even a dog
can learn "no"
How to begin? A photo of a guitarist’s unnecessarily extensive “pedal-board” and amplifier “rig”? A link to a guitar forum discussion about guitar strings? Perhaps one about modeling amplifiers, signal-chains, or inline studio processing? Maybe include 3 or 4 different samples or videos (using differing sound processing) of unprocessed ad filtered recordings of the same tune? Any of these could introduce the mediated sequences of mediation from which we pretend that we might simply avoid, detox, or assume less mediated ways of living in their stead. If you’re not familiar with any of this, well . . . it’s quite the rabbit hole to jump down.
Thoreau’s woods (ahem) Dickinson’s garden, or figuratively, Joni’s garden at Woodstock, folks “going off the grid” or pretending that Paleo is somehow more authentic and immediate. Or, or, or. Formed internal mediation circuits structure perception, cognition, digestion just as much as human maintenance has reshaped most of what people perceive and experience as “nature.”
Immediacy is lightning. Immediacy is an experienced but incommunicable blow: Dickinson’s “truth” told “slant.” Circuitry effects how supposedly “immediate” things or events (say, Janis or Jimi at Monterey or whatever example works best for you) induce affective responses through our habitual receptions. We do not live in immediacy.
Consider a wound guitar string: its manufacturing determines how well the winding grips the core, installation processes determine how well the string grasps the tuning post, design determines its break-angle over the bridge, the bridge’s placement determines whether it can be tuned accurately, its height over an electric pickup determines its electromagnetic induction. All of these factors (and more) mediate how a string will convert human-produced energy into wave-forms that can be amplified acoustically or electro-magnetically, then acoustically. This could become a sort of Guignol parody of Adam Smith’s analysis of the manufacture of a pin, but hopefully the point is apparent. And that would just be for production.
Reception: how we hear music, recognize what can be music, respond to it, all are deeply mediated. Reception informs perception. Almost all 760 pages of Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow, which ends by invoking readers to sing a forgotten (made-up) hymn against the Standing Order, include multiple musical references. Of these, the most significant might be Charlie Parker’s breakthrough moment with “Cherokee” at Minton’s Playhouse. Without it modern jazz does not occur. In Gravity’s Rainbow it opens up the possibility of Slothrop’s resistance to his racist conditioning.
It anchors, however impossibly, a key scene linking the fictional Tyrone Slothrop to the real Jack Kennedy and Malcolm X in the restroom of the Roseland Ballroom in Roxbury. It figures in one of Slothrop’s sodium amytal sessions in scene 10, then however improbably, “the old Hohner” he finds in a German stream after V-E day is “the same one he lost in 1938 or -9 down the toilet at the Roseland Ballroom, but that’s too long for him to remember” (GR 622, 623). 40 pages later, the “Shit and Shinola” section of scene 66 concludes concludes “at the Roseland Ballroom” (GR 688). Pynchon remarks: “Eventually Jack and Malcolm got murdered. Slothrop’s fate is not so clear. It may be that They have something different in mind for Slothrop” (GR 688). It also might be, and Parker’s deconstruction of “one more lie about white crimes” (GR 63) hints, that “Slothrop’s Progress” (GR 25) from co-protagonist to provider of influential background music “playing a blues on a mouth harp” (GR 642) traces learning to play a variety of nos to the behaviors he’d been conditioned—like a dog—to perform.
In The Crying of Lot 49 Pynchon includes a few dim-witted Captain Beefheart-esque musicians who get exploited, more or less willingly, by record executives. It can seem like his critique of how music frames experience in Gravity’s Rainbow matches Frank Zappa’s well-known mocking rejection of pop, classical, and most jazz. (I’m too lazy to look it up, but there’s more than one interview in which he dismissed Bach and Beethoven in particular, and most classical composers because they, in his estimation, had to compose down to the comprehension and competence of in-bred, syphilitic, and ignorant ruling classes). This is an extreme version of “Gustav the composer”’s argument with Saure the drug dealer about Beethoven versus Rossini. Its first appearance, which ends as they learn of Webern’s death, gets more attention than its return, introduced in the text by a Webernesque “soprano voice [that] sings notes that never arrange themselves into a melody, that fall apart in the same way as dead proteins” (GR 621).
