DB Roy wrote:Attempts by Hamilton and his farm hands to remove or cut the rope were futile and the craft took off with the poor heifer in tow dangling by the neck. Some time later, Hamilton said, the animal was found in a field some miles away terribly mutilated. Many UFO-writers reprinted Hamilton’s account word-for-word apparently unaware that Hamilton later admitted the story was a hoax. He belonged to a group who were engaged in betting who could tell the tallest tale and make others believe it (kind of a 19th century “Impractical Jokers”).

Credulity is the side of paranoia that tempts the rest of us to abuse them. This temptation should be resisted. It is similar to pouring out a nice Scotch and soda for an alcoholic.

DB Roy wrote:Hat Man is a purely supernatural phenomenon which centers people often waking up to see a shadowy figure in a broad-brimmed or Stetson-like hat. He never speaks but stares. My own brother swears he saw such a figure once as a boy just after waking up in the middle of the night. A shadowy man was over by the desk in the room I shared with by brother. He had his back to my brother. My brother could see his outline and that he wore a brimmed hat. I was in my bed sleeping soundly. My brother watched him a while. He seemed to be searching through the desk. What he could possibly be looking for in a child’s desk is anybody’s guess. Suddenly, the man stiffened and stood up straight. My brother knew the man realized he was being watched and by whom. My brother closed his eyes. The room was silent but he knew if he opened his eyes, the man’s face would be close to his and so he dare not. He lay unmoving for a long time too frightened to open his eyes. Eventually, he fell asleep. In the morning, he told me about the man he had seen but I, of course, didn’t believe him. To this day, he swears he saw the man.

This sounds to me be nothing more than sleep paralysis where a person wakes up and feels a menacing presence in the room. This is part of what is known as hypnopompic sleep where dream images take on hallucinogenic properties as we transition to full wakefulness.

I experienced this myself when I once woke up to hear a woman upstairs screaming in what must have been sheer horror or excruciating pain. The only reason I didn’t jump up and run upstairs to see who was up there screaming so horrendously was that my cat, who had very sharp ears, was sleeping peacefully on my chest. There was no way he could have or would have slept through that. As I lay there, the scream started to fade and took on a very reverberant quality as it did so—as though she were screaming inside St. Peter’s Basilica. I lay there marveling at the strangeness of it.

I once drifted awake to find myself convinced that there was someone behind me standing by the bed in which I slept with my wife. I realized it was Jesus, by the beneficent aura emanating from this presence. I spent a little time trying to decide whether I should turn and look. Then, before I made up my mind, the presence was gone. The closest I have come to a paranormal experience.

DB Roy wrote:Brad Steiger compares the MIB to the trickster figures of mythology. The MIB feed into psychological fear that has haunted humankind since the earliest days of its existence—that there are those who walk among us who look human but are not human.

I was kind of thinking it would be fun to put out my own story of UFO visitation, to see if the MIB would come visit me. Or at least Will Smith. But then you suggested that a vampire might show up instead. And besides, if they can read minds they only show up when the sighting is real.

Harry Marks wrote: Credulity is the side of paranoia that tempts the rest of us to abuse them. This temptation should be resisted. It is similar to pouring out a nice Scotch and soda for an alcoholic.

Wise words, amigo.

I was kind of thinking it would be fun to put out my own story of UFO visitation, to see if the MIB would come visit me. Or at least Will Smith. But then you suggested that a vampire might show up instead. And besides, if they can read minds they only show up when the sighting is real.

Careful what you wish for, amigo.

She stayed with buses after that, getting off only now and then to walk so she’d keep awake. What fragments of dreams came had to do with the post horn. Later, possibly, she would have trouble sorting the night into real and dreamed.

