VirusHead

The semaphore (four rotating disks of light) atop the Adobe tower in downtown San Jose is indeed transmitting a message.

Never heard of a semaphore? There are multiple meanings. In programming, it concerns methodology for mutual exclusion (see “excluded middles” below), parallel processing, and synchronization.

Predating the electrical telegraph, the semaphore was defined as an optical telegraph that conveyed information via visual signals – towers with blades, shutters, flags and so on.

semaphore

I wonder to what extent the Adobe semaphore might be performing the first function? It performs the second as a kind of street art – well, I think that’s the purposeless purpose, but one can never be sure. And that’s the whole fun of it.

Communication and information processing are inherent to both meanings. I could go on and on on here on topics like entropy and noise and Maxwell’s Demon and so forth, but this is already going to be a long post.

Mark Snesrud and Bob Mayo cracked the code of the Adobe Semaphore. The message is the entire text of the Thomas Pynchon novel The Crying of Lot 49.

One almost can’t help wondering about the process by which such a text would have been chosen. I suspect it was really just a kind of postmodern viral “resonance” – and yeah, it’s cool – but there is a sinister tone underlying this novel. You’d almost have to close your eyes to the possibility of other meanings in that performative choice. Are they interpeting themselves, then, as the “tower” of the novel? Or the postal underground? Or the command-control, or the shadows, or the lines of flight? Or all, or none?

The 1965 Pynchon novel is a serious satire of the military industrial complex and communication systems of command and control. It’s full of playfulness and paranoia, but the larger theme is the tendency of informational chaos to multiply under the pressure of increasing attempts at control.

Ultimately, the reader is forced into the position of making many of the interpretive decisions; people who limit themselves to literalist readings had best avoid this one. It’s not as good a novel as Gravity’s Rainbow – and in some ways it’s harder to understand – but it’s classic Pynchon, and a good place to start.

My favorite passage from the book (pp. 179-182, only two paragraphs!):

Yet she knew, head down, stumbling along over the cinderbed and its old sleepers, there was still that other chance. That it was all true. That Inverarity had only died, nothing else. Suppose, God, there really was a Tristero then and that she had come upon it by accident. If San Narciso and the estate were really no different from any other town, any other estate, then by that continuity she might have The Tristero anywhere in her Republic, through any of a hundred lightly-concealed entranceways, a hundred alienations, if only she’d looked. She stopped a minute between the steel rails, raising her head as if to sniff the air. Becoming conscious of the hard, strung presence she stood on — knowing as if maps had been flashed for her on the sky how these tracks ran on into others, others, knowing how they laced, deepened, authenticated the great night around her. If only she’d looked. She remembered now old Pullman cars, left where the money’d run out or the customers vanished, amid green farm flatnesses where clothes hung, smoke lazed out of jointed pipes. Were the squatters there in touch with others, through Tristero; were they helping carry forward that 300 years of the house’s disinheritance? Surely they’d forgotten by now what it was the Tristero were to have inherited; as perhaps Oedipa one day might have. What was left to inherit? That America coded in Inverarity’s testament, whose was that? She thought of other, immobilized freight cars, where the kids sat on the floor planking and sang back, happy as fat, whatever came over the mother’s pocket radio; of other squatters who stretched canvas for lean-tos behind smiling billboards along all the highways, or slept in junkyards in the stripped shells of wrecked Plymouths, or even, daring, spent the night up some pole in a lineman’s tent like caterpillars, swung among a web of telephone wires, living in the very copper rigging and secular miracle of communication, untroubled by the dumb voltages flickering their miles, the night long, in the thousands of unheard messages. She remembered drifters she had listened to, Americans speaking their language carefully, scholarly, as if they were in exile from somewhere else invisible yet congruent with the cheered land she lived in; and walkers along the roads at night, zooming in and out of your headlights without looking up, too far from any town to have a real destination. And the voices before and after the dead man’s that had phoned at random during the darkest, slowest hours, searching ceaseless among the dial’s ten million possibilities for that magical Other who would reveal herself out of the roar of relays, monotone litanies of insult, filth, fantasy, love whose brute repetition must someday call into being the trigger for the unnameable act, the recognition, the Word.

How many shared Tristero’s secret, as well as its exile? What would the probate judge have to say about spreading some kind of legacy among them all, all those nameless, maybe as a first installment? Oboy. He’d be on her ass in a microsecond, revoke her letters testamentary, they’d call her names, proclaim her through all Orange Country as a redistributionist and pinko, slip the old man from Warpe, Wistfull, Kubitschek and McMingus in as administrator de bonis non and so much baby for code, constellations, shadow-legatees. Who knew? Perhaps she’d be hounded someday as far as joining Tristero itself, if it existed, in its twilight, its aloofness, its waiting. The waiting above all; if not for another set of possibilities to replace those that had conditioned the land to accept any San Narciso among its most tender flesh without a reflex or a cry, then at least, at the very least, waiting for a symmetry of choices to break down, to go skew. She had heard all about excluded middles; they were bad shit, to be avoided; and how had it ever happened here, with the changes once so good for diversity? For it was now like walking among matrices of a great digital computer, the zeroes and ones twinned above, hanging like balanced mobiles right and left, ahead, thick, maybe endless. Behind the hieroglyphic streets there would either be a transcendent meaning or only the earth. In the songs Miles, Dean, Serge and Leonard sang was either some fraction of the truth’s numinous beauty (as Mucho now believed) or only a power spectrum. Tremaine the Swastika Salesman’s reprieve from holocaust was either an injustice, or the absence of a wind; the bones of the GI’s at the bottom of Lake Inverarity were there either for a reason that mattered to the world, or for skin divers and cigarette smokers. Ones and zeros. So did the couples arrange themselves. At Verperhaven House either an accommodation reached, in some kind of dignity, with the Angel of Death, or only death and the daily, tedious preparations for it. Another mode of meaning behind the obvious, or none. Either Oedipa in the orbiting ecstasy of a true paranoia, or a real Tristero. For there either was some Tristero beyond the appearance of the legacy America, or there was just America and if there was just America then it seemed the only way she could continue, and manage to be at all relevant to it, was as an alien, unfurrowed, assumed full circle into some paranoia.