Mason & Dixon

by Thomas Pynchon

“Alas,” beams the Revd, “must we place our unqualified Faith in the Implement, as the Tale accompting for its Presence,— these Family stories have been perfected in the hellish Forge of Domestick Recension, generation ’pon generation, till what survives is the pure truth, anneal’d to Mercilessness, about each Figure, no matter how stretch’d, nor how influenced over the years by all Sentiments from unreflective love to inflexible Dislike.” “Don’t leave out Irresponsible Embellishment.” “Rather, part of the common Duty of Remembering,— surely our Sentiments,— how we dream’d of, and were mistaken in, each other,— count for at least as much as our poor cold Chronologies.”

The Driver’s Whip is an evil thing, an expression of ill feeling worse than any between Master and Slave,— the contempt of the monger of perishable goods for his Merchandise,— in its tatter’d braiding, darken’d to its Lash-Tips with the sweat and blood of Drove after Drove of human targets, the metal Wires work’d in to each Lash, its purpose purely to express hate with, and Hate’s Corollary,— to beg for the same denial of Mercy, should, one day, the rôles be revers’d. Gambling that they may not be. Or, that they may.

“A fine young Mulatto gal’d be just your pint of Ale I’d wager, well tonight you’re in luck, damme ’f you’re not.” “Not in the Market,” replies Dixon, as he imagines, kindly. “Ho!” drawing back in feign’d Surprize, “what’s this, not in the market, how then may I even begin to educate you, Sir, or should I say, Friend, upon this Topick? The news, Friend, being that all are in the Market,— however regrettably,— for ev’ryone wants a slave, at least one, to call his own. . . .” “Sooner or later,” Dixon far too brightly, “— a Slave must kill his Master. It is one of the Laws of Springs.” The Herdsman of Humans, who has been staring at Dixon, now looks about for a line of Withdrawal. “Give me Engines, for they have no feelings of injustice,— sometimes they don’t exist, either, so I have to invent what I need . . . ,” at which point the Enterpriser has edg’d his way as far as the door.

Having acknowledg’d at the Warpath the Justice of the Indians’ Desires, after the two deaths, Mason and Dixon understand as well that the Line is exactly what Capt. Zhang and a number of others have been styling it all along— a conduit for Evil. So the year in Delaware with the Degree of Latitude is an Atonement, an immersion in “real” Science, a Baptism of the Cypress swamp, and even a Rebirth,— not some hir’d Cadastral Survey by its nature corrupt, of use at Trail’s End only to those who would profit from the sale and division and resale of Lands. “Guineas, Mason, Pistoles, and Spanish Dollars, splendorously Vomited from Pluto’s own Gut! Without End! All generated from thah’ one Line . . . ? Yet has any of it so much as splash’d or dribbl’d in our Direction?

“Very well,— yet Right Lines, by minimizing Distance, are highly valu’d by some,— Commanding Officers, Merchants, Express-Riders? Must these all be Creatures of Sha?” “Without Question. Officers kill men in large numbers. Merchants concentrate wealth by beggaring uncounted others. Express-riders distort and injure the very stuff of Time.” “Then why not consider Light itself as equally noxious,” inquires Dixon, “for doth it not move ever straight ahead?” “Ah!” a gleam as likely Madness as Merriment appearing in his Eye. “And if it moves in some other way?” “Ev’ry Survey would have to be re-run,” cries Dixon. “Eeh,— marvellous,— work for all the poor Dodmen till Doomsday!”

“What’s that you’re writing? Looks like Verse . . . ?” “My Epitaph. Like to hear it? ‘He wish’d but for a middling Life, Forever in betwixt The claims of Lust and Duty, So intricately mix’d,— To reach some happy Medium, Fleet as a golden Beam, Uncharted as St. Brendan’s Isle, Fugitive as a Dream. Alas, ’twas not so much the Years As Day by thieving Day,— With Debts incurr’d, and Interest Due, That Dreams were sold to pay,— Until at last, but one remain’d, Too modest to have Worth, That yet he holds within his heart, As he is held, in Earth.’

“Many of us in the parsonical line of work,” admits Wicks Cherry-coke, “find congenial the Mathematics, particularly the science of the fluxions. Few may hope to have named for them, like the Reverend Dr. Taylor, an Infinite Series, yet such steps, large and small, in the advancement of this most useful calculus, have provided us a Rack-ful of Tools for Analysis undreamed-of even a few years ago, tho’ some must depend upon Epsilonics and Infinitesimalisms, and other sorts of Defective Zero. Is it the Infinite that tempts us, or the Imp? Or is it merely our Vocational Habit, ancient as Kabbala, of seeking God there, among the Notation of these resonating Chains. . . .”

“Thy trip to Scotland will be closely watch’d, Mason, from below. . . . ‘Once the solar parallax is known,’ they told me, ‘once the necessary Degrees are measur’d, and the size and weight and shape of the Earth are calculated inescapably at last, all this will vanish. We will have to seek another Space.’ No one explain’d what that meant, however . . . ? ‘Perhaps some of us will try living upon thy own Surface. I am not sure that everyone can adjust from a concave space to a convex one. Here have we been sheltered, nearly everywhere we look is no Sky, but only more Earth.— How many of us, I wonder, could live the other way, the way you People do, so exposed to the Outer Darkness? Those terrible Lights, great and small? And wherever you may stand, given the Convexity, each of you is slightly pointed away from everybody else, all the time, out into that Void that most of you seldom notice. Here in the Earth Concave, everyone is pointed at everyone else,— ev’rybody’s axes converge,— forc’d at least thus to acknowledge one another,— an entirely different set of rules for how to behave.’