At some indefinite passage in night’s sonorous score, it also came to her that she would be safe, that something, perhaps only her linearly fading drunkenness, would protect her. The city was hers, as, made up and sleeked so with the customary words and images (cosmopolitan, culture, cable cars) it had not been before: she had safe-passage tonight to its far blood’s branchings, be they capillaries too small for more than peering into, or vessels mashed together in shameless municipal hickeys, out on the skin for all but tourists to see. Nothing of the night’s could touch her; nothing did. The repetition of symbols was to be enough, without trauma as well perhaps to attenuate it or even jar it altogether loose from her memory. She was meant to remember. She faced that possibility as she might the toy street from a high balcony, roller-coaster ride, feeding-time among the beasts in a zoo any death-wish that can be consummated by some minimum gesture. She touched the edge of its voluptuous field, knowing it would be lovely beyond dreams simply to submit to it; that not gravity’s pull, laws of ballistics, feral ravening, promised more delight. She tested it, shivering: I am meant to remember. Each clue that comes is supposed to have its own clarity, its fine chances for permanence. But then she wondered if the gemlike “clues” were only some kind of compensation. To make up for her having lost the direct, epileptic Word, the cry that might abolish the night.


So, as Oedipa wanders through the night, she is, in a manner of speaking, sleepwalking. She is journeying through a night-world where reality and fantasy are intermixed. She contemplates suicide--the blessed release from all the world's troubles and her own. But she cannot go until she remembers what she is supposed to remember. In this sense, we are all like Oedipa--we are born, thrust into the world and then we must make our way through it and pick up clues as to what it all means and fit them together, draw our own constellations. We can become so perplexed that we throw the pieces about that take our brody but, like the IA founder, maybe we should stick around. Have we forgotten more than we ever learned? Everything means something. But what? Oedipa knows that until she finds out, she is already, to an extent, dead and hence suicide will be no way out.

In Freemasonry, they have a ritual of the Third Degree concerning a master builder named Hiram Abiff who is building Solomon's Temple. One day, as he leaving work for the day, he is accosted by three of his craftsmen. They demand from him the Master's Word. Hiram refuses and is accosted by each craftsman (referred to as a "ruffian"). Being struck three times, Hiram dies. The ruffians then bury Hiram's body by an acacia tree. When they are later caught and reveal the location of the body, Solomon goes there and disinters the body. He grip's Hiram's dead hand in the Lion's Paw grip and pulls him from the grave and standing ankle to ankle, knee to knee, hand to back and mouth to ear, Solomon whispers the Master's Word to Solomon and he is resurrected (the Word is given as "Mah-Hah-Bone").

Similarly, Oedipa awaits rebirth by having the Word revealed to her so that she will be reborn in the clear light of revelation. As Pynchon wrote earlier: "as if a plunge toward dawn indefinite black hours long would indeed be necessary before The Tristero could be revealed in its terrible nakedness." Oedipa must ride it out.

In Golden Gate Park she came on a circle of children in their nightclothes, who told her they were dreaming the gathering. But that the dream was really no different from being awake, because in the mornings when they got up they felt tired, as if they’d been up most of the night. When their mothers thought they were out playing they were really curled in cupboards of neighbors’ houses, in platforms up in trees, in secretly-hollowed nests inside hedges, sleeping, making up for these hours. The night was empty of all terror for them, they had inside their circle an imaginary fire, and needed nothing but their own unpenetrated sense of community. They knew about the post horn, but nothing of the chalked game Oedipa had seen on the sidewalk. You used only one image and it was a jump-rope game, a little girl explained: you stepped alternately in the loop, the bell, and the mute, while your girlfriend sang:

Tristoe, Tristoe, one, two, three, Turning taxi from across the sea ...

“Thurn and Taxis, you mean?” They’d never heard it that way. Went on warming their hands at an invisible fire. Oedipa, to retaliate, stopped believing in them.

In Oedipa's night world, reality and illusion are intertwined. She meets a group of little girls who are themselves sleepwalking within her own sleepwalk. They may represent those who adhere to religion. They have a circle with an imaginary fire in the center. Circle is the root of the word "church." Circle is related to the sorceress Circe, the daughter of Helios. Her name is pronounced "kir-kee" which is the same word as our "Church." A church is a group of people united into an impenetrable sense of community. Their father is the sun and they encircle him and hence they are the zodiac. But, as Pynchon points out, the fire is imaginary. They worship but are asleep, unconscious. They do not fear the night because Circe had the ability to turn anyone who threatened her into a wild animal and, indeed, the word "zodiac" means "circle of animals." The Christian Church is essentially feminine but has been usurped by men (again, we are confronted with this image of a woman caught up in a man's world). Women have forgotten their role, that they are the keepers of the secret word and, when, Oedipa reveals to them the true meaning of their mindlessly recited rhyme, they simply shrug uncomprehending and go on with their useless worshiping. They have the symbol--the muted post horn--but do not understand nor make any attempt to. Angered, Oedipa, in her night world, stops believing in them. They may not be real and so Oedipa banishes them.

