor.

Dally's growing up, meanwhile: "one day they were in the San Juans and Dally came walking in through some doorway or other and Merle looked up and saw this transformed young women and knew it was only a matter of time before she was out the chute and making life complicated for every rodeo clown who crossed her path" (75). I just wanted to quote that, really, because I like it, but the point is, it must be the early twentieth century by now. He happens upon a magazine with a pictorial about the Zomboni family, with Erlys and a bunch of half-siblings that Dally never knew she had. She will be off in that direction soon enough, but first: Webb Traverse, patriarch of the Webb family whose peregrinations take up a large part of this book.

Merle is doing photography work, and Webb drops in, the smells making him think of explosives. Again, we have a clear connection: light to metal to nitro to anarchism. It's spelled out pretty clearly:

You mean to say gold, silver, these shinin and wonderful metals, basis of all the world's economies, you go in a laboratory, fool with 'em a little, and you get a high explosive that all you got to do's sneeze at the wrong time and it's adios, muchachos? (77-78).

Their conversation gets cryptic, talking about a Philosopher's Stone and its opposite, an "anti-stone." "It has another name, but we'd just get into trouble sayin it out loud" (78). I don't think the question of this "other name" has a straightforward answer, but we might think of an atomic bomb: light as a constructive vs destructive force.

We get into some more explicit politics, as they connect to these chemical ideas: "if you look at the history," Webb observes, "modern chemistry only starts coming in to replace alchemy around teh same time capitalism really gets going," (79), to which Webb suggests that

Maybe capitalism decided it didn't need the old magic anymore. . . . Why bother? Had their own magic, doin just fine, thanks, instead of turning lead into gold, they could take poor people's sweat an turn it into greenbacks, and save that lead for enforcement purposes." (ibid).

Somehow, I feel like this relates to the idea--as seen in John Crowley's Aegypt Cycle--that things were a certain way at one point and then they change and then they had always been what they'd become. That seems like an idea that fits well into this text.

So Merle becomes the new amalgamator at Little Hellkite, and Merle goes back to being an anarchist. Much more of the Traverses next chapter, but I can't end here without quoting from the end of this one: "Lately Merle had been visited by a strange feeling that 'photography' and 'alchemy' were just two ways of getting at the same thing--redeeming light from the inertia of precious metals" (80). I think I've probably belabored these things enough for now, but you can surely see how that fits in thematically. I've gotta tell you, so far I am absolutely blown away (ha ha) by this novel: I'm definitely getting more out of it than I was the first time.