Clock that last relative clause. Gustav (& Zappa) attach cultural and political significance to “the German dialectic, the incorporation of more and more notes into the scale; culminating with the dodecaphonic democracy, where all the notes get an equal hearing” (GR 440). Pynchon’s clause narratively frames the lack of melody as a presence of death akin to the “amused dum-de-dumming of old Mister fucking Death he self” in Parker’s “bird’s singing” (GR 63, 64). Gustav (a proto-Adorno and Horkheimer) champions Beethoven as an “architect of musical freedom—he submitted to the demands of history, despite his deafness” (GR 440). That “dead proteins” clause exposes political philosophy as just as much of an imposition, if not more of one, than bio-chemistry, on the problem of how we conceptualize, respond to, and commit to actions on the basis of music. I mentioned last time Saure’s defense of Rossini’s joy and connection and love as opposed to Beethoven’s musical imperialism (GR 440).
In the later argument, when Gustav rants against Patronage as “an Old Folk’s Benevolent Association, screaming at Saure, “You’re caught in tonality . . . Trapped. Tonality is a game. All of them are. You’re too old. You’ll never move beyond the game, to the Row. The Row is enlightenment” (GR 621). Saure responds, in between “shoving incredible piles of cocaine into his nose” (GR 621):
"The row is a game too . . . Sound is a game, if you're capable of moving that far, you adenoidal closet-visionary. That's why I listen to Spohr, Rossini, Spontini. I'm choosing my game, one full of light and kindness. . . . You're too stuck with that stratosphere stuff and rationalize its dullness away by calling it 'enlightenment.' You don't know what enlightenment is, kerl, you're blinder than I am" (GR 621-622).
As they argue, Slothrop hikes to “a mountain stream where he’s left his harp to soak all night” (GR 622). He begins to play, and by the flowing water, “is closer to being a spiritual medium than he’s been yet, and he doesn’t even know it” (GR 622). After detailing Slothrop’s encounters with bagpipes, Pynchon mentions that this found “harp is the same one he lost” (GR 623). Descent through racially-charged shit; ascent to spirituality—one which will turn out to be inclusive and transcendental. It’s so obvious except for the 600 intervening pages. And all of the experiences. If the character doesn’t remember it, how should the reader be expected to recognize it? Still, multiple vectors point to this as a major moment in the story: Slothrop leaves the pointless argument about what music can mean to music. He reconnects with a past even if he doesn’t know it. And, he moves from subject to subtext.
Two scenes later, Slothrop’s background harmonica (I mean, who else’s could it be ;)) subtly bends Pynchon’s account of Eddie Pensiero, “connosseur of shivers” and barber, as he perceives “the shiver-borne blues” (GR 643). “Blues,” he writes, “is a matter of lower sidebands—you suck a clear note, on pitch, and then bend it lower with the muscles of your face. Muscles of your face have been laughing, tight with pain, often trying not to betray any emotion all your life. Where you send the pure note is partly a function of that. There’s that secular basis for the blues, if the spiritual angle bothers you” (GR 643). This is a harmonica-centered description: a guitarist usually bends blue notes on a guitar up. The framing, not in terms of politics or philosophy, but the projection of personal physiognomy, is the point—and movement will betray emotion.
It also fulfills the earlier prophesy of “tunes to be played, millions of possible blues lines, notes to be bent from, the official frequencies, bends Slothrop hasn’t really the breath to do . . . not yet but someday . . . . well at least when he finds the instrument it’ll be well soaked in, a lot easier to play” (GR 65-66).
Parker’s harmonies (along with Charlie Christian, Mary Lou Williamson, Miles Davis, Thelonious Monk, Bud Powell, and Dizzy Gillespie, and many more) and the complex rhythms introduced by Max Roach and Kenny Clarke moved, Pynchon insinuates beyond the dialectic “into a new kind of time that may have allowed you to miss the rest” (GR 472). If the Parker who could quote The Firebird at 300 bpm in a solo when he saw Stravinsky walk in existed to “gainsay the Man’s lullabies, to subvert the groggy wash of the endlessly, gutlessly over-dubbed strings” (GR 64), Slothrop moves beyond the frames of mediation and conditioning his military and corporate handlers presumed made him a tool. As Parker figured out a way to get through “Cherokee”’s deviously simple melody, so, perhaps, Slothrop’s counter-plots and gambols also revealed a few more lies about white crimes. And his music matches his actions in refusing to participate in them anymore.
Instead of hating the Herrero, he connects with them. First, he works with Andreas Orukambe to throw Major Marvy, ultra-MAGA racist off a train and then tips them off to Marvy’s planned lynching raid against the Schwarzkommando. Then he says a spell to give them safe passage. Combined in the narrative with Geli Tripping’s spell on Tchitcherine, the Russian agent sent (like Slothrop) to kill his half-brother Enzian, an Herrero leader, this ensures their safe passage.
