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Pökler may only be witnessing tonight -- or he may really be part of it.

But what is there to be witnessed? And where? The section on pp. 410 - 413 that deals with Liebig, Kekulé and Jamf is set, maybe, in Pökler's dreaming unconscious mind; or perhaps in the Collective Unconscious; or... I am interested in dissecting this section to try and figure out what's going on at certain key junctures -- if you don't find that interesting please don't bother reading along.

Just to get some context: in the fourth paragraph of p. 410, Franz and Ilse are falling asleep in Franz's room. (An indeterminate number of days have elapsed since Franz realized, on p. 409, that "Now, too late, when he wanted to act, there was nothing to act on.") Ilse is fantasizing out loud about what life will be like on the moon, "Earth blue and green in the sky..." Then the section I'm talking about begins, and it continues until, in the last paragraph of p. 413, Franz realizes the voice he is hearing is not (dreamt) Jamf at all, but a colleague from down the hall, waking him up. -- In between these two points we get a marvelous panoramic fantasy world.

But let's begin at the beginning: "Should he have told her what the 'seas' of the moon really were?" Franz is lying awake in bed, worrying about his "daughter" -- I'm pretty sure at this point he still believes the girl in question is his bona fide daughter. A few of his thoughts (rationalizing the "re-education" camps) are quoted verbatim, then the narrator's voice comes back in, describing Franz staring at the ceiling, trying to fall asleep. There is a flight fantasy; I'm not totally clear whether Franz's transition into sleep involves a dream of flight, or the act of falling asleep is being compared to soaring -- is this double reading intentional?

But finally we're off the ground, gliding on the currents of dream... exactly whose dream, is open to question. Because "Franz may be only witnessing tonight -- or he may be a part of it." This line has been causing me to stop and think every time I glance at it; I'm not sure what to make of it. We're told this is Kekulé's (famous) dream; but how can he, dead these 40 years, be dreaming? My first thought was, Franz is dreaming about Kekulé's dream; but that doesn't ring quite true when I look at the text. Nor does, "Franz is dreaming about the collective unconscious and the assignment of dreams to different people."

What I think has happened is, the narrator somehow got behind Franz's mind and into the meat of the collective mind. (Quick note to the belligerent: I am not making any assertions here pro or contra the validity of the psychological theories of Carl Gustav Jung, or about Pynchon's opinions in that regard.) To me, the sections of this book which impute an organizational/bureaucratic logic to systems where I would not have looked for one, e.g. the skin cells or now the collective unconscious, are magical. I would describe this section as a seance, with TRP as medium and Franz serving as our control.

The narrator quickly links this mystical bureaucracy with the mundane, tying it in with the Rathenauer seance back at the end of Part I. And it's the perfect link, because Kekulé's dream can be seen as the starting point for IG and LSD -- we get a quick history lesson along with some parenthetical paranoia about Maxwell's Demon.

Let's skip ahead to the passage on p. 412 that begins, "Kekulé dreams the Great Serpent holding its own tail in its mouth, the dreaming Serpent which surrounds the world." Such a beautiful image! The Serpent is to be "delivered into" the System, i.e. this beautiful image is going to be used to produce synthetic chemicals for the benefit of IG Farben, "removing from the rest of the World these vast quantities of energy to keep its own tiny desparate fraction showing a profit" -- an eloquent argument for environmentalism. [ok, simplistic -- that was my response to the passage on a gut level.]

The bus ride that began as a metaphor for living inside the System (like Kekulé?) acquires a more leisurely pace, and metamorphoses into a continuation of our seance, our tour of this familiar-yet-different universe, this "countryside whose light is forever changing". This can happen in such a seamless fashion because our tour is a tour of "the System" on a different level -- that is to say, the dreamer is imagining a maniacal bus ride, which represents his life inside the System (and here we are already moving back, into Franz's head); the narrator meanwhile is driving and conducting our "magic bus" through the territory of the collective unconscious, which is the System behind the System. This is the deepest moment of the dreaming state -- the moment when we catch a glimpse of Blicker, who authors of the narrative which frames every other story -- we must pull back and go on with the trip.

Getting back on the bus we find out (as if we did not already know!) that art and images mean only, exactly, what They decide they mean. And all at once, we are squarely back inside Franz's dream, where Jamf is lecturing about aromatic Rings. He is asking -- and this ties the whole experience together for me -- "who, sent, the *Dream*?"