In an all-night Mexican greasy spoon off 24th, she found a piece of her past, in the form of one Jesus Arrabal, who was sitting in a corner under the TV set, idly stirring his bowl of opaque soup with the foot of a chicken. “Hey,” he greeted Oedipa, “you were the lady in Mazatlan.” He beckoned her to sit.

“You remember everything,” Oedipa said, “Jesus; even tourists. How is your CIA?” Standing not for the agency you think, but for a clandestine Mexican outfit known as the Conjuration de los Insurgentes Anarquistas, traceable back to the time of the Flores Magón brothers and later briefly allied with Zapata.

“You see. In exile,” waving his arm around at the place. He was part-owner here with a yucateco who still believed in the Revolution. Their Revolution.


Still in her role as the Queen of the Night, Oedipa runs into an old acquaintance she had once met in Mazatlan region of Mexico while vacationing there with Pierce. Jesus Arrabal, an anarchist revolutionary in exile in the United States. Oedipa asks Jesus about his organization--Conjuration de los Insurgentes Anarquistas. Pynchon tells us it was in existence at the time of the Flores Magón brothers. These brothers--all law students--ere Ricardo, Jesus and Enrique of Oaxaca. The brothers, particularly Ricardo, were the prime architects of the Mexican Revolution which ran roughly from 1910 to 1920. In 1900, Jesus and Ricardo founded the anarchist publication, El Regeneración. Ricardo had done stints in prison for publicly criticizing the president, Porfirio Díaz. The Mexican courts banned Ricardo's writings and he fled for his life to the United States. In 1904, Ricardo led the PLM (the Mexican Liberal Party) from afar. When PLM uprisings were put down the Mexican government, its leaders fled to the United States to join Ricardo. The PLM itself also came to the U.S. as well and were headquartered in St. Louis. They were often termed the Magonistas.

By 1907, several leaders of the Magonistas, including Ricardo, were arrested and jailed. He was sentenced to prison for 18 months for violating American-Mexican neutrality when the Magonistas attempted to seize control of the copper mines in Cananea in Arizona about 30 miles from the border. The plan was to kill all Americans involved in the exploitation of Mexico and its resources. In 1910, the Mexican Revolution began and El Regeneración started being published out of Los Angeles. Diaz fell in 1911 but new leaders were stepping up whom the Magonistas also opposed and so the Revolution raged on. By 1917, Ricardo Flores Magón was arrested under Wilson's administration via the Palmer Raids which targeted any and all social activists, antiwar protesters and leftists in the United States and sentenced to Leavenworth Penitentiary in Kansas. The Revolution ended some three years later but Ricardo was still imprisoned and died there in 1922.

The Magonistas have since become heroes of sorts to the Mexican people and government demanded the return of Ricardo's remains to Mexico. The U.S. refused and buried him in Los Angeles. In, 1945, however, the U.S. agreed to send his remains to Mexico where they were and still are interred in the Rotunda of Illustrious Persons, a large cemetery in Mexico City.

Interesting that Jesus Arrabal's CIA seems to be occult-based--the Conjuration of Anarchist Insurgents. To conjure is to invoke by incantation or magical spell. But the Latin root, coniurare, also means "to swear together" or to conspire. So we once again find ourselves dealing with conspiracies. Perhaps Arrabal's CIA is a type of Mexican Trystero. But then Trystero is also a Spanish word and that ties in with Zorro as a black-dressed, masked rider opposing the government. Perhaps it is possible that the Trystero rode with Arrabal's CIA and hence the occult aspect of the group.

Arrabal was now running his restaurant in the U.S. in partnership with a Yucateco. A Yucateco is a native of the Yucatan, a Mayan. Their language is also called Yucateco. Oaxaca is not far from the Yucatan peninsula. The indigenous Indians of Oaxaca are called Zapotec. The Flores Magón brothers were, in fact, Zapotec Indians (their father was a full-blood and their mother was half). Mazatlán is further north.
“And you. Are you still with that gringo who spent too much money on you? The oligarchist, the miracle?” “He died.”

