THOUGH she saw Mike Fallopian again, and did trace the text of The Courier’s Tragedy a certain distance, these follow-ups were no more disquieting than other revelations which now seemed to come crowding in exponentially, as if the more she collected the more would come to her, until everything she saw, smelled, dreamed, remembered, would somehow come to be woven into The Tristero.

For one thing, she read over the will more closely. If it was really Pierce’s attempt to leave an organized something behind after his own annihilation, then it was part of her duty, wasn’t it, to bestow life on what had persisted, to try to be what Driblette was, the dark machine in the centre of the planetarium, to bring the estate into pulsing stelliferous Meaning, all in a soaring dome around her? If only so much didn’t stand in her way: her deep ignorance of law, of investment, of real estate, ultimately of the dead man himself. The bond the probate court had had her post was perhaps their evaluation in dollars of how much did stand in her way. Under the symbol she’d copied off the latrine wall of The Scope into her memo book, she wrote Shall I project a world? If not project then at least flash some arrow on the dome to skitter among constellations and trace out your Dragon, Whale, Southern Cross. Anything might help.

If we read the above passage closely, we see the existentialism present in Pynchon’s story. Existentialism is a philosophy developed by Søren Kierkegaard and expanded on by later philosophers and thinkers as Dostoyevski, Nietszche, Heidegger, Heller, Camus and Sartre. The basic premise of existentialism is that we are conscious beings capable of independent thought and action and not simply what society labels us. Ask someone who Babe Ruth was and he may tell you that Ruth was a great baseball player who hit 714 home runs in his career but this is only the label society has hung on Ruth. But what this tell us about the man himself? He is, first and foremost, a conscious being who decided his own deeds. Through our own consciousness, we impart our own meaning to the universe and impose our own values upon it. What you may imagine yourself to be, has no bearing on how others see you. Your actions define you to others and you are responsible for how they see you. So aside from his being a great baseball player, was Ruth a “nice guy” or a “jerk”?

The idea that we give the world meaning and impose our own values on it implies that the world is ultimately absurd. The reason bad things happen to good people or that a harmless, helpless child dies of cancer at age three while Hitler went onto rule much of Europe while killing millions is because the world is absurd. No matter how good of a life you lead, you can be killed out there for no reason at all or die of a heart attack in the prime of your life. We tend to say things as “the world is unfair” or “life isn’t fair” which indicates that we place a certain order on the world and then express remorse or anger when the world doesn’t comply. But the outside world is neither fair nor unfair, neither good nor bad. It is completely neutral and all the conscious creatures making their own decisions determine what kind of place the world is and it may permeate the entire world or simply a small piece of it. The outside world is the big Absurd. Ultimately, questions as “What is the meaning of life?” are meaningless. Does it really make any difference if we are good or evil for what does that mean to the Great Absurdity we are thrust into the day we are born? It means nothing because absurdity is meaninglessness.

Driblette implies as much by saying, “I’m the projector at the planetarium, all the closed little universe visible in the circle of that stage is coming out of my mouth, eyes, sometimes other orifices also.” He also said, “If I were to dissolve in here, be washed down the drain into the Pacific, what you saw tonight would vanish too.” In other words, Driblette is creating his own meaning and imposing his own values on something that is otherwise meaningless—just words read off a page, fickle sense-data. Since it is up to each individual to create his or her own meaning of the chaos surrounding us, Oedipa knows that she must follow Diblette’s example:

Under the symbol she’d copied off the latrine wall of The Scope into her memo book, she wrote Shall I project a world? If not project then at least flash some arrow on the dome to skitter among constellations and trace out your Dragon, Whale, Southern Cross. Anything might help.

But in Pynchon’s tale, it isn’t so much the Absurd that Oedipa must fight against to wrest meaning from her existence. To understand what she is struggling against, we must go back to the Varo painting, “Bordando el Manto Terrestre” when Oedipa saw the mysterious black figure stirring the cauldron while holding a spellbook and realized that “…what really keeps her where she is is magic, anonymous and malignant, visited on her from outside and for no reason at all. Having no apparatus except gut fear and female cunning to examine this formless magic, to understand how it works, how to measure its field strength, count its lines of force, she may fall back on superstition, or take up a useful hobby like embroidery, or go mad, or marry a disk jockey. If the tower is everywhere and the knight of deliverance no proof against its magic, what else?”

We are all Oedipa, locked in our towers, able to see only a small portion of the world from the window, trying to make sense of it, longing for a rescue that can never come because each of us is truly alone, on our own. Love does not conquer all. But Oedipa’s sense that she is at the mercy of an anonymous and malignant magic is now amped up by the presence of the Tristero—whoever they are—mysterious but no longer formless, black but not invisible. But if she is to understand this malignant magic, “how to measure its field strength, count its lines of force,” then the Tristero might be a good place to start projecting her first constellation of meaning, connecting one dot to the next.

Oedipa decides to attend a Yoyodyne stockholders’ meeting for no other reason than because she hadn’t been doing much as the executor of a will and thought this might spur her into action. After getting a visitor’s badge and eating in the huge cafeteria and listening to the Yoyodyne songs sung by shareholders and proxies and led by the company president, Clayton “Bloody” Chiclitz, she wanders off into the bewilderingly large complex. From the moment of her arrival, we are again presented with Oedipa as a woman lost in a man’s world where she is an interloper and not particularly welcome. Nobody at Yoyodyne, other than Oedipa, even appears to be female.

Somehow Oedipa got lost. One minute she was gazing at a mockup of a space capsule, safely surrounded by old, somnolent men; the next, alone in a great, fluorescent murmur of office activity. As far as she could see in any direction it was white or pastel: men’s shirts, papers, drawing boards. All she could think of was to put on her shades for all this light, and wait for somebody to rescue her. But nobody noticed. She began to wander aisles among light blue desks, turning a corner now and then. Heads came up at the sound of her heels, engineers stared until she’d passed, but nobody spoke to her. Five or ten minutes went by this way, panic growing inside her head: there seemed no way out of the area. Then, by accident (Dr Hilarius, if asked, would accuse her of using subliminal cues in the environment to guide her to a particular person) or howsoever, she came on one Stanley Koteks, who wore wire-rim bifocals, sandals, argyle socks, and at first glance seemed too young to be working here. As it turned out he wasn’t working, only doodling with a fat felt pencil this sign:




“Hello there,” Oedipa said, arrested by this coincidence. On a whim, she added, “Kirby sent me,” this having been the name on the latrine wall. It was supposed to sound conspiratorial, but came out silly.

“Hi,” said Stanley Koteks, deftly sliding the big envelope he’d been doodling on into an open drawer he then closed. Catching sight of her badge, “You’re lost, huh?”

She knew blunt questions like, what does that symbol mean? would get her nowhere. She said, “I’m a tourist, actually. A stockholder.”

“Stockholder.” He gave her the once-over, hooked with his foot a swivel chair from the next desk and rolled it over for her. “Sit down. Can you really influence policy, or make suggestions they won’t just file in the garbage?”

“Yes,” lied Oedipa, to see where it would take them.

“See,” Koteks said, “if you can get them to drop their clause on patents. That, lady, is my ax to grind.”

“Patents,” Oedipa said. Koteks explained how every engineer, in signing the Yoyodyne contract, also signed away the patent rights to any inventions he might come up with.

“This stifles your really creative engineer,” Koteks said, adding bitterly, “wherever he may be.”

“I didn’t think people invented any more,” said Oedipa, sensing this would goad him. “I mean, who's there been, really, since Thomas Edison? Isn’t it all teamwork now?” Bloody Chiclitz, in his welcoming speech this morning, had stressed teamwork.

“Teamwork,” Koteks snarled, “is one word for it, yeah. What it really is is a way to avoid responsibility. It’s a symptom of the gutlessness of the whole society.”

“Goodness,” said Oedipa, “are you allowed to talk like that?”

Koteks looked to both sides, then rolled his chair closer. “You know the Nefastis Machine?” Oedipa only widened her eyes. “Well this was invented by John Nefastis, who’s up at Berkeley now. John’s somebody who still invents things. Here. I have a copy of the patent.” From a drawer he produced a Xeroxed wad of papers, showing a box with a sketch of a bearded Victorian on its outside, and coming out of the top two pistons attached to a crankshaft and flywheel.

“Who’s that with the beard?” asked Oedipa. James Clerk Maxwell, explained Koteks, a famous Scotch scientist who had once postulated a tiny intelligence, known as Maxwell’s Demon. The Demon could sit in a box among air molecules that were moving at all different random speeds, and sort out the fast molecules from the slow ones. Fast molecules have more energy than slow ones. Concentrate enough of them in one place and you have a region of high temperature. You can then use the difference in temperature between this hot region of the box and any cooler region, to drive a heat engine. Since the Demon only sat and sorted, you wouldn’t have put any real work into the system. So you would be violating the Second Law of Thermodynamics, getting something for nothing, causing perpetual motion.”

“Sorting isn’t work?” Oedipa said. “Tell them down at the post office, you’ll find yourself in a mailbag headed for Fairbanks, Alaska, without even a FRAGILE sticker going for you.”

“It’s mental work,” Koteks said, “But not work in the thermodynamic sense.” He went on to tell how the Nefastis Machine contained an honest-to-God Maxwell’s Demon. All you had to do was stare at the photo of Clerk Maxwell, and concentrate on which cylinder, right or left, you wanted the Demon to raise the temperature in. The air would expand and push a piston. The familiar Society for the Propagation of Christian Knowledge photo, showing Maxwell in right profile, seemed to work best.




Oedipa, behind her shades, looked around carefully, trying not to move her head. Nobody paid any attention to them: the air-conditioning hummed on, IBM typewriters chiggered away, swivel chairs squeaked, fat reference manuals were slammed shut, rattling blueprints folded and refolded, while high overhead the long silent fluorescent bulbs glared merrily; all with Yoyodyne was normal. Except right here, where Oedipa Maas, with a thousand other people to choose from, had had to walk uncoerced into the presence of madness.

“Not everybody can work it, of course,” Koteks, having warmed to his subject, was telling her. “Only people with the gift. ‘Sensitives,’ John calls them.”

Oedipa rested her shades on her nose and batted her eyelashes, figuring to coquette her way off this conversational hook: “Would I make a good sensitive, do think?”

“You really want to try it? You could write to him. He only knows a few sensitives. He’d let you try.” Oedipa took out her little memo book and opened to the symbol she’d copied and the words Shall I project a world? “Box 573,” said Koteks. “In Berkeley.”

“No,” his voice gone funny, so that she looked up, too sharply, by which time, carried by a certain momentum of thought, he’d also said, “In San Francisco; there’s none” and by then knew he’d made a mistake. “He’s living somewhere along Telegraph,” he muttered. “I gave you the wrong address.”

She took a chance: “Then the WASTE address isn’t good any more.” But she’d pronounced it like a word, waste. His face congealed, a mask of distrust. “It’s W.A.S.T.E., lady,” he told her, “an acronym, not ‘waste,’ and we had best not go into it any further.”

“I saw it in a ladies’ John,” she confessed. But Stanley Koteks was no longer about to be sweet-talked.

