NP corybantes )a dance in three parts)

[Aqua Lung]

Dave Monroe wrote:
> 
> "Let her be a lesbian, let her turn to a fetish, let
> her die: she was a beast of venery and he had no tears
> for her." (V., Ch. 14, Sec. ii, p. 412)

Of course this is Mr. Graves. And I think we can assume 
that
Apollo's daughter than must be the dancer(s)/priest(ess),
corybantes. 

Mr. Graves: 

Turn back to when P seems to be mapping Graves onto Stencil
at the first page of  Chapter 3.  He gives us the book
(White Goddess)  and the
island (where both Stencil and Mr. Graves, not completely
unlike Henry Adams search for the V)  and a few biographical
details, and that submarine scungille farm. 

A little alliteration: 

So, not just VVVVVVV, but HHH and MMM

Way back now to Chapter One Part I of V. where the women
pursued is not V or
any of her persona, but Paola. 


When Pig Bodine, with a "diseased baboon fur" & "a miasma of
evil,"  sees the girl, the young Maltese, "the broad" he
eventually "grabs", in the Grave of Sailors, we get this
comment:  

"What was it about the prairie hare in the snow, the tiger
in the tall grass and sunlight?" 

Chapter Three opens with a proliferation of Vs. 

"
and that now he's awakened to discover the pursuit of V.
was merely a scholarly quest after all, an adventure of the
mind, in the tradition of The Golden Bough or The White
Goddess. ..."the same simple minded literal pursuit..." 

That's Mr. Graves, (Frazer & Bullfinch too) whose pursuit of
the White Goddess is
literal, a search for words, word meanings. Although Mr.
Graves certainly is not literal in the sense of avoiding
exaggeration, metaphor, embellishment, and perhaps most
importantly, ambiguity. 

"V. ambiguously a beast of venery"

Now here we get an interesting paragraph, where the letter 
H predominates: 

Hare, Hind, Hart, seems opposed to the letter 

V: Venery, Venus, Vener,

The word venery means the  Indulgence in or pursuit of
sexual activity. 2. The act of sexual intercourse. [Middle
English venerie, from Old French, from Medieval Latin
veneria, from Latin venus, vener, desire, love. 

It is also the act or sport of hunting; the chase. [Middle
English venerie, from Old French, from vener, to hunt, See
Wen. 

Also see Chapter Twenty of The White Goddess, Who'll hunt
the Wren? And the Hare and so forth, the sexual hunt, also
the battle of the male/female magicians. 

"Chased like the Hart"

Hart: A male deer, especially a male red deer over five
years old. And the homophone, heart. Also, Red deer are
sacred to both Germany
and Ireland and North America, see Frazer's GB

Hind: A female red deer. So now we have the male and the
female red deer.

Hind can also mean a part, a part Located at or forming the
back or rear; posterior: the behind, the ass. 

There are several scenes in the novel where revelation is
awaited or expected or called for and so on, but what
appears is but
the posterior, the ass, the horses ass, the ass of Stencil
and so on.

Hind: is also, British, farm laborer,. a country bumpkin; a
rustic. Reading Frazer, especially on the corn spirit and
the hunt, we discover that the Hind becomes the clown, the
fool in the harvesting ceremony. Stencil is a bit of fool. 

Hare: Any of various mammals of the family Leporidae,
especially of the genus Lepus, similar to rabbits but having
longer ears and legs and giving birth to active, furred
young. And to move hurriedly, as if hunting a swift quarry. 

And of course the homophone hair also plays a part in the
fetish theme. 

"chased like an obsolete, or bizarre, or forbidden form of
sexual delight. And clownish stencil along behind her, bells
ajingle, waving a wooden, toy oxgoad. For no one's amusement
but his own." 


V's natural habitat is not the woods, the corn field, the
spring, the autumn, the winter, the summer, but the "state
(stage) of siege." 


scungille shell:  Stencil's scungille farm, 62; 178; what
Botticelli's Venus seems to be standing in; "There's nothing
inside. Only the scungille shell." 370; 384; [Education of
Henry Adams]



Graves tells us that scungille,  periwinkle, scallop, were
aphrodisiacs, sacred to Aphrodite, identified by the shell,
the mirror ("know thyself") and vanity, the comb (originally
a plectrum for plucking lyre strings) and heartlessness,
associated with the Moon Goddess Eurynome. 

The  M multiplicity is from Graves: 

Mary, the Virgin, but also Merry, May,  Marah (Hebrew for
brine), Myrrh the gift of one
of those wise guys, Mar, Merry old England and Merry Robin
Hood, "Who'll hunt the Wren?" cries Robin the Bobbin, who is
the Devil, the dark
deep in the middle of Stencil's shells, the black mass. 

This is the "nacreous mass of inference, poetic license
[...] imaginative anxiety or historical care, which is
recognized by no one."



          Utque latet Rosa Verna suo putamine clausa,
          Sic os vincla ferat, validisque arctetur habenis,
          Indicatque suis prolixa silentia labris: