V. (Ch 3) Victoria as a gnostic symbol

[Dave Monroe]

... a a friend of mine whom I'm going to miss greatly when he packs up
for New Orleans spent some time the other night listening to me go on
about my recent postings here on that confluence of the feminine, the
artificial, and modernity, as it coalesces in Charles Baudelaire's "The
Painter of Modern Life" (Felicia Miller Frank, The Mechanical Song) and
seems to resurface in Thomas Pynchon's V., about those jeweled
mechanisms of V.'s, about that opalescent window at Chartres cathedral,
about a perhaps certain modernist gnosticism about Baudelaire's essay
(cf. Dwight Eddins, The Gnostic Pynchon), about the history of automata
and their association with the oracular and the uncanny, and, well, so
forth ...

Anyway, he  mentioned that he'd recently received his celestial calendar
or somesuch (from, I believe, that "Star Gazer" show on PBS,
http://www.jackstargazer.com/), a sort of hourglass (= Owlglass?) shaped
chart striated with diagonal lines of stars and other celestial objects
which he immediately associated with images of the bejewelled corset or
somesuch of Sophia in some gnostic tradition or another.   He's not one,
however, to take note of the bibliographic info the way I do, and I
haven't had the time to follow up with some recommended reading, but
that very passage from Elaine Pagels' The Gnostic Gospels was where I
was going to start, Jill.   V. embodies an awful (in several senses) lot
in that novel, gnosticism, modernity, automata ...

By the way, a recent mention of that (relevant, I think) Venus/"V.-ness"
pun reminds me, given that the (lower case) Greek letter, nu, not only
bears no small similiarity with a Roman "v," not to mention that the
"V"s used as the title, heading the chapters in those Harper Whatever
eds., at least, of V. look an awful lot like nus, one might well read
the title as "nu-period," and thus as "frequency times period," which,
given that the period of a wave, of, say, the wave function describing
simple harmonic motion (of, say, a yo-yo, or an orbiting planet), is one
divided by the period of said motion, and thus the frequency is one
divided by the period, frequency times period equals one, interestingly
(?) enough ...

Some helpful hyperlinks ...

http://www.glenbrook.k12.il.us/gbssci/phys/Class/waves/u10l2b.html

http://www.physics.uoguelph.ca/tutorials/shm/amplitude.html

And note the yo-yo-like motion in the latter ...