“Forget it,” he advised; opened a book and proceeded to ignore her.

She in her turn, clearly, was not about to forget it. The envelope she’d seen Koteks doodling what she’d begun to think of as the “WASTE symbol” on had come, she bet, from John Nefastis. Or somebody like him. Her suspicions got embellished by, of all people, Mike Fallopian of the Peter Pinguid Society.

“Sure this Koteks is part of some underground,” he told her a few days later, “an underground of the unbalanced, possibly, but then how can you blame them for being maybe a little bitter? Look what's happening to them. In school they got brainwashed, like all of us, into believing the Myth of the American Inventor, Morse and his telegraph, Bell and his telephone, Edison and his light bulb, Tom Swift and his this or that. Only one man per invention. Then when they grew up they found they had to sign over all their rights to a monster like Yoyodyne; got stuck on some ‘project’ or ‘task force’ or ‘team’ and started being ground into anonymity. Nobody wanted them to invent only perform their little role in a design ritual, already set down for them in some procedures handbook. What’s it like, Oedipa, being all alone in a nightmare like that? Of course they stick together, they keep in touch. They can always tell when they come on another of their kind. Maybe it only happens once every five years, but still, immediately, they know.”

As Metger and Fallopian sat in the Scope and argued about Marxism and surplus value—what Pynchon calls “typical Southern California dialogue"—Oedipa recalls something she had seen back at Fangoso Lagoons when she went back to Lake Inverarity. It was bronze plaque, a historical marker, commemorating an event that occurred on that spot in 1853:

On this site…a dozen Wells, Fargo men battled gallantly with a band of masked marauders in mysterious “black uniforms.” We owe this description to a post rider, the only witness to the massacre, who died shortly after. The only other clue was a cross, traced by one of the victims in the dust. To this day the identities of the slayers remain shrouded in mystery.

A cross? Or the initial T? The same stuttered by Niccoló in The Courier’s Tragedy. Oedipa pondered this. She called Randolph Driblette from a pay booth, to see it he’d known about this Wells, Fargo incident; if that was why he’d chosen to dress his bravos all in black. The phone buzzed on and on, into hollowness. She hung up and headed for Zapf’s Used Books. Zapf himself came forward out of a wan cone of 15-watt illumination to help her find the paperback Driblette had mentioned, Jacobean Revenge Plays.

“It’s been very much in demand,” Zapf told her. The skull on the cover watched them, through the dim light.

Did he only mean Driblette? She opened her mouth to ask, but didn’t. It was to be the first of many demurs.

Back at Echo Courts, Metzger in L.A. for the day on other business, she turned immediately to the single mention of the word Trystero. Opposite the line she read, in pencil, Cf. variant, 1687 ed. Put there maybe by some student. In a way, it cheered her. Another reading of that line might help light further the dark face of the word. According to a short preface, the text had been taken from a folio edition, undated. Oddly, the preface was unsigned. She checked the copyright page and found that the original hardcover had been a textbook, Plays of Ford, Webster, Tourneur and Wharfinger, published by The Lectern Press, Berkeley, California, back in 1957. She poured herself half a tumbler of Jack Daniels (the Paranoids having left them a fresh bottle the evening before) and called the L.A. library. They checked, but didn’t have the hardcover. They could look it up on inter-library loan for her. “Wait,” she said, having just got an idea, “the publisher’s up in Berkeley. Maybe I’ll try them directly.” Thinking also that she could visit John Nefastis.

She had caught sight of the historical marker only because she’d gone back, deliberately, to Lake Inverarity one day, owing to this, what you might have to call, growing obsession, with “bringing something of herself” even if that something was just her presence to the scatter of business interests that had survived Inverarity. She would give them order, she would create constellations; next day she drove out to Vesperhaven House, a home for senior citizens that Inverarity had put up around the time Yoyodyne came to San Narciso. In its front recreation room she found sunlight coming in it seemed through every window; an old man nodding in front of a dim Leon Schlesinger cartoon show on the tube; and a black fly browsing along the pink, dandruffy arroyo of the neat part in the old man’s hair. A fat nurse ran in with a can of bug spray and yelled at the fly to take off so she could kill it. The cagy fly stayed where it was. “You’re bothering Mr. Thoth,” she yelled at the little fellow. Mr. Thoth jerked awake, jarring loose the fly, which made a desperate scramble for the door. The nurse pursued, spraying poison. “Hello,” said Oedipa.

“I was dreaming,” Mr. Thoth told her, “about my grandfather. A very old man, at least as old as I am now, 91. I thought, when I was a boy, that he had been 91 all his life. Now I feel,” laughing, “as if I have been 91 all my life. Oh, the stories that old man would tell. He rode for the Pony Express, back in the gold rush days. His horse was named Adolf, I remember that.”

Oedipa, sensitized, thinking of the bronze marker, smiled at him as grand-daughterly as she knew how and asked, “Did he ever have to fight off desperados?” “That cruel old man,” said Mr. Thoth, “was an Indian killer. God, the saliva would come out in a string from his lip whenever he told about killing the Indians. He must have loved that part of it.”

“What were you dreaming about him?” “Oh, that,” perhaps embarrassed. “It was all mixed in with a Porky Pig cartoon.” He waved at the tube. “It comes into your dreams, you know. Filthy machine. Did you ever see the one about Porky Pig and the anarchist?”

She had, as a matter of fact, but she said no. “The anarchist is dressed all in black. In the dark you can only see his eyes. It dates from the 1930’s. Porky Pig is a little boy. The children told me that he has a nephew now, Cicero. Do you remember, during the war, when Porky worked in a defense plant? He and Bugs Bunny. That was a good one too.”



“The Blow Out” starring Porky Pig from 1936.

“Dressed all in black,” Oedipa prompted him.

“It was mixed in so with the Indians,” he tried to remember, “the dream. The Indians who wore black feathers, the Indians who weren’t Indians. My grandfather told me. The feathers were white, but those false Indians were supposed to burn bones and stir the boneblack with their feathers to get them black. It made them invisible in the night, because they came at night. That was how the old man, bless him, knew they weren’t Indians. No Indian ever attacked at night. If he got killed his soul would wander in the dark forever. Heathen.”

Once again, there is the angle of bones being burned and turned into charcoal.

“If they weren’t Indians,” Oedipa asked, “what were they?”

“A Spanish name,” Mr. Thoth said, frowning, “a Mexican name. Oh, I can’t remember. Did they write it on the ring?” He reached down to a knitting bag by his chair and came up with blue yarn, needles, patterns, finally a dull gold signet ring. “My grandfather cut this from the finger of one of them he killed. Can you imagine a 91-year-old man so brutal?” Oedipa stared. The device on the ring was once again the WASTE symbol.

She looked around, spooked at the sunlight pouring in all the windows, as if she had been trapped at the centre of some intricate crystal, and said, “My God.”

“And I feel him, certain days, days of a certain temperature,” said Mr. Thoth, “and barometric pressure. Did you know that? I feel him close to me.”

“Your grandfather?”

“No, my God.”

So she went to find Fallopian, who ought to know a lot about the Pony Express and Wells, Fargo if he was writing a book about them. He did, but not about their dark adversaries.

“I’ve had hints,” he told her, “sure. I wrote to Sacramento about that historical marker, and they’ve been kicking it around their bureaucratic morass for months. Someday they’ll come back with a source book for me to read. It will say, ‘Old-timers remember the yarn about,’ whatever happened. Old-timers. Real good documentation, this Californiana crap. Odds are the author will be dead. There’s no way to trace it, unless you want to follow up an accidental correlation, like you got from the old man.”

“You think it’s really a correlation?” She thought of how tenuous it was, like a long white hair, over a century long. Two very old men. All these fatigued brain cells between herself and the truth.

“Marauders, nameless, faceless, dressed in black. Probably hired by the Federal government. Those suppressions were brutal.”

“Couldn’t it have been a rival carrier?”

Fallopian shrugged. Oedipa showed him the WASTE symbol, and he shrugged again.

“It was in the ladies’ room, right here in The Scope, Mike.”

“Women,” he only said. “Who can tell what goes on with them?”

Time for some more history. The first American postal routes formed in Boston in 1639 and a Boston-New York route opened in 1672. In 1691, William and Mary, acting as the British Crown (they were actually Dutch), authorized Thomas Neale a twenty-one-year grant to create the North American Postal Service. Neale made New Jersey Governor Alexander Hamilton the deputy postmaster and the first true post office in the colonies began in 1692 but only in Virginia and ran until 1710 when Neale’s patent expired by which time Parliament extended the English post office to serve all the colonies. By the mid-18th century, mail routes ran between Boston, New York and Philadelphia via the Crown Post—England’s colonial mail service—which colonists grew to hate. Ben Franklin and William Goddard seized the opportunity to establish an independent post office in the colonies. Franklin was appointed the first Postmaster General in the colonies in 1775 when the Second Continental Congress decreed the United States Post Office. His post office became the direct forerunner of the U.S. Postal Service. The United States Post Office Department (USPOD) was officially created in 1792 under constitutional authority. It became a cabinet-level department in 1872.




Prior to stamps, when a letter was delivered, the recipient paid the cost to the postman. This caused all kinds of problems—it slowed down delivery, the recipient was often not at home or refused the letter, the postman could become a target for robbery, etc. Prepayment of letters was the preferred and, eventually, the only method of paying for mail and stamps were the proof of that payment. The first stamp known to be used in the United States was a three-cent issued in 1842 by a private courier in New York known as the City Despatch Post. This was also the first adhesive stamp used in the U.S. (which were invented by Rowland Hill of England in 1837).




To prevent the stamp from being re-used, the envelope or card was stamped in the upper right corner covering the stamp with cancellation lines called a killer at the post office after the letter is picked up from its point of origin. The cancellation lines across the face of the stamp means that it cannot be used again. Alongside the killer was the postmark which contains the date, location and often even the time that the letter arrived at the post office. This marks the time at which the post office takes charge of the letter. The postmark was originally called a Bishop mark after English Postmaster General Henry Bishop who implemented the idea in 1661. Every office had its own postmarks so distinctive (including the military) that, even decades later, one knows where a letter was sent from, when and if the writer was civilian or military. In fact, historians often rely on these postmarks when dating letters.

In 1845, Congress passed an act where letters were charged by weight (a convention first adopted by Rowland Hill) at a rate of five cents per half-ounce for up to 300 miles and 10 cents per half-ounce up to 3000 miles. In 1851, a new act set the rate at five cents per half-ounce for up to 3000 within the borders of the U.S. This act also offered a 40% discount on prepaid postage which effectively reduced the price to three cents. By 1856, pre-payment was a requirement and were issued in the form of postage stamps (although federal stamps were first issued in 1847) or a stamped envelope and so the modern American postal system was born. It was transformed into the Unites States Postal Service (USPS) in 1971.



First federally issued stamps, 1847. These stamps were no longer in use after 1851.



1851 issue stamps.

According to Fallopian, these acts were not passed to reduce the costs of mailing a letter so much as to undercut all competition to drive the private couriers out of business and keep the postal system a government monopoly. So, at some point, we must assume, the Tristero came to the United States but when? Even more importantly, why?

