Missing Ladies

[jporter]

Terry queries:

>Is this Pynchon, Adams, or You?


It's all me.

But a more interesting tact might be: Is this Leni or Frenesi:

"She tried to explain to him about the level you reach, with both feet in,
then you lose your fear, you lose it all, you've penetrated the moment,
slipping perfectly into its grooves, mertal-gray but soft as latex, and now
the figures are dancing, each pre-choreographed exactly where it is, the
flash of knees under pearl-colored frock as the girl in the babushka stoops
to pick up a cobble, the man in the black suitcoat and brown sweater grabbed
by policemen one on either arm,trying to keep his head up, showing his
teeth, the older liberal....his eyeglasses filled with the glare of the
winter sky. There is the moment. and its possibilities." [GR, 158-9]

A Volkswagen commercial? Or is it, Oedipa:

"She knew because, she held him, that he suffered DT's. Behind the initials
was a metaphor, a delirium tremens, a trembling unfurrowing of the mind's
plowshare. The saint whose water can light lamps, the clairvoyant whose
lapse in recall is the breath of God, the true paranoid for whom all is
organized in spheres....The act of metaphor then was a thrust at a truth
and a lie, depending on where you were: inside, safe, or outside,
lost...."dt," God help the old tatooed man, meant also a time differential,
a vanashingly small instant in which it could no longer disguise itself as
something innocuous like an average rate; where velocity dwelled in the
projectile though the projectile be frozen in midflight, where death
dwelled in the cell though the cell be looked in at its most
quick..."[CL49, 128-9, Harper & Row]

But finally, Leni surfaces, in the clairvoyant's trance:

"She even tried from what little calculus she'd picked up, to explain it to
Franz as delta t approaching zero, eternally approaching, the slices of
time growing thinner and thinner....But he shook his head. "Not the same
Leni. The important thing is taking a function to its limit. Delta t is
just a convenience, so it can happen."....He was the cause and effect man:
he kept at her astrology without mercy...."There is no way for changes out
there to produce changes in here."...."Not produce," she tried, "not cause.
It all goes along together. Parallel, not series. Metaphor. Signs and
symptoms. Mapping on to different coordinate systems, I don't know..." And
she didn't know, all she was trying to do was reach." [GR, 159.]


Reach? It is the delta t which links these women, reaching for eachother
across this uncrossable fictional universe, a secret moment, stolen from
"the artifice of eternity," a shared present, while Pointsman and Mason
dream of future prizes.

It's only me, getting nowhere...

jody