“Ah, pobrecito.” They had met Jesus Arrabal on the beach, where he had previously announced an anti-government rally. Nobody had showed up. So he fell to talking to Inverarity, the enemy he must, to be true to his faith, learn. Pierce, because of his neutral manners when in the presence of ill-will, had nothing to tell Arrabal; he played the rich, obnoxious gringo so perfectly that Oedipa had seen gooseflesh come up along the anarchist’s forearms, due to no Pacific sea-breeze. Soon as Pierce went off to sport in the surf, Arrabal asked her if he was real, or a spy, or making fun of him. Oedipa didn’t understand.

“You know what a miracle is. Not what Bakunin said. But another world’s intrusion into this one. Most of the time we coexist peacefully, but when we do touch there’s cataclysm. Like the church we hate, anarchists also believe in another world. Where revolutions break out spontaneous and leaderless, and the soul’s talent for consensus allows the masses to work together without effort, automatic as the body itself. And yet, seña, if any of it should ever really happen that perfectly, I would also have to cry miracle. An anarchist miracle. Like your friend. He is too exactly and without flaw the thing we fight. In Mexico the privilegiado is always, to a finite percentage, redeemed one of the people. Unmiraculous. But your friend, unless he’s joking, is as terrifying to me as a Virgin appearing to an Indian.”

Arrabal refers, apparently, to the Virgin of Guadalupe which occurred near Mexico City in 1531. An Indian named Juan Diego had seen Marian apparitions on four occasions. On the fourth encounter, she had him gather flowers in his mantle to take to the bishop after Diego told her he wanted her to give him a sign that would convince others. He took the flowers before the bishop and they fell out of the mantle and left behind a miraculous impression of the Virgin on the mantle:
To Jesus, Pierce's appearance in Mazatlán was as miraculous as the Virgin's appearance to Juan Diego. Pierce represented the very thing they fought against thereby reaffirming to Jesus that there was, in fact, a chance for this other world that Arrabal refers to--this spiritual Utopia--to appear before him. Prior to meeting Pierce, Jesus took it on faith only that this world was real because everyone he had ever met who played the role of enemy of the people always had some sort of redeeming quality about them, some even became folk-heroes. This thwarted the appearance of the Utopia in the real world. It remained only spiritual, an ideal. But Pierce made it real. Pierce made it appear before Jesus who now knew it to be real.

Interestingly, the Virgin image on the mantle once bore a crown which was subsequently removed for reasons not exactly known. This represents once again the disenfranchisement of women. The Church stripped womanhood of her crown and her dignity and replaced it with an oppressive patriarchy. Were the Trystero looking to reinstate her? To sit her at the top of the world she created in the Varo painting? Or was the malignant magic in their hands? Were they using it to oppress or liberate her?

In the years intervening Oedipa had remembered Jesus because he’d seen that about Pierce and she hadn’t. As if he were, in some unsexual way, competition. Now, drinking thick lukewarm coffee from a clay pot on the back burner of the yucateco’s stove and listening to Jesus talk conspiracy, she wondered if, without the miracle of Pierce to reassure him, Jesus might not have quit his CIA eventually and gone over like everybody else to the majority priistas, and so never had to go into exile.

Were the revolutionaries, in the end, just hypocrites? Did they talk about revolution, the empowering of the masses, only to ultimately exploit them? Pynchon may think so. The name "Jesus Arrabal" signifies what? Arrabal simply means "slum." Jesus means "savior." So perhaps he is a savior from the slums. But Jesus is also the Christian Lord. "Slum Lord"?

The dead man, like Maxwell’s Demon, was the linking feature in a coincidence. Without him neither she nor Jesus would be exactly here, exactly now. It was enough, a coded warning. What, tonight, was chance? So her eyes did fall presently onto an ancient rolled copy of the anarcho-syndicalist paper Regeneración. The date was 1904 and there was no stamp next to the cancellation, only the handstruck image of the post horn.


So the Magonista newspaper is still making the rounds even though it was printed 1904 meaning it was still being printed in Mexico and before the Mexican civil war broke out. Here, we also catch a parallel with the American Civil War that played such a role in the Peter Pinguid story. The newspaper Oedipa spies is marked with the W.A.S.T.E. symbol. Was Trystero involved in both wars? Was the goal the overthrow of all governments?

“They arrive,” said Arrabal. “Have they been in the mails that long? Has my name been substituted for that of a member who’s died? Has it really taken sixty years? Is it a reprint? Idle questions, I am a footsoldier. The higher levels have their reasons.” She carried this thought back out into the night with her.

So, the newspaper is still being delivered even though the copies are old. Arrabal has no explanation for it. Clearly, though, the Trystero is keeping an eye on him indicating that he did indeed have a past association with them most likely through his occult revolutionary organization or that organization was absorbed into the Trystero. And what are their motives? Still pushing the revolution? Which one? All of them? Somewhere up there decisions have been made and they feel no obligation to inform us what those decisions are. Is the Trystero saviors of the slums or the slum lords?

Anarchist flags:

Down at the city beach, long after the pizza stands and rides had closed, she walked unmolested through a drifting, dreamy cloud of delinquents in summer-weight gang jackets with the post horn stitched on in thread that looked pure silver in what moonlight there was. They had all been smoking, snuffing or injecting something, and perhaps did not see her at all.

Riding among an exhausted busful of Negroes going on to graveyard shifts all over the city, she saw scratched on the back of a seat, shining for her in the brilliant smoky interior, the post horn with the legend DEATH. But unlike WASTE, somebody had troubled to write in, in pencil: DON’T EVER ANTAGONIZE THE HORN.

Somewhere near Fillmore she found the symbol tacked to the bulletin board of a laundromat, among other scraps of paper offering cheap ironing and baby sitters. If you know what this means, the note said, you know where to find out more. Around her the odor of chlorine bleach rose heavenward, like an incense. Machines chugged and sloshed fiercely. Except for Oedipa the place was deserted, and the fluorescent bulbs seemed to shriek whiteness, to which everything their light touched was dedicated. It was a Negro neighborhood. Was The Horn so dedicated? Would it Antagonize The Horn to ask? Who could she ask?

The muted horn symbol is a subversion of the order, held dear by those victimized by the prevailing order and perhaps someday it would by the symbol of the overthrow of that order, the establishment. But did this underclass truly understand it? Was it a genuine symbol of a promised revolution to come? Or was it simply a placebo bequeathed to them by the establishment that had enslaved them, hated them and failed them more times than they could ever count? Did it come from men like Pierce or was it an obsession in them to capture it and subvert the subverters? Oedipa, by her own admission, is a Young Republican but how are we to take that? Does she mean a stalwart conservative in a certain age group or does she mean she is only nominally conservative mainstream maturing with socio-political wisdom? Oedipa does not appear to disdain the underclass but, at the same time, does she sympathize with it? Does she see a revolution as needed or needlessly destructive or even a threat to her own position in society? She may be recognizing that she doesn't hold any position of power other than being white and mainstream but at least a certain privilege is accorded her by that fact alone. She doesn't have to get up at 4 a.m. to scrub floors or wash clothes. Her position is such that it would be others who rose at ungodly hours to scrub her floors and wash her clothes while leaving the older children at home to the tasks of getting their younger siblings out of bed and ready for school to receive a substandard education that would never take them anywhere in life but prison and an early grave.

Oedipa's sleepwalk through the city is revealing more to her than she had ever seen when she was awake. She sees that she had been walking through life sleeping, oblivious to the plights of those around here while she played princess in the tower waiting for a rich man to sweep her off her feet. She now sees people who have virtually no hope of anything like that ever happening to them. These people can scarcely afford to dream. Oedipa isn't actually sleeping, she is waking up. She receives her warning: Don't ever antagonize the horn! Don't take our one and only dream away or you will pay.

In the buses all night she listened to transistor radios playing songs in the lower stretches of the Top 200, that would never become popular, whose melodies and lyrics would perish as if they had never been sung. A Mexican girl, trying to hear one of these through snarling static from the bus’s motor, hummed along as if she would remember it always, tracing post horns and hearts with a fingernail, in the haze of her breath on the window.