Among Inverarity’s many possessions was a fine stamp collection worth quite a lot that, as executor, Oedipa would need to get appraised. Metzger retained a philatelist from L.A. on the instructions of the will named Ghengis Cohen. With Metzger away on other business and the Paranoids off at a recording studio one dreary, wet morning, Oedipa gets a call from Cohen. He had questions concerning some of the stamps in the collection.

“There are some irregularities, Miz Maas,” he said. “Could you come over?”

She was somehow sure, driving in on the slick freeway, that the “irregularities” would tie in with the word Trystero. Metzger had taken the stamp albums to Cohen from safe-deposit storage a week ago in Oedipa’s Impala, and then she hadn’t even been interested enough to look inside them. But now it came to her, as if the rain whispered it, that what Fallopian had not known about private carriers, Cohen might.

When he opened the door of his apartment/office she saw him framed in a long succession or train of doorways, room after room receding in the general direction of Santa Monica, all soaked in rain-light. Genghis Cohen had a touch of summer flu, his fly was half open and he was wearing a Barry Goldwater sweatshirt also. Oedipa felt at once motherly. In a room perhaps a third of the way along the suite he sat her in a rocking chair and brought real homemade dandelion wine in small neat glasses.

“I picked the dandelions in a cemetery, two years ago. Now the cemetery is gone. They took it out for the East San Narciso Freeway.”

She could, at this stage of things, recognize signals like that, as the epileptic is said to an odor, color, pure piercing grace note announcing his seizure. Afterward it is only this signal, really dross, this secular announcement, and never what is revealed during the attack, that he remembers. Oedipa wondered whether, at the end of this (if it were supposed to end), she too might not be left with only compiled memories of clues, announcements, intimations, but never the central truth itself, which must somehow each time be too bright for her memory to hold; which must always blaze out, destroying its own message irreversibly, leaving an overexposed blank when the ordinary world came back. In the space of a sip of dandelion wine it came to her that she would never know how many times such a seizure may already have visited, or how to grasp it should it visit again. Perhaps even in this last second but there was no way to tell. She glanced down the corridor of Cohen’s rooms in the rain and saw, for the very first time, how far it might be possible to get lost in this.

“I have taken the liberty,” Genghis Cohen was saying, “of getting in touch with an Expert Committee. I haven’t yet forwarded them the stamps in question, pending your own authorization and of course Mr. Metzger’s. However, all fees, I am sure, can be charged to the estate.”

“I’m not sure I understand,” Oedipa said.

“Allow me.” He rolled over to her a small table, and from a plastic folder lifted with tweezers, delicately, a U. S. commemorative stamp, the Pony Express issue of 1940, .03 henna brown. Cancelled. “Look,” he said, switching on a small, intense lamp, handing her an oblong magnifying glass.

“It’s the wrong side,” she said, as he swabbed the stamp gently with benzine and placed it on a black tray.

“The watermark.”

Oedipa peered. There it was again, her WASTE symbol, showing up black, a little right of center.

“What is this?” she asked, wondering how much time had gone by.

“I’m not sure,” Cohen said. “That’s why I’ve referred it, and the others, to the Committee. Some friends have been around to see them too, but they’re all being cautious. But see what you think of this.” From the same plastic folder he now tweezed what looked like an old German stamp, with the figures 1/4 in the centre, the word Freimarke at the top, and along the right-hand margin the legend Thurn und Taxis.




“They were,” she remembered from the Wharfinger play, “some kind of private couriers, right?”

“From about 1300, until Bismarck bought them out in 1867, Miz Maas, they were the European mail service. This is one of their very few adhesive stamps. But look in the corners.” Decorating each corner of the stamp, Oedipa saw a horn with a single loop in it. Almost like the WASTE symbol. “A post horn,” Cohen said, “the Thurn and Taxis symbol. It was in their coat of arms.”



Thurn und Taxis coat-of-arms. Note the post horn at the top. The animal at the bottom is a badger as the name Tassis is a variation of "tasso" the Italian word for a badger.

And Tacit lies the gold once-knotted horn, Oedipa remembered. Sure. “Then the watermark you found,” she said, “is nearly the same thing, except for the extra little doojigger sort of coming out of the bell.”

“It sounds ridiculous,” Cohen said, “but my guess is it’s a mute.”

She nodded. The black costumes, the silence, the secrecy. Whoever they were their aim was to mute the Thurn and Taxis post horn.

“Normally this issue, and the others, are unwater-marked,” Cohen said, “and in view of other details the hatching, number of perforations, way the paper has aged it’s obviously a counterfeit. Not just an error.”

“Then it isn’t worth anything.”

Cohen smiled, blew his nose. “You’d be amazed how much you can sell an honest forgery for. Some collectors specialize in them. The question is, who did these? They’re atrocious.” He flipped the stamp over and with the tip of the tweezers showed her. The picture had a Pony Express rider galloping out of a western fort. From shrubbery over on the right-hand side and possibly in the direction the rider would be heading, protruded a single, painstakingly engraved, black feather. “Why put in a deliberate mistake?” he asked, ignoring, if he saw it, the look on her face. “I’ve come up so far with eight in all. Each one has an error like this, laboriously worked into the design, like a taunt. There’s even a transposition—U. S. Potsage, of all things.”




“How recent?” blurted Oedipa, louder than she needed to be.

“Is anything wrong, Miz Maas?” She told him first about the letter from Mucho with a cancellation telling her report all obscene mail to her potsmaster.

“Odd,” Cohen agreed. “The transposition,” consulting a notebook, “is only on the Lincoln .04, Regular issue, 1954. The other forgeries run back to 1893.”




“That’s 70 years,” she said. “He’d have to be pretty old.”

“If it’s the same one,” said Cohen. “And what if it were as old as Thurn and Taxis? Omedio Tassis, banished from Milan, organized his first couriers in the Bergamo region around 1290.”

They sat in silence, listening to rain gnaw languidly at the windows and skylights, confronted all at once by the marvellous possibility.

“Has that ever happened before?” she had to ask.

“An 800-year tradition of postal fraud. Not to my knowledge.” Oedipa told him then all about old Mr. Thoth’s signet ring, and the symbol she’d caught Stanley Koteks doodling, and the muted horn drawn in the ladies’ room at The Scope.

“Whatever it is,” he hardly needed to say, “they’re apparently still quite active.”

“Do we tell the government, or what?”

“I'm sure they know more than we do.” He sounded nervous, or suddenly in retreat. “No, I wouldn’t. It isn’t our business, is it?”

She asked him then about the initials W.A.S.T.E., but it was somehow too late. She’d lost him. He said no, but so abruptly out of phase now with her own thoughts he could even have been lying. He poured her more dandelion wine.

“It’s clearer now,” he said, rather formal. “A few months ago it got quite cloudy. You see, in spring, when the dandelions begin to bloom again, the wine goes through a fermentation. As if they remembered.”

No, thought Oedipa, sad. As if their home cemetery in some way still did exist, in a land where you could somehow walk, and not need the East San Narciso Freeway, and bones still could rest in peace, nourishing ghosts of dandelions, no one to plow them up. As if the dead really do persist, even in a bottle of wine.

So the Tristero or Trystero, as we learned in Wharfinger’s play did not hesitate to kill Thurn und Taxis couriers. Angelo had gotten Niccoló killed in just this fashion. The W.A.S.T.E. symbol tells Oedipa that not only was their goal to shut down the Thurn und Taxis postal monopoly but that they are still active and operating in the United States. But what did this have to do with Pierce and why was he leaving her clues as to the existence of this group?

Oedipa heads out to Berkeley. “She wanted to find out where Richard Wharfinger had got his information about Trystero. Possibly also take a look at how the inventor John Nefastis picked up his mail.”

She found the Lectern Press in a small office building on Shattuck Avenue. They didn’t have Plays of Ford, Webster, Tourneur and Wharfinger on the premises, but did take her check for $12.50, gave her the address of their warehouse in Oakland and a receipt to show the people there. By the time she’d collected the book, it was afternoon. She skimmed through to find the line that had brought her all the way up here. And in the leaf-fractured sunlight, froze.

No hallowed skein of stars can ward, I trow, ran the couplet, Who once has crossed the lusts of Angelo. “No,” she protested aloud. “‘Who’s once been set his tryst with Trystero.’” The pencilled note in the paperback had mentioned a variant. But the paperback was supposed to be a straight reprint of the book she now held. Puzzled, she saw that this edition also had a footnote:

According only to the Quarto edition (1687). The earlier Folio has a lead inserted where the closing line should have been. D’Amico has suggested that Wharfinger may have made a libellous comparison involving someone at court, and that the later ‘restoration’ was actually the work of the printer, Inigo Barfstable. The doubtful ‘Whitechapel’ version (c. 1670) has ‘This tryst or odious awry, O Niccoló,’ which besides bringing in a quite graceless Alexandrine, is difficult to make sense of syntactically, unless we accept the rather unorthodox though persuasive argument of J.-K. Sale that the line is really a pun on ‘This trystero dies irae . . . .’ This, however, it must be pointed out, leaves the line nearly as corrupt as before, owing to no clear meaning for the word trystero, unless it be a pseudo-Italianate variant on triste (= wretched, depraved). But the ‘Whitechapel’ edition, besides being a fragment, abounds in such corrupt and probably spurious lines, as we have mentioned elsewhere, and is hardly to be trusted.

Then where, Oedipa wondered, does the paperback I bought at Zapf’s get off with its “Trystero” line? Was there yet another edition, besides the Quarto, Folio, and “Whitechapel” fragment? The editor’s preface, signed this time, by one Emory Bortz, professor of English at Cal, mentioned none. She spent nearly an hour more, searching through all the footnotes, finding nothing.

“Dammit,” she yelled, started the car and headed for the Berkeley campus, to find Professor Bortz.

She should have remembered the date on the book 1957. Another world. The girl in the English office informed Oedipa that Professor Bortz was no longer with the faculty. He was teaching at San Narciso College, San Narciso, California.

Of course, Odeipa thought, wry, where else? She copied the address and walked away trying to remember who’d put out the paperback. She couldn’t.

No Hallowed skein of stars can ward, I trow
Who’s once been set his tryst with Trystero.

Means what? A hallowed skein of stars, i.e. a tangle of venerated stars, would be constellations—houses of the zodiac—appealed to by astrologers to affect favorable or beneficial outcomes. But not even these can guard or watch over someone due to have a secluded meet-up with Trystero. Not even the heavens can help him. So we get from this that Trystero isn’t a mere human agency involved in postal delivery but a secret society apparently supernaturally endowed or at least that is how they were perceived in Wharfinger’s day. This would account for why the characters in the play were reluctant to dwell on the words of Angelo concerning how Niccoló will meet his fate. Such forbidden talk may warrant a visit from those who should not be spoken of. You never know who might be listening.

