Time square's S huttle, buttle, tuttle, let it bleed

[Jane]

Schoenmaker, it seems, is at first an idealistic surgeon,
but he suffers a "deterioration of purpose; a decay", (decay
is a big theme here) and, while his view of his work allows
him to perform Esther's nose job, contending that he is not 
"altering the great unbroken chain" that connects Esther to
her Jewish forebears and descendants, don't we suspect that
something isn't quite ideal? There seems to be some kind of
social pathology here or maybe more than one? Perfecting the
race? Perfecting the Jewish race? And why, so they can get
into that great Westchester to the North of NYC, where all
the Elect WASPS and wanna-bee wasps all end up soon or later
(can't find the page in V. so I am paraphrasing here).  Does
this sickness have something to do with the concept of the
Individual? 

"Individuals do what they want, but the chain goes on and
small forces like me will never prevail against it" contends
Schoenmaker to an irate Rachel. But what kind of BS is that?
Alternatively, maybe I am being too critical? Schoenmaker
shouldn't be criticized for failing to see that his attitude
and his actions align him with the mirror world of false
images, should he? 

 What of the mirrored world? I still see a yo-yo when I
split the sun and I haven't inhaled anything but the
cleaning fluid, the pine trees
.she used to clean the
department



 In Schoenmaker's office, Rachel sees a mirror and clock
whose description suggests how history progresses and is
viewed in V., and foreshadows the description of how V is
involved in that history. So some one said that we should
not look for too many or too much in these Vs and mirrors
and I might add the religious symbolism, but I disagree. I
think every time the word god is mentioned or the word death
or ghost or Mother Mary or any other religious word, we
should pay attention. Ploy sharpens his teeth into little Vs
with a bastard file. So big deal, right? After we are half
the way through the novel all of these, if I can follow Dave
Monroe here, bleed all over the book.  Anyway, back to the
mirror in the office, where directly across the room from
Rachel is a mirror, hung high on the wall, and under the
mirror was a shelf which held a turn-of-the-century clock.
The double face was suspended by four golden flying
buttresses above a maze of works, enclosed in clear Swedish
lead glass. The pendulum didn't swing back and forth, but in
the form of a disc, parallel to the floor and driven by a
shaft which paralleled the hands at six o'clock. The disc
turned a quarter revolution one way, then a quarter
revolution the other, each re versed portion on the shaft
advancing the escapement a notch. Mounted on the disc were
two imps or demons, wrought in gold, posed in fantastic
attitudes. Their movements were reflected in the mirror
along with the window at Rachel's back, which extended from
floor to ceiling and revealed the branches and green needles
of a pine tree. The branches whipped back and forth in the
February wind, ceaseless and shimmering, and in front of
them the two demons performed their metronomic dance,
beneath a vertical array of golden gears and ratchet wheels,
levers and springs which gleamed warm and gay as any
ballroom chandelier." The Janus-faced clock is as old as the
twentieth century whose time it measures and whose history
V. recounts. Whatever historical change has occurred, it has
taken place through the alternating swing between two
extremes, interdependent yet antagonistic. This is a very
important point IMHO. Extremes reading of TRP are
disqualified by these images. Not really but it is an image
that I believe sums up an important philosophical position
that I attribute to the author, Thomas Pynchon himself. Of
course, that is stupid of me, but I am none too bright. Back
to the clock now, and I think the movement is affected and
guided by individuals like V. who is like the demons of the
clock, dancing to a prescribed rhythm which creates her and
is perpetuated by her.  As we will discover, V. had at first
lived in real time, but her gradual inanimation leads her to
live in the reverse time of the mirror world. What the
mirror reflects of the world are branches that move
ceaselessly as V. does which, in their shimmering, share the
gaudy nature of Vheissu and we can add or we will the "Birth
of Venus."  The clock operates on the basis of an opposition
of extremes paralleling that opposition of extremes Sidney
Stencil sees resolved in V. The clock as mechanism suggests
a mechanical World. 

"But when, finally, advancing doubt made an end of God the
Creator, there was left in being no more than the mechanical
world-system which would never have been so crudely denuded
of spirit but for its previous degradation to the status of
creature." 

                                        --Karl Jaspers, MAN
IN THE MODERN AGE