Alexander Ulanov. Communication

Communication/dt
Thomas Pynchon. Shout out lot 49. - St. Petersburg: Symposium, 2000

Alexander Ulanov

Publication date: August 30, 2000

“I feel different and much better now after being green, even sickly green, even if just for one minute . ” There is something to be green about. Someone who is about to commit suicide is asked: “And it took you almost three weeks to decide on this? Do you know how long it would have taken an IBM 7094? Twelve microseconds . ” Energy is spiritualized, love is mechanized. "The virgin and the dynamo equally symbolize both love and energy, and therefore they are essentially identical . " Computers will not think like people, but human behavior will become programmed. “Less of his own personality and more and more guises. He comes to a meeting, and the room suddenly fills with people... He is a walking collective image ,” for whom the wife is the object of an interesting report, and not for the question of how she feels after getting out of room where she was locked with an armed madman. The stage dissolves. “When these guys sing “She loves you,” then I feel - yes, she does; she may be many people from different parts of the world, from different times, different colors and ages, but she loves. And the word “you” means everyone " . Collectivity is stifling. You have to give up the rights to any invention made while working for the company. It takes cunning to hide how smart you are. Everything moves “from the least to the most probable state, from diversity to uniformity, from ordered uniqueness to a kind of chaos . ” There is nowhere to run, the world outside is embroidered inside the same tower of imprisonment that is everywhere. The belly is growing, the hair is thinning. Otrada is the sea and the psychoanalyst. I want to feel completely drunk, but I can’t. The crying of lot 49, lamentation of fate number 49.

And at three in the morning a telephone voice cuts in, starting with the second secretary of the Transylvanian Consulate, looking for a bat that had escaped (obviously from Count Dracula), and then transforming into the speech of a Chicano bandit, then an actor. A song breaks in.

It's no good for a surfer to dream
About merging with a surfer
When in the night - like a cat, like a thief -
Humbert is walking. Humbert is slimy.

And in the new development area there will be a lake, where at the bottom there are galleons from the Bahamas, fragments of Atlantis columns from the Canary Islands, giant mollusk shells from Indonesia. The road is a syringe needle stuck into the vein of an avid drug addict in Los Angeles. “Discount coupons, pink leaflets advertising goods at markets, cigarette butts, combs with broken teeth, job advertisements, yellow pages torn from the telephone book” - and people, for some unknown reason, exchanging one piece of this chaos for another, driving Volkswagens and watching action films on Sony TV about heroes killing Japanese and Germans by the thousands.

You can cry and reflect at the same time. “She thought that tears would fill the entire space behind the lenses and would never dry out if the glasses fit tightly enough to the eye sockets. Then she could forever preserve the sadness of this moment and look at the world through the refraction of tears, these special tears that open up an unprecedented variety of connections in important intervals from crying to crying . " A can of nail polish flies around the bathroom like a rocket. Either teenagers steal a boat, or a 17th-century play is playing in the theater. dt - differential time, a small moment when everything changes, albeit slightly, - and delirium tremens, delirium tremens. The Garbage Man loves Vivaldi's Sixth Violin Concerto. The agents have grown to love their precarious lives and are slowly forgetting which governments they work for. On the oscilloscope, instead of Lissajous figures, there are figures of Lesage, the author of the picaresque novels “The Lame Demon” and “The History of Gilles Blas.” Tsar Nicholas II (instead of Alexander with the same number) abolishes serfdom and sends the Far Eastern Fleet to aid the Northern States in the Civil War. (Pynchon is infecting. "Kinneret is a large lake in Israel. In this case, a fictional place in California. In 1954, a children's camp of the same name was opened there" - in a fictional place... This is no longer a novel, these are notes.) Where does memory disappear, compressed in a person? Where are the letters of the burnt book found? “I want to understand whether there is a connection here or not. I’m curious , ” says Oedipa Maas.

Put things in order, create constellations of meanings. But haven’t they already done this by creating a secret mail for all sorts of strange people - inventors of perpetual motion machines, those who want to come to an agreement with dolphins, unlucky lovers. A system “with the help of which a certain number of Americans truly communicate with each other, leaving all the lies, all the everyday worries, all the boredom of mental poverty to the official government mail . ” Or is all this a hallucination? Or is it a joke of a millionaire who left behind a wound-up mechanism of people in order to somehow last? Or is it not a matter of either/or choice, but rather empowerment? The law of exclusion of middle is "crap that should be avoided at all costs . " Not the ones or zeros of a computer's binary code, but streets that are hieroglyphs and just land, songs that are truth and just sound, an America beyond which there is another; and if you don’t see anything beyond America, then this - and not the search for secret mail - is paranoia. Maybe the inventor of a device for converting information into energy is not such a crazy person: we now live in an information society. Why simple when it can be complex is the motto of inventors of all times and peoples. “I like having sex when they talk about Vietnam, but China is the best. We think about all these Chinese. Swarming, multiplying. There you have it, the abundance of life. It’s sexier, right?”

The most important thing is communication. So Oedipa is looking for her - like Oedipus, who was looking for the truth. "You tell a girl, 'I love you.' inappropriate... All this is called noise . " But we live by this noise, this ambiguity; and man never fully understands man. The transfer of information from one person to another does not equalize them, because in each of them this information generates its own. The melody of an isolated greenhouse, a corner of order in the chaos of the city, collides with the cacophony of a party on the floor below, with a jazz quartet and five drunken sailors. But perhaps this noise supported the life of the chick, which the hiding one could not warm up? Oedipus finds himself; Oedipa - his personal connection with the world?

A voice from outside calls you to take a secret path, leads you out of the landfill into the depths of the earth - but only there are the same tapestries from which you ran away, the same comfort. Or is it different? After all, the alternative life with its heroes, drinking bouts and trash heaps is no less clichéd than the usual one, and the alternative Tristero mail, if it exists, is also too similar to a gang, and its user is obliged - obliged! - write at least once a week. Isn't it better than the anarchist miracle of the deaf and dumb who dance whatever comes into their head, but no one collides with each other? Or the Pacific Ocean - the trace of the Moon’s separation from the Earth, which is seen as “a greenish-gray desert, a barren wasteland, stretching to the very horizon, and in order to cross it, you just need to step overboard and go; taking a tent and provisions, you can travel in this way from the city in town" ? Not a messiah on the waves or on dry land - but just like that. Tristero fought with the government mail "Thurn and Taxis" - but it was in the castle of the Countess of Thurn and Taxis that Rilke wrote the first lines of the Duino Elegies.

“The effect of metaphor, then, is a breakthrough either to truth or to falsehood, depending on where you are at the moment: inside in safety or outside in confusion . ” But where - in what case? And where are we?