The Trystero or at least the view of them is that they were not just a private courier service but a veritable Holy Vehm. The Vehm formed in the Westphalia region of Germany in the 13th century. They were composed on common men rather than nobles or royals (although its leaders undoubtedly did their bidding) as a secret vigilante society. Members had to swear oaths and agree to suffer the consequences should they reveal any of the Vehm’s many secrets. The Vehm had some 200,000 men in its ranks within 50 years after its formation. Their job was to ensure that members of society were conforming to societal norms although they veiled it in biblical language so that they appeared to be upholding Christian values. Anyone accused of not living this Christian life were tried by the Vehm. The sentence for a guilty verdict was always carried out at midnight. Those accused of witchcraft and heresy were tried by a special “forbidden court” and a “secret tribunal” by a special division of the Vehm called the Black Vehm. These sentences were said to be the harshest and likely involved torture and confession.

In the United States, Vehm-like organizations formed in the 19th century such as the Ku Klux Klan and the Callithumpians. In both cases, the accused were given warnings and eventually summoned. The Callithumpians, to my knowledge, never executed any of their targets but were more about public shaming. The Klan and the Vehm, on the other hand, seemed unlikely to dispense any punishment but death. To be summoned was itself a death sentence. There are no known instances of anyone being found innocent. The Vehm, great reduced in number, went underground during the Age of Enlightenment but did not disband for they supposedly publicly proclaimed their existence during the Nazi takeover of Germany and allied themselves to the regime and issued many condemnations of the Jews. How many Nazis were members of the Vehm is open to speculation as is whether or not the Vehm fell with the Nazis in 1945. The Trystero do not appear to be part of the Vehm but seem to be regarded as being Vehmic in nature.


The Holy Vehm. They supposedly wore black hoods.

Interesting too the verse references a skein of stars and Oedipa writes of projecting constellations to start making meaning of what Inverarity has left behind. Yet the verse states that no constellation will help when one is due to meet Trystero. But that is exactly what Oedipa intends to do—have her tryst with Trystero—in order to make meaning of it all. But her efforts to project constellations on their blackness may not help her. The verse indicates that it will not.

So how deeply was Inverarity invested with Trystero? He clearly knows about them but how much did he know? Did he know their secrets or were they someone he had stumbled onto? Did he leave the task of trying to unmask them to Oedipa? Why her? Did he simply see something in her that told him she would be the one? Another clue that Inverarity left that Oedipa that she does not seemingly put together was that his last communication with her was a phone call in which he spoke in the voice of Lamont Cranston, the alter ego of the Shadow—a famous radio show in the days before television took over. The Shadow could hypnotize people and learned, through his travels in Asia, how to cloak himself from sight by clouding people’s minds. He could enter rooms and not be seen. He could speak to someone standing next to him and, while they could hear him, they could not see him.

Posters from the height of the show’s popularity depict the Shadow in a now all-too-familiar way:





This is definitely not a coincidence. The idea of the Shadow having supernatural powers such that he cannot be blocked or hidden from are also traits given to Trystero. Most younger people who read Pynchon’s novel in 1966 almost certainly did not make this connection. Probably most still miss it today but at least we have the internet as a research tool. The only way most could have seen the connection in ’66 would have been to have a lucky encounter. So Pynchon does to the reader what Inverarity does to Oedipa—puts the clues out there and let you chase them down if you’re astute enough to recognize them.

After visiting Berkeley campus, Oedipa goes to visit John Nesfastis and see his odd machine that Stanley Koteks had told her about:

She pulled the Impala into a gas station somewhere along a gray stretch of Telegraph Avenue and found in a phone book the address of John Nefastis. She then drove to a pseudo-Mexican apartment house, looked for his name among the U. S. mailboxes, ascended outside steps and walked down a row of draped windows till she found his door. He had a crewcut and the same underage look as Koteks, but wore a shirt on various Polynesian themes and dating from the Truman administration.

Introducing herself, she invoked the name of Stanley Koteks. “He said you could tell me whether or not I’m a ‘sensitive’.”

Nefastis had been watching on his TV set a bunch of kids dancing some kind of a Watusi. “I like to watch young stuff,” he explained. “There's something about a little chick that age.”

“So does my husband,” she said. “I understand.”

John Nefastis beamed at her, simpatico, and brought out his Machine from a workroom in back. It looked about the way the patent had described it. “You know how this works?”

“Stanley gave me a kind of rundown.” He began then, bewilderingly, to talk about something called entropy. The word bothered him as much as ‘Trystero” bothered Oedipa. But it was too technical for her. She did gather that there were two distinct kinds of this entropy. One having to do with heat-engines, the other to do with communication. The equation for one, back in the ‘30’s, had looked very like the equation for the other. It was a coincidence. The two fields were entirely unconnected, except at one point: Maxwell’s Demon. As the Demon sat and sorted his molecules into hot and cold, the system was said to lose entropy. But somehow the loss was offset by the information the Demon gained about what molecules were where.

“Communication is the key,” cried Nefastis. “The Demon passes his data on to the sensitive, and the sensitive must reply in kind. There are untold billions of molecules in that box. The Demon collects data on each and every one. At some deep psychic level he must get through. The sensitive must receive that staggering set of energies, and feed back something like the same quantity of information. To keep it all cycling. On the secular level all we can see is one piston, hopefully moving. One little movement, against all that massive complex of information, destroyed over and over with each power stroke.”

“Help,” said Oedipa, “you’re not reaching me.”

“Entropy is a figure of speech, then,” sighed Nefastis, “a metaphor. It connects the world of thermo-dynamics to the world of information flow. The Machine uses both. The Demon makes the metaphor not only verbally graceful, but also objectively true.”

“But what,” she felt like some kind of a heretic, “if the Demon exists only because the two equations look alike? Because of the metaphor?”

Nefastis smiled; impenetrable, calm, a believer. “He existed for Clerk Maxwell long before the days of the metaphor.”

But had Clerk Maxwell been such a fanatic about his Demon's reality? She looked at the picture on the outside of the box. Clerk Maxwell was in profile and would not meet her eyes. The forehead was round and smooth, and there was a curious bump at the back of his head, covered by curling hair. His visible eye seemed mild and noncommittal, but Oedipa wondered what hangups, crises, spookings in the middle of the night might be developed from the shadowed subtleties of his mouth, hidden under a full beard. “Watch the picture,” said Nefastis, “and concentrate on a cylinder. Don’t worry. If you’re a sensitive you’ll know which one. Leave your mind open, receptive to the Demon’s message. I’ll be back.” He returned to his TV set, which was now showing cartoons. Oedipa sat through two Yogi Bears, one Magilla Gorilla and a Peter Potamus, staring at Clerk Maxwell’s enigmatic profile, waiting for the Demon to communicate.

Are you there, little fellow, Oedipa asked the Demon, or is Nefastis putting me on. Unless a piston moved, she’d never know. Clerk Maxwell’s hands were cropped out of the photograph. He might have been holding a book. He gazed away, into some vista of Victorian England whose light had been lost forever. Oedipa’s anxiety grew. It seemed, behind the beard, he’d begun, ever so faintly, to smile. Something in his eyes, certainly, had changed . . .And there. At the top edge of what she could see: hadn’t the right-hand piston moved, a fraction? She couldn’t look directly, the instructions were to keep her eyes on Clerk Maxwell. Minutes passed, pistons remained frozen in place. High-pitched, comic voices issued from the TV set. She had seen only a retinal twitch, a misfired nerve cell. Did the true sensitive see more? In her colon now she was afraid, growing more so, that nothing would happen. Why worry, she worried; Nefastis is a nut, forget it, a sincere nut. The true sensitive is the one that can share in the man’s hallucinations, that’s all.

How wonderful they might be to share. For fifteen minutes more she tried; repeating, if you are there, whatever you are, show yourself to me, I need you, show yourself. But nothing happened. “I'm sorry,” she called in, surprisingly about to cry with frustration, her voice breaking, “It’s no use.” Nefastis came to her and put an arm around her shoulders.

“It's OK,” he said. “Please don’t cry. Come on in on the couch. The news will be on any minute. We can do it there.”

“It?” said Oedipa. “Do it? What?”

“Have sexual intercourse,” replied Nefastis. “Maybe there’ll be something about China tonight. I like to do it while they talk about Viet Nam, but China is best of all. You think about all those Chinese. Teeming. That profusion of life. It makes it sexier, right?”

“Gah,” Oedipa screamed, and fled, Nefastis snapping his fingers through the dark rooms behind her in a hippy-dippy, oh-go-ahead-then-chick fashion he had doubtless learned from watching the TV also.

“Say hello to old Stanley,” he called as she pattered down the steps into the street, flung a babushka over her license plate and screeched away down Telegraph. She drove more or less automatically until a swift boy in a Mustang, perhaps unable to contain the new sense of virility his auto gave him, nearly killed her and she realized that she was on the freeway, heading irreversibly for the Bay Bridge. It was the middle of rush hour. Oedipa was appalled at the spectacle, having thought such traffic only possible in Los Angeles, places like that. Looking down at San Francisco a few minutes later from the high point of the bridge’s arc, she saw smog. Haze, she corrected herself, is what it is, haze. How can they have smog in San Francisco? Smog, according to the folklore, did not begin till farther south. It had to be the angle of the sun. Amid the exhaust, sweat, glare and ill-humor of a summer evening on an American freeway, Oedipa Maas pondered her Trystero problem. All the silence of San Narciso the calm surface of the motel pool, the contemplative contours of residential streets like rakings in the sand of a Japanese garden had not allowed her to think as leisurely as this freeway madness.

For John Nefastis (to take a recent example) two kinds of entropy, thermodynamic and informational, happened, say by coincidence, to look alike, when you wrote them down as equations. Yet he had made his mere coincidence respectable, with the help of Maxwell's Demon.

Now here was Oedipa, faced with a metaphor of God knew how many parts; more than two, anyway. With coincidences blossoming these days wherever she looked, she had nothing but a sound, a word, Trystero, to hold them together.

She knew a few things about it: it had opposed the Thurn and Taxis postal system in Europe; its symbol was a muted post horn; sometime before 1853 it had appeared in America and fought the Pony Express and Wells Fargo, either as outlaws in black, or disguised as Indians; and it survived today, in California, serving as a channel of communication for those of unorthodox sexual persuasion, inventors who believed in the reality of Maxwell’s Demon, possibly her own husband, Mucho Maas (but she’d thrown Mucho’s letter long away, there was no way for Genghis Cohen to check the stamp, so if she wanted to find out for sure she’d have to ask Mucho himself).

Another parallel is Pynchon’s penchant for the period of the 1930s—the Baby Igor movie, the Porky Pig cartoon and the Shadow radio show (which began airing in 1930). When Nefastis explains the equations for the two types of entropy, he says that “[t]he equation for one, back in the ‘30’s, had looked very like the equation for the other. It was a coincidence.” What do the thirties signify to Pynchon?

We also run into postal metaphors with Maxwell’s Demon sorting the hot and cold molecules. The concept of entropy arose in 1865 upon the work of a German physicist named Rudolf Julius Emanuel Clausius when he mathematically explained the workings of the Carnot heat engine. Nicolas Carnot developed his hypothetical heat engine in 1824 by which it would transfer heat from one region to a cooler region and, in the process, use the energy to perform work. Carnot’s work was expanded upon a decade later by a French engineer named Benoît Paul Émile Clapeyron with a graph which revealed the Carnot cycle to be a closed curve. This led to a reformulation of the Carnot principle.