The songs in the lower stretches of the Top 200 never to become popular blasting through a cheap, tiny and tinny transistor radio symbolizes the underclass, those near the bottom, who would never amount to anything, who would pass too quickly from the world as if they had never been here. People who had nothing substantial to contribute to the world because they had never been allowed to. White people ran society as if it were a country club--it existed for their enjoyment and pursuit of life, liberty and happiness and everyone else could only participate only as the help, as virtual slaves. The Mexican girl is a symbol of the underclass who hums the songs she might never forget but which the rest of society will. They are her dreams and aspirations, her chance to contribute if it ever came, which it probably wouldn't but then again...maybe. But she traces a muted post horn in the fog of her breath on the bus window. Breath is "spiritus" in Latin. Her spirit is the muted post horn and all it represents to her--it is her only hope, her chance. She lives it and breathes it.

Out at the airport Oedipa, feeling invisible, eavesdropped on a poker game whose steady loser entered each loss neat and conscientious in a little balance-book decorated inside with scrawled post horns. “I'm averaging a 99.375 percent return, fellas,” she heard him say. The others, strangers, looked at him, some blank, some annoyed. “That’s averaging it out, over 23 years,” he went on, trying a smile. “Always just that little percent on the wrong side of breaking even. Twenty-three years. I’ll never get ahead of it. Why don’t I quit?” Nobody answering.

The man symbolizes the plight of the underclass and, increasingly, even the middle class. No matter how you play the odds, society is a rigged game, the pretend American dream, where you never quite get anywhere. "Why don't I quit?" Nobody gives him an answer because the answer is a bleak one: to quit the game requires death (the most probably outcome), extraordinary luck (the least probable outcome) or revolution (the messiest and most disruptive outcome). Revolution, however, is the only meaningful solution with the most permanent results. But when it came their turn to climb into the jacuzzis of the oppressors would they be soaking in their blood surrounded by their severed heads staring blankly?

In one of the latrines was an advertisement by AC-DC, standing for Alameda County Death Cult, along with a box number and post horn. Once a month they were to choose some victim from among the innocent, the virtuous, the socially integrated and well-adjusted, using him sexually, then sacrificing him. Oedipa did not copy the number.

So with the Alameda County Death Cult is a foreshadowing the revolution where the oppressors will be overthrown and sacrificed. No matter who you are among the oppressor class, you are NOT innocent, you are NOT virtuous, you are NOT socially-integrated nor well-adjusted. You are simply guilty as charged. Recognizing her membership among that elite, Oedipa passes on their invitation.

Catching a TWA flight to Miami was an uncoordinated boy who planned to slip at night into aquariums and open negotiations with the dolphins, who would succeed man. He was kissing his mother passionately goodbye, using his tongue. “I’ll write, ma,” he kept saying. “Write by WASTE,” she said, “remember. The government will open it if you use the other. The dolphins will be mad.” “I love you, ma,” he said. “Love the dolphins,” she advised him. “Write by WASTE.”

So it went. Oedipa played the voyeur and listener. Among her other encounters were a facially-deformed welder, who cherished his ugliness; a child roaming the night who missed the death before birth as certain outcasts do the dear lulling blankness of the community; a Negro woman with an intricately-marbled scar along the baby-fat of one cheek who kept going through rituals of miscarriage each for a different reason, deliberately as others might the ritual of birth, dedicated not to continuity but to some kind of interregnum; an aging night-watchman, nibbling at a bar of Ivory Soap, who had trained his virtuoso stomach to accept also lotions, air-fresheners, fabrics, tobaccoes and waxes in a hopeless attempt to assimilate it all, all the promise, productivity, betrayal, ulcers, before it was too late; and even another voyeur, who hung outside one of the city’s still-lighted windows, searching for who knew what specific image. Decorating each alienation, each species of withdrawal, as cufflink, decal, aimless doodling, there was somehow always the post horn. She grew so to expect it that perhaps she did not see it quite as often as she later was to remember seeing it. A couple-three times would really have been enough. Or too much.

Oedipa floats among all society's misfits who, for one reason or another, are denied a place that the table. As with the "Negro woman" whose miscarriage rituals are dedicated not to continuity but interregnum. Interregnum is defined as an disruption of governmental and social order. The night-watchman who swallows all the useless products of society shows that any attempt at societal assimilation is toxic. Beneath it all, the soil from which the interregnum is growing--the muted post horn--is everywhere, never far away.