There are sub-plots, backstories, and fragmentation, mostly there is this story of colonized people trying to survive. Unlike Tchitcherine, I think, Slothrop realizes that his family and country were sustained by genocidal, colonialized expropriation. Slothrop sees that his Berkshire, Massachusetts heritage and family business running one of the paper mills that figured in Melville’s “Paradise of Bachelors and Tartarus of Maids” means they “kill[ed] trees, amputating them from their roots, chopping them up, grinding them to pulp, bleaching them to paper and gettting paid for this with more paper” (GR 553). He turns to trees in the forest, understanding that “erach tree is a creature . . . not just some hunk of wood to be cut down” (GR 552-553), and realizes “there’s insanity in my family” (GR 553). When he asks what he can do to respond, “a medium-size pine” encourages him to sabotage lumbering machinery.
Just after this, and after the reader learns of his ancestor William’s heretical belief that “could . . . have been the fork in the road America never took” (GR 556), Slothrop (wearing Tchitcherine’s uniform) encounters Marvy again, and learns of his plans. He thinks “let me be able to warn them in time” (GR 562), they jump him, but recognize him, and explain a mandala he found to them, which he gives back to them and “hopes it will work like the mandala that Enzian told told him once, mba-kyere (I am passed over), mba-kayere . . . a spell against Marvy tonight, against Tchitcherine. A mazuzah. Safe passage through a bad night” (GR 563).
The spell works. Marvy (played in my internal audio book by Slim Pickens) gets delivered to British doctors who think they’re castrating Slothrop (their instructions are to get the guy in a pig suit); this backfires on Pointsman who wants revenge on Slothrop for fouling his plans for a Nobel Prize. In the process, all of their associated movie plots collapse: things don’t fall apart so much as the narratives we use to understand them do. Before we can say no to things, way before we might be able to change how we understand those things, we have to admit that we too have not been raised to be free.
Towards the end Slothrop’s “still thinking there’s a way to get back. He’s been changing, sure, changing, plucking the albatross of self now and then, idly, half-consciously, as picking his nose—but the ghost feather his fingers always brush by is America. Poor asshole, he can’t let her go. She’s whispered love me too often in his sleep, vamped insatiably his waking attention with come-hitherings, incredible promises. One day—he can see a day—he might be able finally to say sorry, sure and leave her . . . but not just yet” (GR 622).
After evading attempts at coercion, capture, and castration once his handlers realized he was not compelled to destroy the Schwarzkommando (the fictional troop of Herrero soldiers around which Gravity’s Rainbow really revolves), he transcends from character into mythological being in the storyworld. There’s only a few lines left to scrawl a conclusion. My mom’s disciplinary reinforcer was usually “well, even a dog can learn no.” Maybe it links to Pointsman’s kidnapped and abused Pavlovian dogs (and Grigory the octopus, and what he thinks is true of Slothrop), but I was thinking more of how she used to imply that dogs can and do display a better moral sense than people.
There’s one sequence (with Bianca on the Anubis) that is abhorrent, but beyond that, “Slothrop’s Progress” is actually encoded from the first thing we see him do: give a just rescued toddler a candy (although she wanted gum). Despite the never-quite specified abuse consequent upon his father Broderick selling him to Laszlo Jamf and the Interfarben Group for medical experiments, Slothrop remains almost a parody version of RWB Lewis’s American Adam trope. Except, that as, the Herero realized their myths no longer worked (and possibly so does the bluntly named Weissman/Blicero) in the corporate era, Slothrop’s character no longer fits:
Nalline Slothrop . . . is right here, in spirit, at this Kruppfest. So is her son Tyrone, but only because by now--early Virgo--he has become one plucked albatross. Plucked hell--stripped. Scattered all over the Zone. It's doubtful if he can ever be 'found' again, in the conventional sense of positively identified and detained" (GR 712).
Narrative’s role in playing internal policeman--the province of Althusser and Moretti--surfaces here, as does Ned Pointsman’s addiction to Fu Manchu stories and Sherlock Holmes pretense. Maybe that’s why some people simply cannot hear “Born in the USA” for what it is: they hear the framing, hear the generic codes, and can’t process the feeling in the words.
The songs, the musical references, and presences form the most omnipresent element of Gravity’s Rainbow. Next, of course, are the films and film plots and tropes which inform everything down to the device marking scene cuts. They project a reality as supple and delusive as that Pynchon imagines with Imipolex-G: and their purpose is to prevent seeing the genocide and insanity that Pynchon makes a constituent element of the emerging corporate industrial transformation.
It’s certainly not a triumph, but it is something that Slothrop evaporates, the Herero seem to succeed in firing Rocket 00001, or, at least, are not apprehended or stopped by the myriad forces trying to stop them, and Katje and Prentice also disappear. An invisible counterforce, is, after all, a powerful counterforce. As long as it exists as a possibility.