Clausius provided the mathematics to explain Clapeyron’s graph and yet a new formulation of Carnot’s principle now known as the Second Law of Thermodynamics when he introduced the world to the word “entropy”: the total entropy of an isolated system always increases over time, or remains constant in ideal cases where the system is in a steady state or undergoing a reversible process. In other words, heat energy can never be converted into mechanical energy with one hundred percent efficiency. There is always a certain amount of the energy that is lost, unusable. Entropy is basically negative energy. The reason your car’s exhaust can’t be doubled back around to your engine to increase its efficiency is that there simply isn’t much energy available in the exhaust to make using it worthwhile. The exhaust is the same temperature as the engine and without a temperature differential, no work can be done. It would cost more than one would get out of it to add devices to make the exhaust’s heat usable. The reason is that the free energy has already been used and exhaust is full of entropy or negative energy which cannot be used. When it comes to using energy to perform work, not only can you never get more energy out than you put into it but you can’t even break even. You’ll always lose more energy than you get out and the more energy you put in, the more you lose.

In information theory, entropy is the amount of unpredictability of the content of information. An information transfer requires three basic components: a transmitter to send out information, a channel on which to transmit that information and a receiver on that channel to receive the transmitted information. The information is sent out in the form of messages. If there are four possible messages, the receiver will try to guess which message will be sent out. Entropy is at maximum when any of the messages are as likely to be sent as any of the other three. But if the messages pertain to the weather and the sky is blue and cloudless, the receiver can deduce which message will be transmitted and so the entropy is greatly decreased.

In the Oedipa’s case, the Trystero is functioning as Maxwell’s demon sorting the mail into mainstream and underground creating hot and cold regions of messages—ordinary mail of bills, junk and Christmas cards and the mail that circulated around America’s underbelly whatever that might be. And what was the work that was being performed in the process? What was the goal of these little, black, demonic sorters in their little black box busily sorting away?

Either Trystero did exist, in its own right, or it was being presumed, perhaps fantasied by Oedipa, so hung up on and interpenetrated with the dead man’s estate. Here in San Francisco, away from all tangible assets of that estate, there might still be a chance of getting the whole thing to go away and disintegrate quietly. She had only to drift tonight, at random, and watch nothing happen, to be convinced it was purely nervous, a little something for her shrink to fix. She got off the freeway at North Beach, drove around, parked finally in a steep side street among warehouses. Then walked along Broadway, into the first crowds of evening.

But it took her no more than an hour to catch sight of a muted post horn. She was moseying along a street full of aging boys in Roos Atkins suits when she collided with a gang of guided tourists come rowdy-dowing out of a Volkswagen bus, on route to take in a few San Francisco nite spots. “Let me lay this on you,” a voice spoke into her ear, “because I just left,” and she found being deftly pinned outboard of one breast this big cerise ID badge, reading Hi! MY NAME Is Arnold Snarb! AND I’M LOOKIN’ FOR A GOOD TIME! Oedipa glanced around and saw a cherubic face vanishing with a wink in among natural shoulders and striped shirts, and away went Arnold Snarb, looking for a better time.

So the Trystero appear to be active in San Francisco. The reference to Roos Atkins suits concerns a San Francisco-based clothing manufacturer. Oedipa pinned involuntarily with a badge identifying her as Arnold Snarb. Oedipa is being turned male because in order for her to carry out her task of assessing and executing the estate of Pierce Inverarity, an estate that is a rich man's capitalist empire, Oedipa is a woman in a man's world and therefore unlikely to get anywhere. In Oedipa's world of the sixties when the sexual revolution was underway, women's rights were a big topic but not transgenderism, which was still a taboo topic. Here, suddenly, in the middle of the gay male capital of the world, is an attractive young woman advertising to the world that she is a man. A man looking for a good time. In Oedipa's world, men don't understand women and don't want to as evidenced by Mike Fallopian's remark at the Scope when Oedipa tells him how she had found the W.A.S.T.E. symbol on the wall in the ladies' room: “Women,” he only said. “Who can tell what goes on with them?” It is the woman's place to understand the man and his wants and needs, not the other way around.

Even more to the point, we cannot be certain that Arnold Snarb was a man to begin with. We only read about a winking cherubic face. Could Arnold have been a mannish-looking woman infiltrating a gay man's bar and then passing the transgender mantle to another woman unapologetically female in appearance? The possibility introduces us to a different phase of male domination--that even in the gay world gay men are more valued than gay women. Transgender then becomes not a choice of lifestyle for gay women but a way to survive in the male dominated world of homosexuality.

Somebody blew on an athletic whistle and Oedipa found herself being herded, along with other badged citizens, toward a bar called The Greek Way. Oh, no, Oedipa thought, not a fag joint, no; and for a minute tried to fight out of the human surge, before recalling how she had decided to drift tonight.

“Now in here,” their guide, sweating dark tentacles into his tab collar, briefed them, “you are going to see the members of the third sex, the lavender crowd this city by the Bay is so justly famous for. To some of you the experience may seem a little queer, but remember, try not to act like a bunch of tourists. If you get propositioned it’ll all be in fun, just part of the gay night life to be found here in famous North Beach. Two drinks and when you hear the whistle it means out, on the double, regroup right here. If you’re well behaved we’ll hit Pinocchio’s next.” He blew the whistle twice and the tourists, breaking into a yell, swept Oedipa inside, in a frenzied assault on the bar. When things had calmed she was near the door with an unidentifiable drink in her fist, jammed against somebody tall in a suede sport coat. In the lapel of which she spied, wrought exquisitely in some pale, glimmering alloy, not another cerise badge, but a pin in the shape of the Trystero post horn. Mute and everything.

All right, she told herself. You lose. A game try, all one hour’s worth. She should have left then and gone back to Berkeley, to the hotel. But couldn’t.

“What if I told you,” she addressed the owner of the pin, “that I was an agent of Thurn and Taxis?”

“What,” he answered, “some theatrical agency?” He had large ears, hair cropped nearly to his scalp, acne on his face, and curiously empty eyes, which now swiveled briefly to Oedipa’s breasts. “How’d you get a name like Arnold Snarb?”

So this apparently gay man is taken in by Oedipa's appearance. In an underground world where gender roles are turned topsy-turvy, Oedipa is turning those roles even more than the gay males are comfortable with. But she decides to use man-in-woman's body ruse to try and get his story:

“If you tell me where you got your lapel pin,” said Oedipa.

“Sorry.”

She sought to bug him: “If it’s a homosexual sign or something, that doesn’t bother me.”

Eyes showing nothing: “I don’t swing that way,” he said. “Yours either.” Turned his back on her and ordered a drink.

Oedipa took off her badge, put it in an ashtray and said, quietly, trying not to suggest hysteria, “Look, you have to help me. Because I really think I am going out of my head.”

“You have the wrong outfit, Arnold. Talk to your clergyman.”

“I use the U. S. Mail because I was never taught any different,” she pleaded. “But I’m not your enemy. I don’t want to be.”

“What about my friend?” He came spinning around on the stool to face her again. “You want to be that, Arnold?”

“I don’t know,” she thought she’d better say.

He looked at her, blank. “What do you know?”

She told him everything. Why not? Held nothing back. At the end of it the tourists had been whistled away and he’d bought two rounds to Oedipa’s three.

“I’d heard about ‘Kirby,’” he said, “it’s a code name, nobody real. But none of the rest, your Sinophile across the bay, or that sick play. I never thought there was a history to it.”

“I think of nothing but,” she said, and a little plaintive.

“And,” scratching the stubble on his head, “you have nobody else to tell this to. Only somebody in a bar whose name you don’t know?”

She wouldn’t look at him. “I guess not.”

“No husband, no shrink?”

“Both,” Oedipa said, “but they don’t know.”

“You can’t tell them?”

She met his eyes’ void for a second after all, and shrugged.

“I’ll tell you what I know, then,” he decided. “The pin I’m wearing means I’m a member of the IA. That’s Inamorati Anonymous. An inamorato is somebody in love. That’s the worst addiction of all.”

“Somebody is about to fall in love,” Oedipa said, “you go sit with them, or something?”

“Right. The whole idea is to get to where you don’t need it. I was lucky. I kicked it young. But there are sixty-year-old men, believe it or not, and women even older, who wake up in the night screaming.” “You hold meetings, then, like the AA?” “No, of course not. You get a phone number, an answering service you can call. Nobody knows anybody else’s name; just the number in case it gets so bad you can’t handle it alone. We’re isolates, Arnold. Meetings would destroy the whole point of it.”

“What about the person who comes to sit with you? Suppose you fall in love with them?”

“They go away,” he said. “You never see them twice. The answering service dispatches them, and they’re careful not to have any repeats.”

How did the post horn come in? That went back to their founding. In the early ‘60’s a Yoyodyne executive living near L.A. and located someplace in the corporate root-system above supervisor but below vice-president, found himself, at age 39, automated out of a job. Having been since age 7 rigidly instructed in an eschatology that pointed nowhere but to a presidency and death, trained to do absolutely nothing but sign his name to specialized memoranda he could not begin to understand and to take blame for the running-amok of specialized programs that failed for specialized reasons he had to have explained to him, the executive’s first thoughts were naturally of suicide. But previous training got the better of him: he could not make the decision without first hearing the ideas of a committee. He placed an ad in the personal column of the L.A. Times, asking whether anyone who’d been in the same fix had ever found any good reasons for not committing suicide. His shrewd assumption being that no suicides would reply, leaving him automatically with only valid inputs. The assumption was false. After a week of anxiously watching the mailbox through little Japanese binoculars his wife had given him for a going-away present (she’d left him the day after he was pink-slipped) and getting nothing but sucker-list stuff through the regular deliveries that came each noon, he was jolted out of a boozy, black-and-white dream of jumping off The Stack into rush-hour traffic, by an insistent banging at the door. It was late on a Sunday afternoon. He opened his door and found an aged bum with a knitted watch cap on his head and a hook for a hand, who presented him with a bundle of letters and loped away without a word. Most of the letters were from suicides who had failed, either through clumsiness or last-minute cowardice. None of them, however, could offer any compelling reasons for staying alive. Still the executive dithered: spent another week with pieces of paper on which he would list, in columns headed “pro” and “con,” reasons for and against taking his Brody. He found it impossible, in the absence of some trigger, to come to any clear decision. Finally one day he noticed a front page story in the Times, complete with AP wirephoto, about a Buddhist monk in Viet Nam who had set himself on fire to protest government policies. “Groovy!” cried the executive. He went to the garage, siphoned all the gasoline from his Buick’s tank, put on his green Zachary All suit with the vest, stuffed all his letters from unsuccessful suicides into a coat pocket, went in the kitchen, sat on the floor, proceeded to douse himself good with the gasoline. He was about to make the farewell flick of the wheel on his faithful Zippo, which had seen him through the Normandy hedgerows, the Ardennes, Germany, and postwar America, when he heard a key in the front door, and voices. It was his wife and some man, whom he soon recognized as the very efficiency expert at Yoyodyne who had caused him to be replaced by an IBM 7094. Intrigued by the irony of it, he sat in the kitchen and listened, leaving his necktie dipped in the gasoline as a sort of wick. From what he could gather, the efficiency expert wished to have sexual intercourse with the wife on the Moroccan rug in the living room. The wife was not unwilling. The executive heard lewd laughter, zippers, the thump of shoes, heavy breathing, moans. He took his tie out of the gasoline and started to snigger. He closed the top on his Zippo. “I hear laughing,” his wife said presently. “I smell gasoline,” said the efficiency expert. Hand in hand, naked, the two proceeded to the kitchen. “I was about to do the Buddhist monk thing,” explained the executive. “Nearly three weeks it takes him,” marvelled the efficiency expert, “to decide. You know how long it would’ve taken the IBM 7094? Twelve microseconds. No wonder you were replaced.” The executive threw back his head and laughed for a solid ten minutes, along toward the middle of which his wife and her friend, alarmed, retired, got dressed and went out looking for the police.

