Circle Game (was: turn off your mind to splintered flashlights)

[Otto Sell]

> the world ain't exactly no toga party full of Princes if you know what I
mean. Ever read that Freud essay on  M's Moses<

Nope, but I'm sure that in the opinion of some ladies too there are more
frogs than princes around.
Could you please give a title or a year.

> Well it's the only explanation that makes any sense at all.<

This is exactly what I do not believe. A psychoanalytic hypotheses
necessarily excludes other hypothesises. It's good that Dave mentions
Campbell and that we recently spoke about Barth because this is important
and Pynchon is consciously playing with it. The underworld Benny goes to is
a man-made underworld, so no wonder that the monster is no real threat,
simply in the wrong place and the hero is not in a real danger - what
remains of the classical herohood in a modern, de-mystified and secularized
place and time like this and in the appropriate literature of such an era?

"We're all God's children, speaking literally or figuratively. Our mommies
and daddies are all kings and queens whom we shall have to displace, and our
conceptions were extraordinary because they engendered the uniqueness of
each of us. (...) we found our little dynasties (...) Then naked we return
whence naked we came, to the bosom of God or of nothingness (...) Et
cetera--you get the idea."
(John Barth, Mystery and Tragedy: The Twin Motions of Ritual Heroism, "The
Friday Book," 1984, p. 47)

> To everything turn, turn, turn, there is a season, now wait
 > a minute here...before I start singing a Joni Mich L song in
> a Bob Dylan voice at a black tie block party at Rush D's
> Ball and swearing in Brooklyn Slang.
>
> Excuse me! You Woody Imitation, you Steeling Dan, you
> prickin the conscious of little girls drawls.... and the
> seasons they go round and round and the painted ponies go up
> and down....
>

And as Joni said this song was made for singing together and the more
out-of-tune-voices the better . . . so I join in:

"We're captive on a carousel of time.
We can't return, we can only look behind from where we came
and go round and round and round in the circle game."