But as if, too, there might exist a place of refuge, up in the fresh air, out over the sea, someplace all the Anarchists could escape to, now with the danger so overwhelming, a place readily found even on cheap maps of the World, some group of green volcanic islands, each with its own dialect, too far from the sea-lanes to be of use as a coaling station, lacking nitrate sources, fuel deposits, desirable ores either precious or practical, and so left forever immune to the bad luck and worse judgment infesting the politics of the Continents--a place promised them, not by God, which'd be asking too much of the average Anarchist, but by certain hidden geometries of History, which must include, somewhere, at least at a single point, a safe conjugate to all the spill of accursed meridians, passing daily, desolate, one upon the next. --Thomas Pynchon, Against the Day

Pynchon actually imagines an Anarchist spa, Yz-Les-Bains, a Big Rock Candy Mountain for resting-up Wobblies, hidden in the foothills of the Pyrenees. To which he adds sprinkles--an Anarchist golf game, like croquet with flamingos in Alice in Wonderland, like the Mad Hatter's high tea. Another mirror heard from.

I mentioned Newton's third law of motion, which assures us that for every force acting on a body, the body exerts a force of equal magnitude in the opposite direction along the same line as the original. It would be comforting to think that something so straightforward applied as well to human behavior; that we could count on a balancing of the ethical books at the end of every bloody day; that there was some sort of entropic jurisprudence, according to which a pissed-off moral universe insisted on recovering its equilibrium; that the return of the repressed is a sure thing. On the one hand, as Ruperta explains to her London friends: "I can never claim forgiveness from anyone. Somehow, I alone, for every single wrong act in my life, must find a right one to balance it. I may not have that much time left." On the other, the Red Reverend Moss Gatlin can't be clearer: "If you are not devoting every breath of every day waking and sleeping to destroying those who slaughter the innocent as easy as signing a check, then how innocent are you willing to call yourself? It must be negotiated with the day, from those absolute terms." Pynchon himself suggests that somewhere below ground, or buried at either pole, or waiting in ambush on the other side of a portal, a membrane or a looking glass, invisible forces mass to motion like an angry Wormwood, for payback time. In his Mexico, the gringos can't sleep at night in their grand villas for fear of the bolero and fandango to come.

There were tunnels, channels, sewers, trollfolk and a polar redoubt in V as well. In The Crying of Lot 49 there was Tristero, a subterranean signal system for the dispossessed in "a separate, silent, unsuspected world" of squatters "living in the very copper rigging and secular miracle of communication." Underground in Gravity's Rainbow there was Dora, the prison camp and Mittelkwerke city of rockets and salt; and "the invisible kingdom" of crematoria ghosts on the other side of Pökler's vacuums; and the Schwarzkommandos who believed that the unappeased souls of their dead were waiting in the Arctic. In Vineland, besides Thanatoids and Indian spirits, there were the dolphinlike woge who hid beneath the ocean to see what we did with their world. In Mason & Dixon, to avenge the shadow-land shapes of the shamefully martyred and nameless dead against such puppet masters as the Royal Society and the British East India Company, there were dream-bodies, ghost-fish, black dogs, werewolves and Gnostic remnants. Remember the "luminous Phantoms" Mason saw, carrying bowls, bones, drums and incense, "flowing by thick as Eels," "ever and implacably cruel, hiding, haunting, waiting,--known only to the blood-scented deserts of the Night."

Now consult again the wonderful quotation in Vineland from William James's Varieties of Religious Experience:

Secret retributions are always restoring the level, when disturbed, of the divine justice. It is impossible to tilt the beam. All the tyrants and proprietors and monopolists of the world in vain set their shoulders to heave the bar. Settles forever more the ponderous equator to its line, and man and mote, and star and sun, must range to it, or be pulverized by the recoil.

Except that in Vineland, just as the People's Republic of Rock and Roll failed to survive government repression in the '60s, so Zoyd Wheeler's "harbor of refuge" in the California redwoods fell in the '80s to narcs, RICOs, Reaganauts, tree-killers, earth-rapers, television anchorfaces, yuppie greedheads and the death-loving Wasteland thought police, in spite of the best efforts of kickass woman warrior DL Chastain, whose martial artistry included the Vibrating Palm, the Hidden Foot, the Enraged Sparrow and the "truly unspeakable" Gojira no Chimopira. And in our own brave new twenty-first century it's not only hard to find a spare Wobbly, but where did all the liberals go? If the gringos in their villas dream at all, it's of sugar-plum stock options. Never mind social justice, what happened to habeas corpus? Faith-based globocops police the words in our mouths and the behaviors in our bed while sorehead cable blabbercasters rant them on. Blood lust, wet dreams, collateral damage and extraordinary rendition; Halliburton and Abu Ghraib; an erotics of property, a theology of greed and a holy war on the poor, the old, the sick, the odd and the other--when oh when will the Tatzelwurm turn? None of this, of course, is news to Pynchon, which is why we're left with brilliant patter, fancy footwork, wishful thinking and a plaintive ukulele.

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