Cyclomite
Joe Varo reports, on Pynchon-l at [1] regarding Cyclopropane, "At first I thought that this was just something the TP made up. But just for the hell of it I looked it up and found that it is an explosive with anaesthetic properties, or vice versa."
Quoting page 184, Varo also asks, " 'From then on, whenever a dynamite blast went off, even far away out of earshot, something concurrent was triggered somewhere in Lew's consciousness...after awhile even if one was only about [italics in original] to go off. Anywhere.' Am I missing something or reading too much into it? Or does this make cyclomite akin to another pynchonian compound?"
Is Cyclomite somehow related to Imipolex G?
Anville Azote responds to Varo:
[...]
There's a darkly comic scene hinging on this property in the first
episode of James Burke's series **Connections** (1978), wherein the
Great Northeastern Blackout strikes just when a woman is giving birth
to twins --- under cyclopropane anaesthesia. In the darkness, a nurse
walks into the room with a lighted candle. . . .
[...]
[2] to
One should perhaps note the triangular shape of cyclopropane. Indeed one should! Only just took the trouble to look at that wikipedia entry, and follow the definitions for Cyclopropane/ tetrahedranes/ tetrahedrals:
"Cyclopropanes taken to the extreme are tetrahedranes and propellanes."
"Tetrahedrane is a hypothetical hydrocarbon with chemical formula C4H4 and a tetrahedral structure."
"A tetrahedron (plural: tetrahedra) is a polyhedron composed of four triangular faces, three of which meet at each vertex."
So no wonder Lew falls in with the TWIT (True Worshippers of the Ineffable Tetractys): "The Tetractys is a triangular figure consisting of ten points arranged in four rows: one, two, three, and four points in each row. As a mystical symbol, it was very important to the followers of the secret worship of the Pythagoreans."
And this is all yet aother instance of the 4 motif. Great stuff.
