baseball, control

[Bonnie Surfus (ENG)]

On Fri, 1 Sep 1995, Gillies, Lindsay wrote:

> 
> Thanks...fabulous characterisation.   I'm responding, of course, to the 
> point that the mound couldn't *possibly* be about the ancient fertility 
> goddesses (per Bonnie) because it has to be a mound because otherwise the 
> ball would drop too far (except Nolan Ryan's).  My thought about the pitcher 
> was not really that he (?she?) *controlled* the game as that (more in 
> keeping with fertility mounds) he initiated a phase.  The pitch, to drop out 
> of archetypal *and* computer architecture terms and into the infinite 
> poverty of economics, is the intial exogenous variable in the system.
> 
> I'd like to pose a larger question.  Clearly TRP is fascinated by and 
> knowledgeable about systems, mathematics, thermodynamic, etc.  But isn't he 
> using systems as an expository device?  If so, what is he getting at---I'm 
> proposing that its not systems per se.  This is crudely obvious, but systems 
> themselves get so fascinating that we forget what they're for, both vis a 
> vis "users" and perhaps among ourselves "readers".
> 
> just a pebble in the pool,
> lcg
> 
A HUGE mistake made by many is to assume the Goddess is all and only 
about Fertility.  I did not mean to imply this, adding tainted fuel to 
the fire.  But beyond this correction, I drop out.  There are some areas 
of Pynchon's work, or anybody else's, that defy this . . . 

At least for me--there is such a thing as a simple ambiguous metaphor 
that can evoke much, beyond one or two "theories" that negate others.  

I guess I only like to compete with myself.

Bonnie