She busrode and walked on into the lightening morning, giving herself up to a fatalism rare for her. Where was the Oedipa who'd driven so bravely up here from San Narciso? That optimistic baby had come on so like the private eye in any long-ago radio drama, believing all you needed was grit, resourcefulness, exemption from hidebound cops’ rules, to solve any great mystery.

But the private eye sooner or later has to get beat up on. This night’s profusion of post horns, this malignant, deliberate replication, was their way of beating up. They knew her pressure points, and the ganglia of her optimism, and one by one, pinch by precision pinch, they were immobilizing her.

Last night, she might have wondered what undergrounds apart from the couple she knew of communicated by WASTE system. By sunrise she could legitimately ask what undergrounds didn’t. If miracles were, as Jesus Arrabal had postulated years ago on the beach at Mazatlan, intrusions into this world from another, a kiss of cosmic pool balls, then so must be each of the night’s post horns. For here were God knew how many citizens, deliberately choosing not to communicate by U. S. Mail. It was not an act of treason, nor possibly even of defiance. But it was a calculated withdrawal, from the life of the Republic, from its machinery. Whatever else was being denied them out of hate, indifference to the power of their vote, loopholes, simple ignorance, this withdrawal was their own, un-publicized, private. Since they could not have withdrawn into a vacuum (could they?), there had to exist the separate, silent, unsuspected world.


The last paragraph sums it up and I have nothing to add to it.

Just before the morning rush hour, she got out of a jitney whose ancient driver ended each day in the red, downtown on Howard Street, began to walk toward the Embarcadero. She knew she looked terrible knuckles black with eye-liner and mascara from where she’d rubbed, mouth tasting of old booze and coffee. Through an open doorway, on the stair leading up into the disinfectant-smelling twilight of a rooming house she saw an old man huddled, shaking with grief she couldn’t hear. Both hands, smoke-white, covered his face. On the back of the left hand she made out the post horn, tattooed in old ink now beginning to blur and spread. Fascinated, she came into the shadows and ascended creaking steps, hesitating on each one. When she was three steps from him the hands flew apart and his wrecked face, and the terror of eyes gloried in burst veins, stopped her.

“Can I help?” She was shaking, tired. “My wife’s in Fresno,” he said. He wore an old double-breasted suit, frayed gray shirt, wide tie, no hat. “I left her. So long ago, I don’t remember. Now this is for her.” He gave Oedipa a letter that looked like he’d been carrying it around for years. “Drop it in the,” and he held up the tattoo and stared into her eyes, “you know. I can’t go out there. It’s too far now, I had a bad night.”

“I know,” she said. “But I’m new in town. I don’t know where it is.”

“Under the freeway.” He waved her on in the direction she’d been going. “Always one. You’ll see it.” The eyes closed. Cammed each night out of that safe furrow the bulk of this city’s waking each sunrise again set virtuously to plowing, what rich soils had he turned, what concentric planets uncovered? What voices overheard, flinders of luminescent gods glimpsed among the wallpaper’s stained foliage, candlestubs lit to rotate in the air over him, prefiguring the cigarette he or a friend must fall asleep someday smoking, thus to end among the flaming, secret salts held all those years by the insatiable stuffing of a mattress that could keep vestiges of every nightmare sweat, helpless overflowing bladder, viciously, tearfully consummated wet dream, like the memory bank to a computer of the lost? She was overcome all at once by a need to touch him, as if she could not believe in him, or would not remember him, without it. Exhausted, hardly knowing what she was doing, she came the last three steps and sat, took the man in her arms, actually held him, gazing out of her smudged eyes down the stairs, back into the morning. She felt wetness against her breast and saw that he was crying again. He hardly breathed but tears came as if being pumped. “I can’t help,” she whispered, rocking him, “I can’t help.” It was already too many miles to Fresno.

“Is that him?” a voice asked behind her, up the stairs. “The sailor?”

“He has a tattoo on his hand.”

“Can you bring him up OK? That’s him.” She turned and saw an even older man, shorter, wearing a tall Homburg hat and smiling at them. “I’d help you but I got a little arthritis.”

“Does he have to come up?” she said. “Up there?”

“Where else, lady?”

She didn’t know. She let go of him for a moment, reluctant as if he were her own child, and he looked up at her. “Come on,” she said. He reached out the tattooed hand and she took that, and that was how they went the rest of the way up that flight, and then the two more: hand in hand, very slowly for the man with arthritis.

