FIX every wandering thought upon

[Queen Liz]

Sidney Stencil, on the scene in Florence in 1899, ponders
the working of his "theory" :

Oh, The Situation. The bloody Situation. In his more
philosophical moments he would wonder about this abstract
entity The Situation, its idea, the details of its 
**mechanism**. He remembers times when whole embassies full
of personnel had simply run amok and gibbering in the
streets when confronted with a Situation which refused to
make sense no matter who looked at it, or from what angle.
He had
decided long ago that no Situation had any objective
reality: it only existed in the minds of those who happened
to be in on it at any specific moment. Since these several
minds tended to form a sum total or complex more mongrel
than homogeneous, The Situation must necessarily appear to a
single observer much like a diagram in four dimensions in
only three. Hence the success or failure of any diplomatic
issue must vary directly with the degree of rapport achieved
by the team confronting it. This had led to
the near obsession with teamwork which had inspired his
colleagues to dub him Soft-shoe Sidney, on the assumption
that he was at his best in front of a chorus line. But it
was a neat theory, and he was in love with it.

The only consolation that he drew from the present chaos was
that his theory managed to explain it. 

Sidney creates a structure that imposes order on otherwise
exasperatingly random events. 

How else can one respond? 

Of course the catch is that it is not "real " and only
permits private meanings and interpretations. 

Herbet's desire to discover what V. is "as his legacy from
his father" leads him to make connections that Eigenvalue 
suspects may be spurious.

Stencil, then, highlights the two problems: 

1.  the problems inherent in discerning reality.

2.  the problems inherent in  interpreting reality. 

As the "century's child" Herbert Stencil embodies a search
for meaning and identity which is tangentially diverted from
its final goal by fear of actually reaching that goal.

His father was in love with his own theory, it made sense of
chaos. 

But for Henry Adams, I mean young Stencil, in love with his
Father's theory, this is like walking into a church and
discovering a machine humming a tune to the sleeping christ
child, as the
"centuries child" (Stencil/Adams) he is in love with theory
but also with the chaos,  the Situation, his own Death is a
quest for His  Story..  

So we are, reading Henry Adams again, Henry IV and the Hot
House. And Stencil is ostensibly seeking V. and knowledge of
how his father died. How did the Virgin become the dynamo?
Two forms of catholicism David. Not pro or con. It's not a
religious tract it's a work of fiction. It's about big
things, young Tommy, in his very first novel, wants his
players on the world's stage, "all the world's a ship and
men but Pigs and Seamen," I think Melville said something
like that anyway
 and the catholicism is very very important
not because Young Tommy was a catholic, no this is a fact
but not too important at the moment, but because the
catholic religion is where the virgin that is now a dynamo
lived.  

Poor Sidney, his death,  felt "like a sacrificial virgin."
He dies at sea, the element of Astarte, Aphrodite, and
Venus. Paul does not die, but lands ion the island of Malta,
there, the people love him. 

Stencil's search is motivated by information about V.
contained in Sidney's diary--text. 
But, as Mchale shows us in his latest essay on M&D,  the
diary has in it a diary or a book or a note or another tale
or tale teller inside another tale teller's dreams of a tale
told by an idiot. It is the ground, fertile,  and it may
even be virgin ground, but it is always impregnated by the
author. So the Crew takes up a collection for Esther's
abortion, they pass the hat. And where did they get this
hat? Why, from Stencil's 
impersonation number 3 of course. The style of some
connection. 

Florence, 1899: 

"There is more behind and inside V. than any of us has
suspected. Not who, but  what she is." 

Stencil, now with the tale told by the Lady V herself, says
she is a "women." Why "women." 
What is she? Stencil gave her the passion, the humanity.
Why? Oh, do try to figure out the lesbianism if you want to
and defend Pynchon against the anti-homosexual christian
conservatives here on list, but the "love" is between the
quick and the dead. 



This  change from "who" (Mother and Virgin) to "what"
parallels V.'s change from human to non human and mechanical
(Dynamo). 

Remember too, that Herbert is a motherless child. 

V. may very well be his mother, a fact he never tries to
ascertain.

As his mother she would have brought him into the world and
given him what only a Mother can give...what Herbert
lacks...purpose...meaning...love...

In searching for V., Stencil finds some kind of purpose
guides his life:

Finding her: what then? only that the love there was to
Stencil become directed entirely inward, toward this
acquired sense of animateness. Having found this he could
hardly release it, it was too dear. To sustain it he  had to
hunt V.; but if he should find her, where else would there
be to go but back into half consciousness? Here Fausto! Here
boy! He tried not to think, therefore, about any end to the
search. Approach and avoid. Do I dare and do I dare, disturb
the universe, click the button, there goes my childhood on
the screen in reverse, but me, I grow old, I grow old, I
shall hunt alligators in the sewers with a wet suit against
the cold and wear white snake skin boots and my  silk Mount
Fuji robe and walk along the Hudson dreaming of my  Diego
Garcia and reciting Yeats. There in a thing, a matter of 
matter, a
sword emblematical,  a stone, the rock, a sacred and
consecrated thing,  still unchanging and eternal, like the
visage
of King in a looking-glass unspotted by the centuries
painted and preserved, 
me,  full of a passionate intensity that fills the mind and
overflows,
a fountain in the Hilton parking lot, forever flowing and
overflowing, continuous and constant,  as the electric force
that gives it life and it gives life to, Niagara falls into
the basin of the mind, but mind is driven mad and stricken
deaf and dumb and blind,  for intellect no longer knows is
from the Ought, or knower from the Known. That is to say, 
the stone descends to Heaven where only the dead can be
forgiven;  But when I think of that my tongue's a  sword. 

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....