It takes time for revelation to come to light. The number in the book title aligns one day before such a thing takes place.
Entropy is Eschatology. Further, it causes an overgrowth of information (the inversion of the second law) needed for the demon to “sort” things out (remember the segregated “hot” sheep and the “cool” goats). At the end of time there is an equivalent heat death but our blinded heroine (Oedipus/Oedipa-us) is confounded in her inability to do any more sorting work and so now waits patiently at the eschaton’s auction. Oedipa (us) are the crying Lot waiting for that moment of hierophany after the 49th day, on the threshold of the Bardo.
The final era of history–terminal, perhaps–is symbolized by the descent of the Holy Ghost who inaugurates a politics of anarchy similar to that described in Yeats’s prophetic poems. The attempt to find some source of spiritual revelation as an alternative to existential malaise, is compromised by Pynchon’s inability-like us, at this point – to imagine a revelation uncontaminated by the paranoia-inducing mystique of cabalaistic Gnosticism. So get settled back, await Portal 49.
To understand the message of the postal service, it is necessary to understand Joachin of Flora, the Renaissance and what happened before and after. The narrative Pynchon is explicating is still not easy to grasp.
There is a narrative and the secret societies know (or knew– are there anymore secret societies that have(gnosis) without wanting to Control?) the cradled ideas relevant for the cosmological cycle. The message can only be read by people experimenting to see if they can perceive the pattern’s caused by time’s arrow. That’s why Pynchon is so difficult, but so is understanding Entropy. That’s why they call it a trumpet. which signals the apocalyptic event.
I have kept trying to understand entropy, but my grasp becomes less sure the more I read. […] But the qualities and quantities will not come together to form a unified notion in my head. It is cold comfort to find out that Gibbs himself anticipated the problem, when he described entropy in its written form as “far-fetched … obscure and difficult of comprehension”. When I think about the property nowadays, it is more and more in connection with time, the human one-way time we‘re all stuck with locally here, and which terminates, it is said, in death. Certain processes, not only thermodynamic ones but also those of a medical nature, can often not be reversed. Sooner or later we all find this out, from the inside.
Thomas Pynchon, Slow Learner
Pynchon is an erudite writer and even when he was a Slow Learner his characteristic concern was with what we might call the cosmic context, with intimations that the characters and plots of earth must somehow answer to a mysterious teleology of extrahuman forces. His disdain for the post-structuralist/modernist thread shows and we prove the truth of his narrative’s metaphors that to our surprise occurred in history. Thus, secular history is a diversionary tactic, not useful to us. This must be understood. Otherwise we are wasting our time to sort out the information.
She is 28 years old but Oedipa Maas is terrified that she cannot see her face in the mirror. This happens in San Narciso. Here’s a new riddle from the Sphinx that spoke to Oedipus:
What do you get when you cross a narcissist that can not enjoy their own shattered reflection?
A paranoid schizophrenic with a spray can. Is the joke that these narratives can (such as The Exegesis of Phillip K Dick) but need not create the cycle of history and destroy our pregnostic harmony and rapport with the order of nature? What is Thomas Pynchon’s Apocalypse? It might be as simple as the dualism of choosing between becoming a donkey instead of the gnostic/knowing/controlling asshole.
…And destroying all computer technology.
“In the beginning, for Pynchon, was the malaise, and in the early stories its matrix is a Weltanschauung shaped by existentialist premises: mankind alone and alienated in a indifferent cosmos, vulnerable to entropy and nihilistic despair. This sense of a sterile, enveloping neutrality is challenged almost at once, however, by a paranoia of religious dimensions-the increasing suspicion, suggestive of ancient Gnosticism, that humanity is trapped in a history increasingly manipulated by antihuman forces. It is this dialectic between the concepts of cosmic indifference and quasi-demonic conspiracy that generates the larger significations of The Crying of Lot 49. The latter unfolds as an explicit analogue of Pentecostal revelation, with the difference that what is to be revealed is tinged with the moral ambiguities of the animating conspiracy.”
Dwight Eddins
Hardcover, 9780253319074