“He disappeared last night,” he told her. “Said he was going looking for his old lady. It’s a thing he does, off and on.” They entered a warren of rooms and corridors, lit by lo-watt bulbs, separated by beaverboard partitions. The old man followed them stiffly. At last he said, “Here.”

In the little room were another suit, a couple of religious tracts, a rug, a chair. A picture of a saint, changing well-water to oil for Jerusalem’s Easter lamps. Another bulb, dead. The bed. The mattress, waiting. She ran through then a scene she might play. She might find the landlord of this place, and bring him to court, and buy the sailor a new suit at Roos/Atkins, and shirt, and shoes, and give him the bus fare to Fresno after all. But with a sigh he had released her hand, while she was so lost in the fantasy that she hadn’t felt it go away, as if he’d known the best moment to let go.

“Just mail the letter,” he said, “the stamp is on it.” She looked and saw the familiar carmine 8¢ airmail, with a jet flying by the Capitol dome. But at the top of the dome stood a tiny figure in deep black, with its arms outstretched. Oedipa wasn’t sure what exactly was supposed to be on top of the Capitol, but knew it wasn’t anything like that.



“Please,” the sailor said. “Go on now. You don’t want to stay here.” She looked in her purse, found a ten and a single, gave him the ten. “I’ll spend it on booze,” he said.

“Remember your friends,” said the arthritic, watching the ten.

“Bitch,” said the sailor. “Why didn’t you wait till he was gone?”

Oedipa watched him make adjustments so he’d fit easier against the mattress. That stuffed memory. Register A . . .”Give me a cigarette, Ramirez,” the sailor said. “I know you got one.”

Would it be today? “Ramirez,” she cried. The arthritic looked around on his rusty neck. “He’s going to die,” she said.

“Who isn’t?” said Ramirez.


As Oedipa helps the old sailor to his bed, she notices a picture of a saint changing water to lamp oil. This is St. Charbel. He lived an ascetic life of poverty in Lebanon where he studied the bible and meditated. Once he asked a brother monk to fill his lantern with oil and the brother took the lamp and filled it with water instead as a joke. He gave the lantern to Father Charbel and, to his astonishment, watched the old Father light the lamp which glowed with a strong flame. The monk ran off and told others and some fathers went to Father Charbel's quarters and asked him if he knew his lantern was only filled with water. Father Charbel stated that he was unaware of this and yet the lantern burned. One of the fathers opened the lantern, dipped his finger in the reservoir and dabbed it on his tongue and verified that it was only water. The conclusion was that God had filled St. Charbel with His glory. St. Charbel is generally depicted thusly:



One cannot help but find a strange resemblance to the sorcerer in the Varo painting:



Charbel is male and the sorcerer in the Varo painting is female. A High Priest and High Priestess. Each is full of magic but the Priest's magic is unconscious, perhaps bestowed upon him; the Priestess's magic is self-generated and self-directed. The Priest's magic is beneficent while the Priestess's magic is malevolent. Others receive her magic unawares but she directs it. When Oedipa was talking to old Mr. Thoth in the nursing home and saw his Trystero ring, she shivered and felt as if trapped in the center of a great crystal. That crystal is a "shewstone" otherwise called a crystal ball--for gazing at events preternaturally. Oedipa feels the malevolent magic directed at her from somewhere but does not know where this somewhere is or exactly who is doing the gazing.

The sailor hands Oedipa a letter with the Carmine 8-cent airmail stamp on it except Oedipa notices that on the dome of the Capitol depicted in the stamp, a figure in deep black stands with its arms outstretched. Oedipa knows this is wrong. What is on the dome of the Capitol? The figure is that of Columbia. She is also the woman depicted by the Statue of Liberty. She is the Columbia referred to in "the District of Columbia." She is simply a personification of the United States of America.



She has been replaced in the stamp with a Trystero agent? Or is this what Pynchon intends? Rather she IS that black figure, the High Priestess. Columbia is the magic woman. She has a transformative power but it is not beneficial. She transformed America from an unimaginably wild, open, beautiful land of wonder into a crowded, crime-infested, poisoned land of plunder.



Is the true America run by a cabal of black magicians destroying us with their magic, their alchemy?

Thank you for your input but I am not going to do any of that.