The executive undressed, showered and hung his suit out on the line to dry. Then he noticed a curious thing. The stamps on some of the letters in his suit pocket had turned almost white. He realized that the gasoline must have dissolved the printing ink. Idly, he peeled off a stamp and saw suddenly the image of the muted post horn, the skin of his hand showing clearly through the watermark. “A sign,” he whispered, “is what it is.” If he’d been a religious man he would have fallen to his knees. As it was, he only declared, with great solemnity: “My big mistake was love. From this day I swear to stay off of love: hetero, homo, bi, dog or cat, car, every kind there is. I will found a society of isolates, dedicated to this purpose, and this sign, revealed by the same gasoline that almost destroyed me, will be its emblem.” And he did.

Oedipa, by now rather drunk, said, “Where is he now?”

“He’s anonymous,” said the anonymous inamorato. “Why not write to him through your WASTE system? Say ‘Founder, IA.’”

“But I don’t know how to use it,” she said.

“Think of it,” he went on, also drunk. “A whole underworld of suicides who failed. All keeping in touch through that secret delivery system. What do they tell each other?” He shook his head, smiling, stumbled off his stool and headed off to take a leak, disappearing into the dense crowd. He didn’t come back.


Here we have a tenuous but interesting connection between the founder of IA and Inverarity. I had stated earlier that the Urban Dictionary defined Inverarity as a chubby, smiling man whom I compared to a type of Buddha figurine:



In the inamorato's story, the founder of IA decides to immolate himself Buddhist monk style. Seated on the floor Buddha-style, he starts laughing when the ex-coworker points out why he was fired in the first place--slow decision-making. So his story becomes legend and he is elevated to the status of a savior. A Buddha is one who is enlightened. A bodhisattva is one who forestall his enlightenment to help others reach enlightenment first. The founder of IA was about to become literally enlightened by setting himself on fire but he held off to help untold numbers of others to reject the idea of clinging to others or to material possessions which is a form of misery. The whole thing is facilitated by W.A.S.T.E. So we start to see what W.A.S.T.E. is doing: it is an underground movement linking all the various underground movements together. This makes the mega-movement strong and connected. IA was founded to defeat the idea of being in love with anything and that would include money. So did Pierce see W.A.S.T.E. as a threat to his empire and his love for material things? Or did he decide like Andrew Carnegie that money and wealth was a curse and should be dispersed through society philanthropically and was leaving it to Oedipa figure it out or die trying?

One must remember at the time that Pynchon wrote this story that homosexuality was still largely a taboo subject in most of America. In this day of people from all walks of life coming out as gay and transsexuals fighting for rights to use the public lavatory of their choice, homosexuality has become somewhat normalized. Gay people have left the dark niche which American society had consigned them to and, through the media, shed some light upon their world for the rest of society to see. In the sixties, the homosexual world was definitely underground. Cities would not allow gay clubs to set up in "safe" areas where children might see. So gay clubs were located in rundown, bad areas that were constantly raided by cops. Patrons were beaten and robbed outside.

Pynchon had foreseen the time when "normal" Americans would want to peek into the gay world and even rub elbows with the gay members of society (not understanding that they probably already knew someone who was gay but hiding it and might even such people themselves). So he creates a tourism industry that takes Americans visiting San Francisco into bonafide gay establishments--The Greek Way implying anal sex, of course--to see how this other population live, that the Pierce Inverarity's of the world would find some way to make a buck off them, to cheapen their existence and reduce them to a marketable commodity. For that is what it ultimately means to be accepted into the American mainstream, to have a price tag hung on you, to be exploited and used up. If you're lucky, the capitalist elite finds a way to milk you again through "retro" nostalgia. But the presence of the muted post horn inside the bar lets us know that no matter how marketable the gay community might become in the future, there will always be some part that remains underground, silent and waiting.

[Sorry to have gotten away from this for so long. So much has happened. But I should get back to this.--DB]

Oedipa sat, feeling as alone as she ever had, now the only woman, she saw, in a room full of drunken male homosexuals. Story of my life, she thought, Mucho won’t talk to me, Hilarius won’t listen, Clerk Maxwell didn’t even look at me, and this group, God knows. Despair came over her, as it will when nobody around has any sexual relevance to you. She gauged the spectrum of feeling out there as running from really violent hate (an Indian-looking kid hardly out of his teens, with frosted shoulder-length hair tucked behind his ears and pointed cowboy boots) to dry speculation (a horn-rimmed SS type who stared at her legs, trying to figure out if she was in drag), none of which could do her any good. So she got up after awhile and left The Greek Way, and entered the city again, the infected city.


So, again, Oedipa is woman caught up in a man's world where even the women are men and the other men are not even sure if she isn't really a man. Despite her being a woman, she isn't welcome, only cross-dressing men are. It is a world where there is no place for women except to give birth to male children, the future movers and shakers of the world. A world where men do not understand women and don't want to (remember Fallopian's contemptuous retort to Oedipa when she told him about the muted post horn she found drawn on a wall in the ladies' room at The Scope: "Women. Who can tell what goes on with them?") In the world of the IA, the chasm is so deep that people are even afraid to fall in love. Today's "incel" phenomenon is subverted from men who crave sex from women but can't get it to men who crave nothing from women and who just want to be left utterly alone. Their celibacy isn't involuntary but entirely and willingly self-imposed monk-like, hermit-like. And yet the misogyny inherent in both viewpoints appears to spring from the same source and seems every bit as misguided and dangerous.

And spent the rest of the night finding the image of the Trystero post horn. In Chinatown, in the dark window of a herbalist, she thought she saw it on a sign among ideographs. But the streetlight was dim. Later, on a sidewalk, she saw two of them in chalk, 20 feet apart. Between them a complicated array of boxes, some with letters, some with numbers. A kids’ game? Places on a map, dates from a secret history? She copied the diagram in her memo book. When she looked up, a man, perhaps a man, in a black suit, was standing in a doorway half a block away, watching her. She thought she saw a turned-around collar but took no chances; headed back the way she’d come, pulse thundering. A bus stopped at the next corner, and she ran to catch it.

Having now been initiated into this underground, Oedipa now starts to see its influence everywhere around her where before she had been so blissfully unaware. But she's not sure it's as widespread as it looks. Some of the muted post horns might just be her imagination. Then she sees a man in a black suit watching her—or is he? She takes no chances and flees.

So, the key word here is paranoia. We are delving into a fringe of society that thrives on secrecy and conspiracy theory where the most innocent of occurrences carry the most sinister and evil of intentions from shadowy agencies or entities that orchestrate these scenarios behind the scenes and disguising them as ordinary random occurrences. We enter the world of the occult. The word "occult" means hidden or secret from the Latin. By the early 16th century, it meant that which was not to be divulged. Later in the century, it took on the meaning that which cannot be comprehended, which was beyond understanding. By the 17th century, occult had come to be applied to magical traditions as alchemy, Rosicrucianism, Kabbalah, astrology, summonings, spell-casting, prophecy, scrying, witchcraft, devil worship and tarot. By the 20th century, UFOs and aliens could be added to the list of the occult. The contacteeism fad of the 50s was overtly occult where Invisible Colleges were replaced with Great Galactic Councils watching over humanity and making sure we never get too close to being gods lest we destroy the earth. Of course, why they allowed us to develop the atomic bomb if they were so concerned about our warlike ways is certainly something to question.

Part of the occult tradition has been the rejection of science or the appropriation of it for their own purposes (in which case, it isn't really science anymore). So, the impossible becomes possible, the unreal becomes real, the irrational becomes rational. There are always villains in back of everything. Nothing is random, everything is strictly determined and purposes are always nefarious. Underneath the entire history of the human race lie ulterior motives. So, the man in the black suit that Oedipa spies becomes a sinister agent. In modern times. the human race has even combined disparate areas of conspiracy into one. Hence, UFOs, Sasquatch, alien abduction and men in black are frequently featured together. For some UFO conspiracy advocates, the words "angel" and "demon" are interchangeable with "alien" and they believe praying and quoting bible verses actually ward off these aliens and prevent them from being abducted. It’s really the same old superstition wrapped up in science-fiction garb.

But here we are specifically concerned with the Men In Black or MIB as they are called because they feature in our story. The MIB came into the national consciousness in 1947 when a man named Harold Dahl and his crew aboard a marine salvager off the coast of Maury Island in Washington state spotted six doughnut-shaped UFOs hovering over them. One appeared to be in some kind of trouble and the other craft surrounded it. According to Dahl, the middle craft "shuddered" and released a barrage of "metal slag" that rained down on the salvager and its crew causing injury, damage and the death of Dahl's dog which was also onboard. This debris was afterwards collected and turned over to two military officers from McChord Field Air Force Base whose plane then stalled out in midair causing it to crash, killing both men and destroying all their evidence. Then a man dressed in a black suit and driving a black car arrived to visit Dahl and told him that bad things could happen to him and his family if he continued publicizing his sighting so he publicly stated the whole thing had been a hoax.

In 1953, one of the world’s original UFO researchers, Albert K. Bender, mysteriously shut down his organization, the International Flying Saucer Bureau. No one knew why. In 1962, Bender revealed in his book, Flying Saucers and Three Men, that he had been visited by three MIB who had basically put the fear of God into him and convinced him to get out of the UFO business. From that point on, the MIB became a cultural fixture in the American fringe and spread around the world. The MIB became a phenomenon unto themselves within UFO circles. They are, in fact, the creepiest aspect of ufology and conspiracy theory.



These "men" are often said to talk like robots or in a strange singsong manner. They generally wear dark glasses, black hats and black suits, shoes and ties with a white dress shirt. But there are stories of MIB dressed in military officers' uniforms. They seem otherworldly and their clothes often don't seem to fit them right, as if they aren’t fully human. Some walk and sit very stiffly. Some are very tall and others very short. One strange thing I've noted is that in the 1960s, MIB were said to be dark and Asian or Indian looking but are now almost all uniformly pale or doughy in complexion. Their hair is usually black but not always. It is often worn too long for government agents or military personnel. Their hair often appears to be a wig or hairpiece as though they are completely bald. Some MIB look identical being the same height and having the same face. Some appear to be robots but others seem quite human. They are said to be very intimidating and exude an aura of pure malevolence or evil.

