Against the Day, Chapter Fifteen: Worst Song Played on Ugliest Guitar!

Should I have given such a significant chapter a jokey reference for a title? Perhaps not. But what's done is done, and we just have to learn to live with it. It's a very long chapter with a lot in it; I'm kind of dreading how long it's going to take me to write this entry. But write it I must! The end is in sight!

Reef, Yashmeen, and Cyprian. That's who we're talking about. As we open the chapter, they've found "the Anarchist spa of Yz-les-Bains" in France somewhere. I kind of assumed that was a real place--I mean, not the "anarchist" spa part, but that there would be a real town called Yz-les-Bains--but no; it's purely an invention. Difficult to tell with Pynchon sometimes. Or all the time. It's one of those little mini-communities within larger, potentially hostile states that he loves so much. Something's happening here, but what it is ain't exactly clear: "...these solemn young folks carried with them an austerity, a penultimacy before some unstated future, a Single Idea, whose power everything else ran off of. Here it was not silver or gold but something else. Reef could not quite see what it was" (931).

Who else is here? Ol' Ratty McHugh, Cyprian's pal. As mentioned last time he appeared, he's married now, but like RYC, he's now part of a trio with his wife Jenny and a woman named Sophrosyne. This is how it goes with anarchists! Or so it seems. Though I must say, one thing you notice is that you study these sorts of radical, transgressive queer theorists, and then you realize that all your teachers have extremely conventional, bourgeois personal lives. Not that there's anything wrong with that, but it is kind of funny. No one has that problem here, though; it seems like something that could profitably be explored, if you're looking for something to do.

So they're anarchists. What does that mean? Well, no archies, obviously.

"We work for one another, I suppose. No ranks, no titles, chain of command...no structure, really."

"How do you plan things?" Yashmeen was curious to know, "assign duties? Coördinate your efforts, that sort of thing.

"By knowing what has to be done. Which is usually obvious common sense." (933)

You know, as highly sympathetic as I am to anarchism, that last seems reeeeeeally hand-wavey. I know enough about anarchism to know that even if you don't have leaders, you still have structure, not this magical-thinking "yeah, everyone just knows what to do." Uh huh. Does that seem to YOU to accord with human nature?

What seems like a more valid analysis is criticism

of these ancient all-male structures. Blighted the hopes of Anarchists for years, I can tell you--as long as women were not welcome, it never had a chance. In some communities, often quite famous examples, what appeared to be unguided and perfect consensus, some miracle of social telepathy, was in fact the result of a single male authority behind the scenes giving out orders, and a membership willing to comply--all agreeing to work in silence and invisibility to preserve their Anarchist fiction. Only after the passage of years, the death of leader, would the truth come out.

I...don't know enough about anarchism to evaluate if this is a real thing that happened or not, but it certainly seems plausible. I'm not wholly sure that the presence or absence of women is really going to make the difference, however. And when Sophrosyne suggests that women can "keep men busy where they'll do the most good, even if men don't know half the time where that is" (934)--well, that seems to be relying awfully heavily on gender stereotypes that may have some validity due to the way societies are socially constructed, but if we're anarchists, aren't we trying to get past that? I feel, sometimes, that Pynchon isn't quite adequately able to conceptualize these things, writing as he is within the society that all of us here are stuck with. That's a problem with utopian thinking in general: if you're plunging into a completely different world, by definition it's going to be a world that you can't really imagine. Hmm. Worth thinking about.

Reef, Cyprian, and Ratty are playing Anarchists' Golf, which features holes all over the place, no fixed sequences, people digging new holes--sounds a bit like Calvinball. Ratty is concerned because they've found a map, purportedly of the Belgian Congo but really, supposedly, in code, and of the Balkans, which apparently is where everything important in the world happens: "If the Earth were alive, with a planet-shaped consciousness, then the 'Balkan Peninsula might easily map on to whatever in this consciousness most darkly wishes for its own destruction." (939)

They have a meeting with Coombs De Bottle, who was the T.W.I.T. explosives expert earlier in the book So this map: it's very alarming. Do you remember that Interdikt from way back when? It was this mad-scientist plan from Renfrew to create this huge, hundreds-of-miles-long border in the Balkans that, when set off, would release poison gas.

This is clearly in part a metaphor for the approaching war, which the anarchists extremely don't want: you might think that they wouldn't care what these governments that they disdain try to do, but no, Ratty points out, accurately, that this would entail a crackdown on anarchism, and they would lose whatever they've painstakingly gained. This part kind of struck home: "Central governments were never designed for peace. Their structure is line and staff, the same as an army. The national idea depends on war" (938). Remember the psychopathic Michael Ledeen's assertion that "every ten years or so, the United States needs to pick up some small crappy little country and throw it against the wall, just to show the world we mean business?" Seems relevant.

