VV(4) - Stencil's Farm & Adam's Virgin

[David Morris]

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(62) Around each seed of a dossier, therefore, had eveloped a nacreous mass 
[...]  He tended each seashell on his submarine scungille farm
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http://www.m-w.com/cgi-bin/dictionary

Main Entry: na·cre
Pronunciation: 'nA-k&r
Function: noun
Etymology: Middle French, from Old Italian naccara drum, nacre, from Arabic 
naqqArah drum
Date: 1718
: MOTHER-OF-PEARL
- na·cre·ous /-krE-&s, -k(&-)r&s/ adjective

http://www.hyperarts.com/pynchon/v/s.html

Scungille shell:
H. Stencil's scungille farm, 62; 178; what Botticelli's Venus seems to be 
standing in; "There's nothing inside. Only the scungille shell." 370; 384; 
[Education of Henry Adams]

http://www.hyperarts.com/pynchon/v/adams.html#virgin

Historians undertake to arrange sequences,--called stories, or 
histories,--assuming in silence a relation of cause and effect. These 
assumptions [...] have been astounding, but commonly unconscious and 
childlike; so much so, that if any captious critic were to drag them to 
light, historians would probably reply, with one voice, that they had never 
supposed themselves required to know what they were talking about. [...] 
Adams, for one, had toiled in vain to find out what he meant. [...] [H]e 
insisted on a relation of sequence, and if he could not reach it by one 
method, he would try as many methods as science knew. Satisfied that the 
sequence of men led to nothing and that the sequence of their society could 
lead no further, while the mere sequence of time was artificial, and the 
sequence of thought was chaos, he turned at last to the sequence of force. 
(pp.1068-69)

[T]he historian's business was to follow the track of the energy; to find 
where it came from and where it went to; its complex source and shifting 
channels; its values, equivalents, conversions. It could scarcely be more 
complex than radium; it could hardly be deflected, diverted, polarised, 
absorbed more perplexingly than other radiant matter. Adams knew nothing 
about any of them, but as a mathematical problem of influence on human 
progress, though all were occult, all reacted on his mind, and he rather 
inclined to think the Virgin easiest to handle. (p.1074-75)

Modern politics is, at bottom, a struggle not of men but of forces. The men 
become every year more and more creatures of force, massed about central 
power-houses. The conflict is no longer between the men, but between the 
motors that drive the men, and the men tend to succumb to their own motive 
forces. (pp. 1104-05)

As history unveiled itself in the new order, man's mind had behaved like a 
young pearl oyster, secreting its universe to suit its conditions until it 
had built up a shell of nacre that embodied all its notions of the perfect. 
Man knew it was true because he made it, and he loved it for the same 
reason. [...] The woman especially did great things, creating her deities on 
a higher level than the male, and, in the end, compelling the man to accept 
the Virgin as guardian of the man's God. The man's part in his Universe was 
secondary, but the woman was at home there, and sacrificed herself without 
limit to make it habitable, when man permitted it, as sometimes happened for 
protection against forces of nature. She did not think of her universe as a 
raft to which the limpets stuck for life in the surge of a supersensual 
chaos; she conceived herself and her family as the center and flower of an 
ordered universe which she knew to be unity because she had made it after 
the image of her own fecundity; and this creation of hers was surrounded by 
beauties and perfections which she knew to be real because she herself had 
imagined them. (pp. 1138-39)




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