Devotees of the Nut Cutlet

Well, once again in a lax moment the Mongolian authorities let me slip back into the motherland. Brother Palzang was correct; our flight path took us right over the North Pole, probably too high to spook the reindeer though, and then, ironically, across Mongolia to get to Beijing. I thought it a bit rude of United not to quickly drop down and let me off. “Friendly Skies,” indeed.

So nice to be home, if a bit chilly. A shot I took out my eastern window early this morning shows snow showers on the horizon:

Tomorrow, it might struggle to 40F. Nights are already in the teens. Mooj and Nita were really happy to see me. Well, not “me” per se; rather, “another large, warm body.” This time of year, they’re especially snuggly. I submit another pic from this morning for evidence:

I’m well-prepared, however. I brought over my good sleeping bag and a new winter hat courtesy of my sis Laura – part of why we chose it was the name: Windy Monkey. My other sis, Sarah, contributed to the cause a big ol’ bag of Madagascar coffee beans, procured right from the source on her last jaunt to Antananarivo. Global family, what can I tell you? Other javanese gifts originated in Costa Rica and Italy, adding nicely to my stash of Dean’s Beans. Just might make it to spring (ie, June). This is a relief. I love my brothers and sisters at the temple where I stayed, but goodness gracious do they subsist on the cruddiest, most ill-brewed coffee imaginable. I’m going to chalk it up to their developing profound equanimity in meditation; I shudder to contemplate the alternative, blithe indifference.

Which brings me, naturally, to Thomas Pynchon. There are few objective truths. One is this: Pynchon is America’s greatest living writer, maybe the greatest ever. I mentioned recently that I finished his mammoth latest, Against the Day. Well, I went right back to the beginning and started again, something I've never done before. Why? Because I read for pleasure, and no one serves it up with more hilarious brilliance than Pynchon. Now that I have the characters and interlinking stories kind of straight, I can focus on his sheer virtuosity with the English language.

I’ll offer a couple examples. My inner clock’s still not adjusted, so I was up at 2AM and read for a while. My sudden laughter at these passages made one of the cats leap off the bed. It all needs a brief set-up, though. The time is the turn of the 20^th c. Lew Basnight had been working for a Chicago detective agency looking into Anarchist conspiracies among the mine workers in Colorado, and their penchant for dynamiting things and people connected to the plutocrats, or "plutes". Lew himself gets knocked out by a blast and is rescued by an unlikely pair, Neville and Nigel, two effete Brits on an Oscar Wilde-inspired holiday who have an unquenchable enthusiasm for the more exotic strains of mind-altering psychotropics. They all board a train, get to Galveston, and Lew is persuaded to join them on their voyage back to England.

Once there, Lew discovers they are members of a pseudo-spiritualist group of the sort that was all the rage at the time. I’ll let Pynchon take it from here. Brother Don in particular will like this. Keep in mind that Pynchon is consciously mimicking the prose style of the time period he’s writing about:

“The T.W.I.T., or True Worshippers of the Ineffable Tetractys, were headquartered in London at Chunxton Crescent, in that ambiguous stretch north of Hyde Park known then as Tyburnia, in a mansion attributed to Sir John Sloane, which during its last tenancy, dating roughly from the departure of Madam Blavatsky from the material plane, had become a resort for all manner of sandaled pilgrims, tweed-smocked visionaries, and devotees of the nut cutlet. At this most curious of moments in the history of spiritual inquiry, in keen competition with the Theosophical Society and its post-Blavatskian fragments, as well as the Society for Psychical Research, the Order of the Golden Dawn, and other arrangements for seekers of certitude, of whom there seemed an ever-increasing supply as the century had rushed to its end and through some unthinkable zero to the other side, the T.W.I.T. had chosen to follow a secret neo-Pythagorean way of knowledge based upon the sacred Tetractys,

1

2 3

4 5 6

7 8 9 10

by which their ancient predecessors had sworn their deepest oath. The idea, as nearly as Neville and Nigel could explain it, was to look at the array of numbers as occupying not two dimensions but three, set in a regular tetrahedron – and then four dimensions, and so on, until you found yourself getting strange, which was taken to be a sign of impending enlightenment.”

Aaaahahahaha! By that standard, I may be halfway there! But wait, it gets better. Soon, Lew engages Neville and Nigel to take him out in search of an hallucinogenic compound called ‘cyclomite’ he had grown quite addicted to in the American West but had run out of. If I taught a writing seminar – which, thank karma I do not – I would make the class study the following entry into Dr. Coombs de Bottle’s lab as a sublime example of a two-paragraph set-up. And it does tie in, finally, with what I was talking about before:

“Owing to a stubborn belief in Whitehall that the eccentric enjoy access to paranormal forces with nothing better to do than whisper suggestions for ever-more-improved weapons design, personnel offices throughout the Empire had been on alert for at least a generation to the genteel stammer, the ungovernably darting eyeball, the haircut that no known pomade could subdue. Dr. Coombs de Bottle, actually, failed to meet these criteria. Suave, cosmopolitan, wearing a snow-white lab ensemble from Poole’s of Savile Row in hand-loomed Russian duck, smoking black Egyptian cigarettes in an amber holder, not a hair on his face allowed anywhere it should not be, he seemed suited more to a calling of public ingratiation, the international arms trade, perhaps, or the clergy. But something, some actor’s polish to his style of address, hinted at a nebulous past, and a grateful awareness of having, after all, found haven here. He greeted Neville and Nigel with a familiarity that Lew might have found suspect had there been less in the vast workshop they were now being ushered into to claim his attention and eventually, he supposed, trouble his dreams.

“Electrical arcs stabbed through the violet dusk. Heated solutions groaned toward their boiling points. Bubbles rose helically through luminous green liquids. Miniature explosions occurred in distant corners of the facility, sending up showers of glass as nearby workers cowered under seaside umbrellas set up for just such protection. Gauge needles oscillated feverishly. Sensitive flames sang at different pitches. Amid a gleaming clutter of burners and spectroscopes, funnels and flasks, centrifugal and Soxhlet extractors, and distillation columns in both the Glynsky and Le Bel-Henninger formats, serious girls with their hair in snoods entered numbers into log-books, and pale gnomes, patient as lock-pickers, squinted through loupes, adjusting tremblers and timers with tiny screwdrivers and forceps. Best of all, somebody in here somewhere was making coffee.”

I read Pynchon in exactly the same way I listen to great jazz.

Much more cool stuff to talk about soon; we've hit the ground running. I’m going day after tomorrow to see Amaa – the 104-year old yogini,remember? – in her home province of Khentii, which I’ve never visited before. Will of course return to share all the stories and pix.

Wow. I just realized that the music wafting through the window as I type this is a popular version of the 21 Homages to Tara, the female Buddha! I love Mongolia.

Comments

[Jim]

Can I say "Welcome Home!"?

I always enjoy your blog entries. I'm afraid Pynchon is a bit too difficult for me. It reminds me of reading Lord of the Rings out loud. Such rich language, just a bit to rich for this working-class guy.

Anyway, just wanted to say "Sain Bainuu" from a new friend over at Shendrup Ling. If you ever stop by the Stupa Cafe, ask for Jim (the new ESL teacher who arrived in UB while you were traveling) at the front desk.

Jim

[minnie]

ok, that's it, it went on my library queue

[Oliver]

Good to hear that you had a safe journey!