A Soul In Ev'ry Stone

[Deng, Stephen]

This may be completely out in left field, but "a face on ev'ry 
mountainside" reminds me of Mt. Rushmore.  Could "the Riders" then be the 
Rough Riders of Teddy Roosevelt, the Preterite president fortunate enough 
to be in office when the monument was built and therefore have his face 
appear with Lincoln, Washington, and Jefferson?

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From:  stencil at bcn.net[SMTP:stencil at bcn.net]
Sent:  Monday, April 07, 1997 12:49 PM
To:  pynchon-l at waste.org
Subject:  Re:  A Soul In Ev'ry Stone

Here's yet another personal take on TRP's presumed intent.

>1  "There is a hand to turn the time,
> 2  Though thy glass today be run,
> 3  Till the light that hath brought the Towers low
> 4  Find the last poor Pret'rite one...
> 5  Till the Riders sleep by ev'ry road,
> 6  All through our crippl'd Zone,
> 7  With a face on ev'ry mountainside,
> 8  And a soul in ev'ry stone...
>
>    Now everybody "

The first two lines' unending roond of watch on and watch off is
completed in the last six.   The humbling and exposing light of 3 and
4 might  be actinic nuclear violence but the warm noonday sun can make
the tallest tower cast a very short shadow and is an easier light to
seek by.
The sleeping Riders could be vanquished Tolkeinesque darkness but
there are reasons to think of them more sympathetically:
  -there is no strong earlier LOTR reference;
 -the name Hupla, the mirrored analog of Tchitcherine's Jake the
Horse, calls up "Hupla, hupla, Reiter...," a knee-dandling nursery
jingle that  ends with a weary unhorsed rider-child;
 -GR's strong Rilke line brings in those who rode with the Cornet,
"...through the night, through the day...  And courage is grown so
weary and longing so great...[ where ]...alien huts crouch thirstily
by mired springs..." to the final laughing fountain.
Line 6 is a problem, possibly weakening the rest: it's hard to imagine
a classically-trained Restoration or Georgian churchman using "Zone"
without a prurient snigger.
It's hard to find GR-internal references for the last two lines.  One
can see a kind of millennial achievement of, on the one hand a
toleration of dynamite Borglum improvements on nature, and on the
other a cultivation of the appreciative restraint of Buonarrotti's
_Prigioneri_ (however much that restraint was imposed by death.)

"Now everybody" can be taken as straight Thomas Pynchon;  he had used
the dialect "Now ever'body" at the end of an earlier song (possibly at
the end of the section detailing Saeure Bummer's humiliations; books
are not at hand here) and he had not hesitated to address us directly
before, as in the plea for manly love to supplant sour bitchy
queerdom.  Of course no one can object to using the book as a
political manifesto;  having purchased it, you could sell it page by
page for asswipes or roach wrappers, although that doesn't work well
either. YMMV, and while text is trigger, we're all chambered for
different loads.

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