FIX every wandering thought upon part II

[Queen Liz]

VI. My Self

A living man is blind and drinks his drop. 
What matter if the ditches are impure? 
What matter if I live it all once more? 
Endure that toil of growing up; 
The ignominy of boyhood; the distress 
Of boyhood changing into man; 
The unfinished man and his pain 
Brought face to face with his own clumsiness; 
The finished man among his enemies? -- 
How in the name of Heaven can he escape 
That defiling and disfigured shape 
The mirror of malicious eyes 
Casts upon his eyes until at last 
He thinks that shape must be his shape? 
And what's the good of an escape 
If honor find him in the wintry blast? 
I am content to live it all again 
And yet again, if it be life to pitch 
Into the frog-spawn of a blind man's ditch, 
A blind man battering blind men; 
Or into that most fecund ditch of all, 
The folly that man does 
Or must suffer, if he woos 
A proud woman not kindred of his soul. 
I am content to follow to its source 
Every event in action or in thought; 
Measure the lot; forgive myself the lot! 
When such as I cast out remorse 
So great a sweetness flows into the breast 
We must laugh and we must sing, 
We are blest by everything, 
Everything we look upon is blest.

Ironically, Stencil's "sense of animateness," Mother, is
supported by the search for inanimateness and Death.

So, although he may acquire some knowledge of V., he cannot
arrive at certain and complete knowledge because it would be
his annihilation.

Stencil becomes the extension of his overactive imagination
nurtured by a desire for identity. He cannot establish his
identity in his own right and therefore becomes "He Who
Looks For V." 

We read his sorting out,  the splitting of his personality
in episodes: his search based on imaginative embellishments
of the few parts of self and knowledge he has of Self--V.
and his Father's text. 

If the coincidences are real then Stencil has never
encountered history at all, but something more appalling. 

In this chapter, as in previous chapters, Pynchon does not
conceal his debt to T.S. Eliot. 
How like the Wasteland, how it jumps from city to city or
"home" to "home," emphasizing an  intertextual range of
influences, broad, Modernist and Modern, unlocking an
extraordinarily wide cultural memory,  fragments shored
against the 
humming of the dynamo's ruins. 

Fausto prays,  "May you be only Paola, one girl," and he
hopes that she will not experience what he has, "a
fracturing
of personality." Eliot's work is painfully aware of this
crisis of the self, and its challenge to nineteenth-century
writing is enormous. For Eliot, the lyric poem is "the voice
of the poet talking to himself, or to nobody." Moreover, the
manner of his "talking" is quite bizarre, and shocking.
Eliot's verse plays with and parodies traditional
structures, the same poem oscillating in its versification
and rhythms. Sometimes it comes near to solidity and fixity
of form, only to dissolve into a
much more fluid formal structure deploying, in his own
words, a "contrast between fixity and flux," and an
"unperceived evasion of monotony." The Waste Land
exemplifies this, being an extreme example of formal
eclecticism and teasing, a startling series of lyric
fragments which jump schizophrenically from the sublimity of
dream language to the ridiculousness of pub language ("Hurry
Up Please It's Time")  and interrogate each through the
other (high and low). The use of the Tarot at the end of GR
is nothing new under the Sun. In fact, although Eliot wrote
the Waste Land, the problem of who writes a Poem is, then,
complicated and accentuated not only by Pound's
collaboration in the
final editorial processing of The Waste Land, which caused
Eliot to write "I am never sure that I can call my verse my
own," but So too,   just who or what the poet's "I" and
"EYE" is and are, Eliot I, II, II, IV, and YOU,  is at this
stage in literary history a painful problem, and Eliot's
verse highlights this in several aspects. Pynchon too,
highlight this and does so not
only in his first novel, but in his last. Thematically, as
in Pynchon,  it often evokes disturbed mental states. For
example,  in "Rhapsody on a Windy Night" (Pynchon draws on
this quite a lot) for instance, clear perception is
distorted,
objective reality is twisted to the point of frightening
hallucination. The personification and enfetishment is also
worth noting: a street-lamp tells the "hero" about women's
eyes, twisted  "like a crooked pin,"  and  "A crowd of
twisted things" closes in. When he eventually reaches home,
its safety turns out to be "The last twist of the knife." 


 The figure of modernity characteristically has no home,
wandering nomadically in a world stripped of values, in a
shifting reality which confounds fixity in mental states.
Many of Eliot's early poems seem close to the knife-edge of
madness. And the best cure for that Dear Ishmael, dear
Wicks, is a
sailing ship. 

Put on your sailing shoes....