With a comb and mirror in her hand

[Terrance]

Mark David Tristan Brenchley wrote:
> 
>         Thanks, but I know the mythology of Venus, I was referring to the
> Botticelli painting which Graves seemed to say had a comb and mirror.
> 
> Mark

Thank you for calling Central Services, this has not been a
recording. We're all in it together kid. 

No, he does not say that the comb or the mirror is to be
found in the painting. 
He does however, like Stencil maybe, or like Pynchon or the
reader, get carried away with Kute Korrespondences. The
M-names include Mary, Mara, Marian, Miriam, Maria....

Back when P seems to be mapping Graves onto Stencil, he
gives us the book and the island and a few biographical
details, and the submarine scungille farm Strange! Mr.
Pynchon  here as a young man up to his hips in books, 
stumbles about in Joyce's giant overshoes.

So, not just VVVVVVV, but MMMMMMM and HHHHHHH

Mr. Pynchon is having with Mr. Graves.  He does this to
Eliot, to Rilke, to anyone he wants, Melville was very good
at this. 


Digression: 

The stick, the wand, the oxgoad, the penis, the most
phallic, says Dave Monroe, although I think the horn, the
pipe of pan, that sax is a phallic ax. 


In Chapter One Part I of V. the women pursued is not V or
any of her persona, but Paola. All the Pigs want her. Paola
is important. I think if we focus on the men and the Vs we
will miss this. Perhaps P is having fun with us too, us,
being perhaps the 
male reader? 

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." 

These two books are used as parodic material, as is De
Rougemont's Love In The Western World-- the Myth of Love
secularized, decedent, debased. 

Henry Adams is a different case, I suspect, but this is a
big argument and I don't know. 


"the same simple minded literal pursuit
" 

That's Mr. Graves, 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, the letter
H---Hare,
Hind, Hart, seems opposed to the letter V---Venery, Venus,
Vener, 
with compressed and succinct allusions to both Golden Bough
and White Goddess. Note how Love, sex, the hunt, see for but
one example, Frazer's GB II, page 10 for the Hare, and what
Frazer describes in many traditions as the Corn Spirit or
mother/baby/maiden/ and Proserpine. That Love / Death
(telos?) again, here sex, hunt, kill, sacrifice, rape (Paola
and Pig), and again all the whore, virgin, mother,
stereotypes are played on. 

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, but reading this novel or maybe it's my own fears
of plastic valves,  I am inclined to think of the
homophone-heart. Also, Red deer are sacred to both Germany
and Ireland and North America, see Frazer on the American
connection.  

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, David Morris commented on this other side of God
and Moses and someone noted how Pynchon connects the ass-the
digestive system to fear and paranoia 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. 

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 is a human part, also plays
to the fetish theme. 

"chased like 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." 


And of ours of course, since we do know, or we will,  what
Stencil refuses here, that V's natural habitat is not the
woods, the corn field, the spring, the autumn, the winter,
the summer, but the "state of siege," for our amusement as
well.






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]

http://www.hyperarts.com/pynchon/v/adams.html#virgin

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. 

Now, he says,  Botticelli's Birth Of Venus is an exact icon
of her cult. 
But read carefully, he does not say she has the comb or
mirror. 
In English ballad poetry she is the bitter sweetness of love
and danger
for travelers, mariners in foreign ports, like the ports of
Malta.  See The White Goddess Chapter 22, Ophielia's song in
Shakespeare's Hamlet, the introduction of the idea of
Romantic Love in Western Europe, Love In The Western World,
Denis De Rougemont.

Merry, May,  Marah (Hebrew for brine), myrrh the gift of one
of those wise guys, MARY, Merry old England and Merry Robin
(can't get more phallic than 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 and
kiss his ass, down where only GOD knew what lived.
What is living down in that Rock? White Ivory? 

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