TboneSE Final Salvo

[calbert at hslboxmaster.com]

>From Pynchon's Paraclete, by James Nohrnberg  From Mendleson

.....NEar the end of T. S. Eliot's Four Quartets, in a passage to whose
symbolism Pynchon seems to have been especially receptive, thereis a description of what the poem had earlier called a "calamitous annunciation" - the Axis blitz of London during World War II. In the poem this follows tje description of the aftermath of an air raid - "After the dark dove with the flickering tongue/ Had passeed below the horizon of his homing"- and repeats the earlier symbol of the dove:

"The dove descending breaks the air
WIth flame of incandescent terror
of which the tongues declare
The one discharge from sin and error.
The only hope or else despair
Lies in the choice of pyre or pyre -
To be redeemed from fire by fire.

A character in th eepilogue to V. , Stencil Sr. , speaks of "Paracletian politics" - the politics of the Holly Ghost - by which he means the alleged willingness of the CHurch to exploit the revolutonary movements that threatened the British Empire  at the end of WWI. Stencil's notes include:



THe matter of a Paraclete's coming, the comforter, the dove; the tongues of flame, th gift of tongues: Pentecost. Third Person of the Trinity........Would the Paraclete aslo be a mother? Comforter, true. But what gift of communication could ever comefrom a woman.......


THis old idea, that the Holy Spirit was Jesus' mother - it appeared in the lost apocryphal Gospel of the Hebrews - informs the central pieta of THe Crying of Lot 49......."



love,
cfa

Ok, Seneca's coming - hide your hearts girls

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