So this sort of comes out of nowhere: Bottle plays a piano note: "Once it was actually a forbidden noise you know. You'd get your knuckles rapped for playing it. Worse than that, if it happened to be during the Middle Ages." This is from the Lydian Mode, and for some reason, it's extremely disliked in the Balkans: "whenever we play it for anyone out there, even whistle it, it seems they either run away screaming of assault us physically. What could they be hearing, that's so acceptable?." So the plan is to send RYC into the Balkans to find the answer, and also to "look into some rumors recently of a neo-Pythagorean cult who regard the Lydian with particular horror" (940). They're to go with a group of musicologists collecting local folk songs. And while they're there, they can also see about this Interdikt, I guess, although that remains implicit.

So they're going to go, but first, this line from Jenny:

This is our own age of exploration...into that unmapped country waiting beyond the frontiers and seas of Time. We make our journeys out there in the low light of the future, and return to the bourgeois day and its mass delusion of safety, to report on what we've seen. What are any of these 'utopian dreams' of ours but defective forms of time travel? (942)

So they set off. We get more stuff about the RYC relationship, which sort of makes its themes more apparent: the whole thing with performative sexuality, where you are what you are because of a series of acts rather than it just being an endless, stable thing--I mean, it may SEEM stable, but that is always subject to change. And THAT is utopian. The world doesn't have to be the way it seems to be. This isn't just my interpretation! I mean, it is, obviously. That's exactly what it is. But I am positive that Pynchon was thinking along the same lines! This part really lays it out:

For a while now, anytime he and Yash happened to be fucking face-to-face, she would manage to reach around and get a finger, hell, maybe even two sometimes, up in there, and he guessed it wasn't always that bad. And to be honest he did wonder now and then how it might be if Cyprian fucked him for a change. Sure. Not that it had to happen, but then again . . . it was shooting pool, he supposed, you had the straight shots, and cuts and English that went with that, but around these two you also had to expect caroms, and massés, and surprise balls out the corner of your eye coming back at you to collide at unforeseen angles, off of cushions sometimes you hadn't even thought about, heading for pockets you'd never've called... (943)

So there it is. The pool metaphor--for all its double entendres about stick and balls--seems to make it clear.

Anyway, we learn that, yes indeed, "the main task for Reef, Cyprian, and Yashmeen right now was locating the Interdikt line, and disabling it" (946). Easy as pie! Cyprian runs into Gabrovo Slim, the Bulgarian whom he helped the last time he was out Balkans-way. He invites them to stay with his family, so they hang out there for awhile, saying goodbye to the musicologists. Yashmeen is getting ready to give birth; meanwhile, Cyprian finds that "men avoided him. Cyprian wondered if, in a trance he could no longer remember, he had not offended someone here, perhaps mortally" (949). I really just mention that because it's so like Lew Basnight's situation--although I really don't know what these two could have in common.

Her daughter is named Ljubica. Reef may be the biological father, but obviously there's a sense in which Cyprian is co-father. "I knew her once--previously--perhaps in that other life it was she who took care of me--and now here is the balance being restored--" (950). Maybe!

They meet some motorcyclists. Do you remember the late Derrick Theign's plan to create an elite motorcycling reconnaissance team called R.U.S.H.? Well, that's this, but they're not enemies. The leader is a guy Cyprian knows named Mihály Vámos. He takes Reef and Cyprian to see the mysterious Interdikt. There's a large structure where they find canisters of phosgene being stored--phosgene gas, of course, was used as a weapon in World War I. God the horrors we humans inflict on one another. This part kind of blew my mind; it's the most important thing I've learned on rereading the book, I think. Vámos explains how you can get phosgene just by taking chlorine and carbon dioxide: "expose them together to light and you get phosgene." Yes! "Born of light," Cyprian remarks. Obviously, phosgene is an actual thing, but it's also a metaphor. Or maybe the light is a metaphor. Hard to say. "It seems this isn't a gas weapon, after all...'Phosgene' is really code for light. We learned it is light here which is really the destructive agent." How so? "From military experience with searchlights, it was widely known how effectively light at that candle-power could produce helplessness and fear. The next step was to find a way to project it as a stream of destructive energy." Of course, there are also undertones here of atomic weaponry, but even without that--MY GOD! You can see it, right? Searchlights looking for hidden soldiers or prisoners or whatnot--it's a weapon, even if not quite in the way we're thinking of. "Fear in lethal form...And if all these units, all along this line, went off at once--"

A great cascade of blindness and terror ripping straight across the heart of the Balkan Peninsula. Like nothing that has ever happened. Photometry is still too primitive for anyone to say how much light would be deployed, or how intense--somewhere far up in the millions of candles per square inch, but these are only guesses--expressions of military panic, really" (953).

That's going to be the War. World War I is it. This light. Seriously, this is...something else. What to DO about it? Well...nothing, apparently? There are definitely things about characters and motivations that I have trouble with here. It's undeniable. What to tell Yashmeen? "That we couldn't find it. We'll pretend to keep looking for a while, but in the wrong directions. We must keep her and the baby well away from this" (954). And, well...that's about that with that. I guess.