The MIB show up generally after a witness sights a UFO even when the witness has told no one about the sighting. They do not identify themselves either by name or organization. They would then intently question the witness, sometimes for hours, about the sighting. They usually appear in threes but not always. Usually, one man would do the talking while the other two just stood there silently looking evil. At least one of them would stare at the witness throughout the interrogation, never taking his eyes off the person. Very unnerving to say the least. They often showed up in a large, black, official-looking car but sometimes would arrive and depart unseen and often would do so impossibly fast, e.g. they might leave the apartment of a witness, closing the door behind them and when the witness would immediately open the door to watch them leave, would find the hallway deserted and no one outside. The witness would then continue to have UFO encounters and, each time, these would be followed by a visit from the MIB or by a strange phone call warning the person to remain silent. If the witness mailed something off to another party concerning his experiences, the MIB would show up on his doorstep holding the envelope or package, telling him that he was becoming a problem and if he knew what was good for him, to keep silent (here, they have a very eerie and striking resemblance to Pynchon's Trystero agents subverting the mail service). They warn the witness to keep silent about the sighting or bad things will happen. They seem to possess telepathy. While they can be polite, they are never friendly.

The stories about these MIB are rather creepy or comically odd and I'll give a few case histories to illustrate the point. I am not saying any of these stories are true as that doesn’t matter for our purposes:

-Abductee Betty Andreasson revealed that on June 8, 1978 at her rather secluded home in Ashburnham, Massachusetts at 5:35 p.m., she and her daughter, Bonnie, were the only ones there when they noticed two disturbing figures outside in the driveway apparently looking over the property. One man was dressed in a pressed black suit, was very tall, and had an extremely high forehead. His very black hair provided a sharp contrast with his very pale skin. His partner was very short, dressed in a khaki jacket, and walked with a very strange shuffling gait. The tall man moved his arms in a very stiff way, unwilling or unable to bend them at the elbows. Betty and Bonnie were too frightened of these weird-looking “men” to confront them and thought of calling the police. But then some cars came over the hill nearby and the “men” scurried behind some bushes. The tall one pointed at something in his stiff, elbowless way. Then the pair disappeared behind a stone wall and a moment later, two automobiles were seen driving away.

-In the late 2000s, author Kurt Sigurdson was Yeti-hunting near Crescent City, CA. He was an avid Sasquatch-hunter and had done it a number of times but on this occasion, he actually saw a Sasquatch approach him while he sat in his jeep parked near a swamp. In 2014, he relayed the incident. He was parked along a deserted stretch of road by a swamp in the late twilight when he saw the Sasquatch approaching him. Sigurdson realized what an extremely rare opportunity this was and he was both thrilled and scared to be in this situation and rolled up his window because he was scared. Suddenly, a car pulled up behind Sigurdson. One of the occupants in the car had what Sigurdson described as a "strobe device" of the type that he and his father used when they scuba-dived when he was a boy. He described it as big and bulky with a pistol-grip but didn't believe they made them like that anymore. The person with the strobe shined it at the Sasquatch which Sigurdson said "bellowed" and took off across the swamp. Sigurdson was angry at what he thought initially were two Sasquatch-hunters or "Bigfooters" as he called them ruining his opportunity to see one of these creatures up close. "So these guys then proceed to pull up next to me," said Sigurdson, "and they are in this like old-style, late 1970s, uh, this compact Japanese-style vehicle. It looked like a Datsun or an early Toyota. And, uh, I don't know if they made Toyotas back then, maybe a Honda. It actually looked like a Datsun, frankly, which I know most people haven't even heard of Datsun at this point but that's what it looked like. And these guys, I got a good look at 'em, they had high cheekbones, they had a very kind of a gold complexion, ya know, I'm like Scandinavian, so when I was in Iceland, I saw a few people with this complexion, there are humans with this complexion and it's very unusual and I think the Icelanders even have a special kind of phrase for it cuz it's attractive but it's weird. It's just very golden and mixed with the light-colored hair and the high cheekbones and these guys were handsome but like they just, uh, the guy in the passenger side just looked at me like I was a bug or something like I was the most vile, annoying zoo animal or something that was out of line and required some sort of intervention or whatever. And so, uh, they had light-colored eyes, not piercingly light blue eyes but, ya know, kind of light-brown hair cut fairly short. And they were wearing matching it looked like, um, plaid shirts that looked kind of well pressed and most plaid is kind of rumpled. People don't wear it pressed so it was kind of weird. They were way too big for the vehicle. They were just huge in that--they dwarfed the vehicle inside. I don't know how big they were, it's hard to tell but, you know, well, well over six feet tall. And so this guy proceeds to take out his diving light thing and I know this sounds ridiculous cuz it sounds like Men-In-Black but it really happened and he points it at me and I looked away thinking I would be okay but it reflected off the foliage on the other side of my jeep and blinded me--and this is the weird thing--so it blinds me but normally if you look at a light bulb or something weird, you look at the sun, I don't know, you get blinded for a second but I just remember like when I looked up they were already way up on this little bridge flashing out over the swamp. So I don't know how much time had elapsed but, uh...and then I honestly can't remember what happened. I try to remember but it seems like they might have come and parked behind me and I took off or I drove around them when they were on the bridge--I can't honestly remember. It wasn't that long ago so it's disturbing that I can't remember what happened. I just remember driving really fast back to Crescent City to a motel and checking in and my left eye was just killing me and it felt like I had a sty in it or something and I'm not prone to that and since it happened, I've been getting these little sores in the corner of that eye and it even makes my eye twitch. So that night I, uh, [gasps] I just... [breathes heavily] I, uh...I, um, couldn't sleep, I couldn't eat and I couldn't hold down fluids and, uh, [gasps heavily and clears throat and sounds near tears] anyway I don't like talkin' about it. It just was putting a kink in my, uh [voice breaking], Bigfooting experiences after that. I just kind of quit doing it [clears throat]."

-In 2005, a postal worker in Washington DC, who does not wish to be identified (for this reason, we’ll simply call him PW), claimed to have the following encounter: PW had to make deliveries to a certain government building that had extremely extensive surveillance all around it. When he went inside to drop off mail, he found the only place he had access to was the mailroom. No other part of the building was open to him. PW had to press a buzzer to be let in. This went on for a few weeks. Then one day, as he was making his run to the building, PW saw “three figures crossing the street on their way to the building. At first glance, I thought they were normal. But as I looked closer, I was shocked at how strange they were. They were extremely thin and they didn’t walk by putting one leg in front of the other but sort of waddled by moving their whole bodies from side to side lifting one foot off the ground then the other foot in a whole body side-to-side waddle. But as strange as this was, this was not what frightened me. What frightened me was that they were absolutely thin! It was like they were as flat as a set of clothes that had been ironed. Their faces and bodies were entirely flat—no contours. The nose did not jut out—nothing. And they were also extremely thin. The best I could describe it is if you saw a suit hanging from a clothes hanger, that would be about the same thickness. It was like no thickness at all, just clothes hanging from a hanger. All three were dressed in black suits. They all had black sunglasses.” As PW watched, the three figures walked up to the door of the building and rang the buzzer. They were given admittance in a few seconds. “I was absolutely scared shitless as I had just been about to enter that same building. I really wasn’t sure what to do but I kind of steeled myself and slowly forced myself to ring the buzzer and enter the building figuring, ‘Hey, I might have imagined this.’ In any case, I should force myself to go through my routine until I can think this thing out. When I entered the mail room, there were like 10 (normal) men standing there just looking at me. It was really intimidating. They asked me if I had seen anything. I was kind of speechless for a second and one of THEM walked right up to me from the side and slightly behind me. I could tell it was one of the same types of things that I had seen crossing the street. It walked right up to me and I was too afraid to turn my head to the side and look at it. I am very scared just typing this right now, remembering it. It didn’t say anything, it just got right up close to me and I had a feeling of fear so intense. I felt as if my heart had just frozen and was going to fall out of my body onto the ground. Again, they asked me, ‘Did you see anything? What did you see?’ I just shook my head and stammered, ‘No, I didn’t see anything!’ PW said there was no way they couldn’t tell that he was terrified. “I thought they might hold me there and not let me go. But finally they said, ‘Okay, leave now.’ The MIB that was to my side and a little behind me kind of took a step back to make way and I had to steel myself to actually walk past it on my way to the door and I was out of the building. It is the bravest thing I’ve ever done in my life.” PW thought about the encounter when he got home. “At the time, I had never heard of the MIB. I had no idea what that thing was or what the government was doing. All I knew was that I was dealing with something far more powerful than me. I thought maybe it was some new type of robot and the government was doing test-runs on them but why that would be done in broad daylight I could not and still do not understand.” PW was so frightened that his first thought was that he should leave the country but then thought that if he did that, they might find that suspicious and track him down and kill him so he decided to do nothing and act as normal as possible. A short while later, he was assigned a new route by his supervisor who did not know why PW was being reassigned but told him that the order to reassign him came from higher up. As soon as he could procure new employment, PW quit but he still puzzles over what he saw that day and why it happened. He is adamant that, in spite of the weird flat creatures, the building was a government building being run by ordinary humans.

-This story happened in Japan. A man identified only as Kenji was a blogger and wrote about weird occurrences, cryptozoology (bizarre animals), UFOs and the like. One night while sitting in a nearby bar, he noticed three men come in. They superficially resembled the Japanese but were taller than most Japanese men. They wore black suits and ties but because the men were so thin, the suits were loose-fitting. They had very long fingers—a common trait of MIB. They looked like a mixture between Japanese and Middle Eastern but their skin was very smooth and looked almost translucent making them look sickly. They sat at a nearby table. They conversed in Japanese but with a weird accent that Kenji had never heard before. They ordered drinks but when they were brought over, they didn’t drink them. Once man tasted his drink, sort of grimaced and never touched it again. They sat still, occasionally fidgeting but otherwise doing nothing. One man attempting to use his cell phone but didn’t appear to know how and dropped it on the table. Other people in the bar began to stare at the strange men. Kenji felt they were there because of him and got up to leave. That’s when the one closest to him suddenly turned and started to converse with him. He remarked what a cold day it had been when, in fact, it was the middle of the summer and the day had been rather hot. The man wanted to know what Kenji did for a living. He told them. The man remarked that there must not be much money in it. Kenji asked them who they were and the man said they were businessmen just passing through. When Kenji tried to excuse himself, the man asked him to stay and they’d buy him a drink. During this time, the other two men did not speak but merely sat, one of them fidgeting with the chopsticks on the table as if he had never seen chopsticks before. The man said why go home and write about UFOs when he could stay with them and they would buy him drinks. The other men laughed at this point and Kenji said their laughter was humorless and menacing and raised his hackles. He felt scared and excused himself. Kenji said that maybe these really were businessmen and he misread the situation but these were the strangest businessmen he had ever seen.

