V.V. 3--Time, place, and mirror-time

[Mr. McChoakumchild]

Schoenmaker, it seems, is at first an idealistic surgeon,
but he suffers a "deterioration of purpose; a decay",
(decay, particularly skin or surface decay, is an important
motif in V.) 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? 

He is in fact going against the White Goddess, against Eve,
against Nature and he unknowinging provides a clue to what I
think is a very important theme. It's not the physical so
much as the psychological, the cultural HUMAN chain that is
being broken, this of course leads to the the "selling out
of the human race." What Shoenmaker thinks is germ and
nuclear, but is in fact, cultural and psychological. 

Brief digression on Prometheus: 


"I know, Profane thought. I am a descendent of schlemiels,
Job founded my line."

"Hey," called Mafia from the writing desk. "How do you spell
Prometheus, anybody."

Benny Profane "-in Union Square at sundown, blindfolded by a
raging hangover and covered by a comforter of chilly pigeons
who looked liked vultures-"

http://www.nlm.nih.gov/hmd/frankenstein/prom300.jpg



Every patron saint hung on the wall/ Shared the room with
twenty sinners/

http://covers4.virtualave.net/s/steelydan/steelydan07l.jpg


In chapter 37 of M&D, we meet the Duck. Dixon and Mason are
having breakfast as "M. Allegre proceeds, before a room-ful
of what to his mind, must seem unfeeling barbarians, to
recite his Iliad of Inconvenience." Armand mentions Dixon
and Mason's brother in science Jacques de Vaucanson. They
know of his mechanical duck. Vaucanson is next described as
"The Man Voltaire call'd a Promethus." Promethus,
to keep it simple, is Greek religion's supreme Trickster,
and a god of fire. The apparent meaning of his name,
Forethinker, emphasized his intellectual side. In common
belief he developed into a master craftsman, and in this
connection he was associated with fire and the Creation Of
Man. Aeschylus is credit with writing "Prometheus Unbound,"
we have it and we may with fair assurance accept the theory,
now generally held, that the  "Prometheus Bound" was the
first part of a trilogy, followed by "Prometheus Unbound"
and "Prometheus the Fire-Bearer." This play has often been
compared to the biblical book of "Job."  This becomes
important, as we consider Benny Profane-Jew/Catholic,
Job/Prometheus, and Schlemiel.
>From Mary Shelly's "Frankenstein or the Modern Prometheus,"
which Pynchon calls
the "first and among the best of the Luddite Novels," we can
trace a succession of various Prometheus and Prometheus
Bound and Unbound (including Percys Shelly's) AND Mock
Prometheus  to Benny and the M&D mechanical Duck.


The clock, the mirror, the skin- surface and tourism, decay,
fetish, and the Chain, are all connected as we will
discover. The chain both connects all of us as Pip discovers
in Great Expectations, a discovery he makes, btw,  while 
looking into the Mirror of the Sea, had to get Conrad in
here, or as Stephen Dedalus Conceives:

In my corrected edition, page 32 of Ulysses, Chapter 3:30-55

 Naked Eve
whiteheaped corn, orient and immortal, standing
from everlasting to everlasting. Womb of sin
.One of her
sisterhood lugged me squealing into life.Creation from
nothing. What has she in the bag? A misbirth with ta
trailing navel cord, hushed in rooty wool. The cords of all
link back, strandentwining cable of all flesh. That is why
mystic monks. Will you be as gods? Gaze in your omphalos.
Hello! Kinch here. Put me on to Edenville. Aleph, alpha;
nought, nought, one.

Womb of sin.

Wombed in sin darkness I was too, made not begotten. 

Fathers and sons, consubstantial.

Benny a parody of Bloom. 

A mock Job.

" 'The prophet Job said of her (The White Goddess) "She
dwelleth and abideth upon the rock. Her young ones also suck
up blood.' "  --Graves



Is it Vera or Veronica that is the rock? 


 What social pathology at work here? Pathologies? What has
turned the faces of youth green and why are the older ones
nostalgic for a bloody Past?  A long chain of screwers and
the screwed, a daisy chain even. What unites the S and the
M? The victim and the victimizer? Not the same as it was in
GR. Well not exactly. Don't want to open that sphincter, be
accused of some nasty ISM, but Homosexual Sodomy, the
sterility of white sperm into black feces, Blicero of
Gottfried being the climax, is Solopsistic History, while
here in V., History is Fetishistic, Narcissistic in CL. 

See Graves Forward to The White Goddess on Plato, Sodomy and
the usurpation of feminine power by Philosophy. 

Sontag doesn't quite get it right, when she claims Freud is
the heir of Plato, no she's not correct. Not even a correct
reading of Brown's reading of Plato/Freud. 

Perfecting the race? 

Perfecting the Jewish race? 

There is no such place as German town in NYC, is there? 

And why prepare a face to meet the faces you hope to turn
and face, at a cocktail party perhaps?

Why, to  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?   

And, it's up there in Westchester, that's where the big boys
lived in the 1950s and 60s, and on the Long Island's Gold
Coast, where the "artists" lived, the Machiavellian
"artists." The 5 towns Japs were just wanna bees and not
WASPS. Even with that Movied nose, those long Jewish legs,
hanging out of the Caddy. The WASP  with the power to make
the state a work of art by the rational manipulation of
Power or what McLuhan called, the "Folklore of Industrial
Man" dreamed in Westchester. 

We are unique, each of us. And isn't that great, who wants a
WASP'S nose anyway? Unless you are a WASP. But  "amid the
diversity of our inventions and abstract techniques of
production and distribution there will be found a great deal
of cohesion and unity. This consistency is not conscious in
origin or effect and seems to arise from a sort of
collective dream." 

Remember, that in GR, Carl Jung's ideas work for Them. 

Does this social pathology 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. 

Individual actions don't matter? So is everything permitted? 

Now, 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? 

In  GR a cynical narrator asks, "are you going to judge this
man? 

 We would have to see what being aligned with the mirror
world means. 

 What of the mirrored world? 


 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. 

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 reversed 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!  I think the movement is affected and
guided by individuals like V, she 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