Right. So we know exactly where they are, because they pass through this arch in Bulgaria called the Halkata. Cyprian claims that if you go through it with someone else you'll be in love forever, but if you go by yourself, well, "anyone who passes it alone, according to my informants here, turns into the opposite sex. I'm not sure where that would leave me, Yashmeen. Perhaps I don't need the confusion" (955). Well, perhaps not, but this whole idea of an opposite sex suggests a binary that this whole relationship doesn't really subscribe to--which is sort of odd when you think about it, given the novel's whole duality fixation. Hmm. Well.

They come to a convent of a sect which combines Christian and pre-Christian elements, "going back, it was claimed, to the Thracian demigod Orpheus, and his dismemberment not far from here, on the banks of the Hebrus River" (956). Relevant: "The Manichean aspect had grown ever stronger--the obligation of those who took refuge here to be haunted by the unyielding doubleness of everything" (957). You may recall previous mention of Manicheans as light-worshippers who would commit any crime in the name of light. But I don't think these guys are like that. Cyprian makes a pivotal decision: "When you leave here, I shan't be coming with you" (957). Why? Well, "no more of these tiresome gender questions," for one, though it clearly goes deeper than that. Reef and Yashmeen are heartbroken, but their efforts to get him to change his mind are for naught, even though this is a dangerous place to be given the war that's just about to break out.

Cyprian has to take a vow of silence before he is initiated. Before, he is allowed to ask one question. He asks: "what is it that is born of light?" (959). The Abbot, Father Ponko, tells him:

In the fourteenth century, our great enemies were the Hesychasts, contemplatives who might as well have been Japanese Buddhists--they sat in their cells literally gazing at their navels, waiting to be enfolded int a glorious light they believed was the same light Peter, James, and John had witnessed at the Transfiguration of Christ on Mount Tabor. Perhaps they asked themselves forms of your question as well, a sort of koan. What is it that was born of that light? Oddly, if one reads the Gospel accounts, the emphasis in all three is not on an excess of light but a deficiency--the Transfiguration occurred at best under a peculiar sort of half-light. "There came a cloud and overshadowed them," as Luke puts it. Those omphalopsychoi may have been a holy light, but its link with the Transfiguration is doubtful.

...I feel like you didn't quite answer the question, Ponko. Obviously this is related to the book's theme of light, but we are far from what any human would ever actually say to another human. Not that there's anything wrong with that, but I feel like this part of the book is a kind of oblique, almost hermetic prose-poetry. It is VERY difficult to figure the relevance of any of this stuff. This goes on for a while, but I don't know that I can say much about it--suffice it to say that ultimately, Reef and Yashmeen leave and Cyprian stays. "And Cyprian was taken behind a great echoless door" (962) is how he goes out, somewhat devastatingly.

Reef and Yashmeen are indeed devastated, but the problem is, they're also entering what is quickly becoming a war zone that they need to make their way through if they're ever to reach America. This goes on for quite a while, but I don't think it needs to be covered in as much detail as the earlier parts of the chapter--it's mostly a travelogue; not as eventful. So, the highlights.

The reach a deserted farm, only there's a big ol' sheepdog there, who seems potentially unfriendly, but really pals it up with Ljubica:

It would be many years before he learned that this dog's name was Ksenija, and that she was the intimate companion of Pugnax, whose human associates the Chums of Chance had been invisibly but attentively keeping an eye on the progress of Reef's family exfiltration from the Balkan Peninsula. Her task at this juncture was to steer everyone to safety without appearing to.

So there you go. They've got some guardian angels. I would love know to how Reef learned this fact years later. I'd also be curious to know why exactly the Chums would be so focused on these people in particular, apart from the fact that they both appear in the same novel.

They meet some hostile Albanians, and shit appears to be on the verge of getting too real, but then one of them turns out to be none other than Ramiz, the guy Reef saved from the Tatzelwurm in the Alps way back when. There's a little community:

As it turned out, this village was inhabited by refugees who had found it possible no longer to remain each a prisoner in his own home, and decided that setting up a village-size compound all together would be the best way to have a little more room to move around in while still honoring the Kanun of Lekë Dkagjin. A community founded on vengeance suspended.

Again with the smaller communities existing within larger non-congenial societies.

Finally, they reach safety in the town of Corfu. And who should they meet here? None other than Auberon Halfcourt, Yashmeen's pa, who had received a postcard that she'd sent and wandered over to this area. It's a happy meeting. And GOOD GOLLY, that's not all! It turns out that Auberon has a girlfriend now, Kit's old flame Umeki Tsurigane. The year before in Constantinople, she ran into Kit again, who was working as a bartender. It looked like they might rekindle things, but then Auberon showed up and that was that. And finally, Auberon explains, "for me, Shambhala, you see, turned out to be not a goal but an absence. Not the discovery of a place but the act of leaving the futureless place where I was." Umeki, here, presumably representing a potentially procreative future. Nice.

Yup, four and a half single-spaced pages; definitely the most I've written on any chapter here or likely will. PHEW.