-Author John Keel has written extensively about the MIB in his now famous 1975 book, The Mothman Prophecies, concerning UFO activity and the appearance of a terrifying flying “man” with hypnotic, glowing red eyes that the press dubbed the Mothman. The activities of the UFOs, the Mothman and the MIB culminate in the collapse of the Silver Bridge that spanned the Ohio River between in Point Pleasant, West Virginia and Gallipolis, Ohio on December 15, 1967 killing 46 people. After the tragedy, Mothman was seen no more in the area although the people of Point Pleasant have never forgotten him. Keel’s book was made into a movie in 2002. The story begins with a sewing machine salesmen name Woodrow Derenberger returning to his home in Mineral Wells, West Virginia one rainy night along I-77 from Ohio when a strange car passed him at amazing speed. This strange car had what Derenberger described as a “kerosene lamp chimney” and rode a few inches above the ground apparently having no wheels. This car cut Derenberger off forcing him to brake to a stop. A man dressed in black exited the “car” which then levitated about 40 feet into the air and hovered there. This strange man approached Derenberger wearing a large grin. He telepathically asked Derenberger to lower his window as he wanted to talk to him and that he meant no harm. Derenberger rolled his window down and the man asked Derenberger his name and then told him that his name was Indrid Cold.



Derenberger and Cold talked about the distant town of Parkersburg whose lights were off in the distance. Cold seemed unacquainted with simple earthly things. Finally, Cold told Derenberger that he had enough information and thanked him saying they would meet again. The grinning man walked back towards his vehicle which lowered itself to the street. Cold got in and the “car” zoomed off into the night at tremendous speed and was gone in a few seconds. Since that time, many people have claimed to have met Indrid Cold whom many believe to be an MIB.

We will now examine the role of MIB down through the ages.

DB Roy wrote: This is not written to get you to read the book. You should read it beforehand. That's not hard because it is very short--a novella, really--and you don't have to buy it as the text is available on the internet. If you read this essay without having read the novel first, it will be spoiled for you because I intend to analyze every part of it from beginning to end. I hope you find it engaging and educational. It certainly was educational for me.

This looks like a lot of fun. It helps me see why Pynchon is considered such a genius. It also helps make sense of why Franzen's "The Corrections" was so well received. I mean, it's good writing, but I think a lot of what made it "significant" was that it worked off Pynchon. At least, judging by what you have here.

The bad news (for me) is I'm not sure I'm up to reading "The Crying" right now. Even though it isn't that long. The good news is that it doesn't look to me like "spoiler" is a serious problem. As with a lot of good literature, it looks like it will be better the second time than the first. Because the meat is more in the writing than in the plot.

So maybe I will just read through your excerpts and comments at a leisurely pace. Enjoying them so far.

We will remember that I earlier I mentioned the Holy Vehm organizations of the Middle Ages in areas of Europe such as Germany. These were secret and the membership often paid midnight visits to those they had targeted. The accused would be put on trial and executed. The members wore black hoods. Often, warnings were given before a person would be summoned to the secret midnight trial. In the United States, the Ku Klux Klan fulfilled the role of the Vehm. But the MIB also have a striking resemblance to a Vehm: witness sights a UFO, MIB show up and warn witness to keep quiet. Midnight visits and threatening phone calls put the witness on notice—“We are watching you.” In his book, The Gods of Eden, author William Bramley writes:

If we were to conclude that MIB only started in 1947 in connection with UFO sightings, we would be very mistaken. In Brandenburg [in Germany] there appeared in 1559 horrible men, of whom at first fifteen and later on twelve were seen. The foremost had beside their posteriors little heads, the others fearful faces and long scythes, with which they cut at the oats, so that the swish could be heard at a great distance, but the oats remained standing. When a quantity of people came running out to see them, they went on with their mowing. Shortly after this manifestation, Brandenburg was struck by a terrible plague.

Bramley also writes:

. . . in the year of Christ 1571 was seen at Cremnitz in the mountain towns of Hungary on Ascension Day in the evening to the great perturbation [disturbance] of all, when on the Schuelersberg there appeared so many black riders that the opinion was prevalent that the Turks were making a secret raid, but who rapidly disappeared again, and thereupon a raging plague broke out in the neighborhood.

Black riders would describe our Trystero quite admirably.

We find it impossible to separate the MIB and the UFO phenomenon from occultism. Black has always been the color of evil, fear and the unknown. That’s why evil villains are always dressed in black. Black cats, bats, spiders—all symbolize evil. Imps of the devil are generally black in color.



Spiders and bats are blood-suckers and so share a bond with vampires who also generally depicted as black.



Vampires share something in common with the UFO phenomenon and that is cattle mutilation which seems to have started around 1974.



While a lot of ink has been spilled by UFO-writers trying to prove that aliens need the cattle parts for hybridization experiments or for manufacturing new diseases such as AIDS, they overlook the obvious connection. The mutilators are vampires. They suck the blood of the unfortunate cattle utterly dry but operate as phantoms leaving behind no teeth marks, claw marks or footprints. Even the flies, predatory and scavenging animals, will not touch the carcass marked with the mark of the vampire whom we depict as dressed in black suits and capes.

In the case of the mutilators, they are seen flying over the herds of the ranchers late at night in black, unmarked helicopters. The story was circulated these were Satanists with rich backers who buy the helicopters and they land in fields walking on rubber mats which leave no footprints, dart the cows, take their blood using some kind of suction pump and cut off those body parts and organs needed for rituals with surgical instruments. But these same types of helicopters are also associated with UFO sightings. Some witnesses have even seen what they believe are military men dressed in black uniforms and ballcaps entering and exiting these craft and UFO lore is rife with accounts of witnesses who swear they’ve seen these men mutilating cattle. In some accounts, standard Army scalpels are sometimes found nearby a dead cow.

The cattle mutilation has a connection to the Middle Ages also: the Christians were fond of spreading rumors that Jews stole Christian babies and sliced them up, drank the blood and then burned the corpses in Satanic rituals. The purpose of these stories was to stoke up fear and terror in the populace so that they could be manipulated into attacking the Jewish populace. These types of stories were repeated in the 1980s across the United States in what was dubbed “The Satanic Panic” in which people (mostly, if not entirely, made up of women) came forward and swore that they were ritually abused as children by family and/or neighbors who were “generational Satanists.” The story, whipped up by a complicit media (looking at you, Geraldo Rivera), went that these Satanists had infiltrated our federal and local governments as well as our schools, police forces and daycare centers in order to procure more children for sacrifice and sexual and physical abuse in rituals and that there were “millions” of these Satanists across the country and were probably already in YOUR town. People became terrified and were convinced it was happening around them. People were accused of belonging to Satanic child molestation rings and many were sent to prison on scant circumstantial evidence. The McMartin Preschool case was only one example of how the hysteria had very real and dire consequences for innocent people who had done nothing and many families were ruined by one family member making accusations against the others.

In 1897, a Kansas farmer named Alexander Hamilton, claimed a large cigar-shaped craft hovered over his farm one night shining down a bright beam and scaring the animals. When a heifer got caught in a fence, the beings in the craft (whom Hamilton claimed he could see and thought were hideous) lowered a red-colored noose around the bawling animal’s neck. 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”). Strangely, though, Hamilton’s story came out more than seven decades before real cattle mutilation being attributed to UFO activity began to actually occur.

Rich Reynolds makes the point that the MIB appear in the bible as the men in white. One such man tells Abraham to kill his son. In Ezekiel, six MIW appear at the gates of the city and one of them begins marking out those who will perish. MIW also seem to be assisting Jesus behind the scenes in the Gospels, their presence is never explained (while the OT calls them angels, the NT specifically refer to them as men dressed in white). MIW deliver death and pestilence to punish sinners. This may seem a bogus comparison to MIB but suppose the grim reapers in the field mentioned earlier just prior to a plague outbreak were arrayed in white raiment and the author, instead presenting them as black demons of sorts, said their appearance caused the deaths of many sinners instead of innocent people then we would see there really is no difference between the MIW and MIB. The good and the evil is entirely relative.

Modern study has examined offshoots of the MIB such as the phenomenon called “Hat Man.” 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.

In another case, a girl awoke to find a man in a hat bending over her grinning (Indrid Cold?). She screamed until her family burst into her room by which time the man, of course, was gone. 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. A friend of mine once woke to find a man dressed like an old-fashioned locomotive engineer standing over his bed staring at him. My friend said he was convinced the man was really there. “Take what you want,” my friend said but the man didn’t move a muscle. Instead his image began to quiver and crinkle like a burning photograph until it was gone.

In the case of UFO research, real humans sent by the government to investigate sightings have likely been confounded with the mysterious phantom-like entities cloaked in black. The former are real and the latter are not so real, i.e. one is natural, the other is supernatural. 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. This supernatural belief may be rooted in the perfectly natural truth of the sociopath or psychopath—a person in human form but with less feeling for others than an animal and who prays on others for self-gratification. What frightens us most about these particular creatures is that they have not been bred out of existence. They persist and in significant numbers. Their ability to mimic us well enough that they have survived and will continue to do so and, perhaps someday, prove they are the superior lifeform and outnumber us.

Pynchon’s Trystero likewise seem to be someone who has lived among us and yet apart from us for a very long time. Insiders that are outsiders. Like the Hashishim of Hassan-I-Saba, they are everywhere watching and listening. Like the MIB bureaucracy, somewhere there are Trystero offices where reports are filed, read and courses of action determined. It’s probably not known if Pynchon had read any MIB literature. “Flying Saucers and Three Men” had been out for less than four years before “Crying” was published. My guess would be that Pynchon likely read it simply because he is an author and authors are always in search of ideas. The image of the sinister figure in black suit and hat has become embedded in our culture. But the truth is, it has always been here.


From an episode of "Lost in Space." One has to wonder if the writers were deliberately inserting MIB into their plots. It would certainly seem so.



Two stills from the movie "Jeepers Creepers 2" (2003). Not only is the villain a Hat Man/MIB but there is actually a case where a woman swears a creature as this attached itself to her car while she was driving and resisted all her attempts to throw it off. What's really strange is that she claims this happened before this movie was released. Be that as it may, the MIB/Hat Man represents something rooted deep in our psyches. From Jungian psychology, it is something from the murky depths of the archetypes. H.P Lovecraft had nightmares about similar black creatures who snatched him up in the night and flew over the New England countryside dangling him in the air as he screamed in terror to which their only reply was to laugh horridly. He called them, appropriately, "night gaunts."


There is another case on record of a witness who claims to have encountered a malevolent entity he swore resembled the Hamburglar.


A play by Robert Anton Wilson, William Burroughs and Tom Waits. It concerns a German folktale similar to Faust.



Zorro ("Fox")--another mysterious, masked black rider. He was invented in 1919 by author Johnston McCulley. Although intended for only one story, the public reception after the character was portrayed in 1920 by Douglas Fairbanks kept McCulley busy writing new Zorro stories for the next four decades. Like all mysterious figures in black, Zorro can never be caught despite there being a hefty bounty on his head. He is a type of Robin Hood figure--part of the underworld and yet fighting on the side of good. He represents that thin line between good and evil. His ability to mimic authority figures and yet elude them makes him a type of folk hero. HIs evilness can become a tool for good whether with or without his consent. The Trystero could be ruthless and murderous but they fought against government monopolization of the mail, the primary form of communication before the telephone or telegraph. Likewise, this dark side of our psyche that we see as something other than ourselves provides psychological balance.