“I had my Boswell, once,” Mason tells Boswell, “Dixon and I. We had a joint Boswell. Preacher nam’d Cherrycoke. Scribbling ev’rything down, just like you, Sir. Have you,” twirling his Hand in Ellipses,— “you know, ever . . . had one yourself? If I’m not prying.” “Had one what?” “Hum . . . a Boswell, Sir,— I mean, of your own. Well you couldn’t very well call him that, being one yourself,— say, a sort of Shadow ever in the Room who has haunted you, preserving your ev’ry spoken remark,— ” “Which else would have been lost forever to the great Wind of Oblivion,— think,” armsweep south, “as all civiliz’d Britain gathers at this hour, how much shapely Expression, from the titl’d Gambler, the Barmaid’s Suitor, the offended Fopling, the gratified Toss-Pot, is simply fading away upon the Air, out under the Door, into the Evening and the Silence beyond. All those voices. Why not pluck a few words from the multitudes rushing toward the Void of forgetfulness?”

Mason will go back to waking day after day in Sapperton, piecing together odd cash jobs for the Royal Society, reductions for Maskelyne’s Almanack,— small children everywhere, a neat Observatory out in the Garden, a reputation in the Golden Valley as a Sorcerer, a Sorcerer’s Apprentice, who once climb’d that strange eminence at Greenwich, up into another level of Power, sail’d to all parts of the Globe, but came back down among them again,— they will be easy with him, call him Charlie, at last. Another small-town eccentric absorb’d back into the Weavery, keeping a work-space fitted out someplace in the back of some long Cotswold house, down a chain of rooms back from the lane and out into the crooked Looming of those hillside fields.

“Well Hullo, Death, what’s that you’re whistling?” “Oo, little Ditters von Dittersdorf, nothing you’d recognize, hasn’t happen’d yet, not even sure you’ll live till it’s perform’d anywhere,— have to check the ’Folio as to that, get back to you?” “No hurry,— truly, no hurry.” “You ’cute Rascal,” Death reaching out to pinch his Cheek. . . . Some times Mason wakes before traversing into the next Episode,— sometimes the bony Thumb and Finger continue their Approach, asymptotickally ever closer, be he waking, or dreaming something else.

When the Hook of Night is well set, and when all the Children are at last irretrievably detain’d within their Dreams, slowly into the Room begin to walk the Black servants, the Indian poor, the Irish runaways, the Chinese Sailors, the overflow’d from the mad Hospital, all unchosen Philadelphia,— as if something outside, beyond the cold Wind, has driven them to this extreme of seeking refuge. They bring their Scars, their Pox-pitted Cheeks, their Burdens and Losses, their feverish Eyes, their proud fellowship in a Mobility that is to be, whose shape none inside this House may know. Lomax wakes, sweating, from a poison’d Dream. Euphrenia has ascended the back Stairs, as the former Zab Cherrycoke those in front, to Slumber. Ethelmer and DePugh, Brae and the Twins, have all vanish’d back into the Innocence of Unconsciousness now. Ives is off at his Midnight Junto,— yet Mr. LeSpark and the Revd remain. The Room continues to fill up, the Dawn not to arrive. And if it all were nought but Madmen’s Sleep? The Years we all believ’d were real and deep As Lives, as Sorrows, bearing us each one Blindly along our Line’s relentless Run. . . .

Mason has seen in the Glass, unexpectedly, something beyond simple reflection,— outside of the world,— a procession of luminous Phantoms, carrying bowls, bones, incense, drums, their Attention directed to nothing he may imagine, belonging to unknown purposes, flowing by thick as Eels, pauselessly, for how long before or after his interception, he could never know. There may be found, within the malodorous Grotto of the Selves, a conscious Denial of all that Reason holds true. Something that knows, unarguably as it knows Flesh is sooner or later Meat, that there are Beings who are not wise, or spiritually advanced, or indeed capable of Human kindness, but ever and implacably cruel, hiding, haunting, waiting,— known only to the blood-scented deserts of the Night,— and any who see them out of Disguise are instantly pursued,— and none escape, however long and fruitful be the years till the Shadow creeps ’cross the Sill-plate, its Advent how mute. Spheres of Darkness, Darkness impure,— Plexities of Honor and Sin we may never clearly sight, for when we venture near they fall silent, Murdering must be silent, by Potions and Spells, by summonings from beyond the Horizons, of Spirits who dwell a little over the Line between the Day and its annihilation, between the number’d and the unimagin’d,— between common safety and Ruin ever solitary. . . .

“Since I was ten,” said Doc, “I wanted you to take me and Willy to America. I kept hoping, ev’ry Birthday, this would be the year. I knew next time you’d take us.” “We can get jobs,” said William, “save enough to go out where you were,— ” “Marry and go out where you were,” said Doc. “The Stars are so close you won’t need a Telescope.” “The Fish jump into your Arms. The Indians know Magick.” “We’ll go there. We’ll live there.” “We’ll fish there. And you too.”