VV(12) - Choosing Victimization

[Terrance]

David Morris wrote:
> 
> When faced with a hopelessly overwhelming force, dominating and indifferent,
> or maybe even enjoying the pain of its victims, when one's choices lay only
> in adopting an inward attitude - not in effecting any change to one's
> hopeless fate, when VICTIM is an inevitable identity, THEN one may chose to
> love one's fate, to become a Stellar Victim.
> 
> The classic martyr is very similar to this person except that this Stellar
> Victim changes all the rule within her/his own person.  The SV is no longer
> a victim, but a participant, in fact an almost equally enjoying patron in
> this pleasure/pain play.  The SV denies the Master his pleasure in sipping
> another's pain.  In fact the strength of the SV is a horrifying specter,
> ever sub-rosa threatening to kill all the while providing horns-full of dark
> pleasures.
> 
> Blicero is not the SV, but he is closely related.  He relates closely to the
> victim.  That is why we love him so.

Pan and Blicero

Infidelity, some feminists suggest, is a feminist practice
of undermining the "Law-of-the-Father" or
"Name-of-the-Father" 


Panic, especially at night when the citadel darkens and the
heroic ego sleeps, is a
direst participation mystique in nature, a fundamental, even
ontological experience
of the world as alive and in dread. Objects become subjects;
they move with life
while one is oneself paralyzed with fear. When existence is
experienced through
instinctual levels of fear, aggression, hunger, or
sexuality, images take on compelling
life of their own. The imaginal is never more vivid than
when we are connected
with it instinctually. The world alive is of course animism;
that this living world is
divine and imaged by different gods with attributes and
characteristics is polytheistic
pantheism. That fear, dread, horror are natural is wisdom.
In Whitehead's term
"nature alive" means Pan, and panic flings open a door into
this reality.

Pan and the Nightmare by Wilhelm Heinrich Roscher and James
Hillman (1972; reprint Spring Publications, Dallas, 1988)

"Pan was the son of Penelope by all her suitors in the
absence of Ulysses." 



Graves, Robert The White Goddess, A Historical Grammar Of
Poetic Myth, FSG, NY, 1948

Stereotypes, Cowards, and Dominance


As the characters begin to separate from Blicero's camp
(Enzian, Pokler, Katje), they also drift away from his views
concerning sexual symbolism. In this book filled with
prejudicial stereotyping on the basis of sex, race, and
religion, stereotyping is the antithesis of love because
love individuates for the purpose equality,
whereas stereotyping generalizes for the purpose of
domination. 

Both  Blicero and Pointsman remain enamored of their views
toward what they regard as the separate provinces of male
and female.

Blicero, of course is evil incarnate, Satan to the Mother
god Earth, he attempts to usurp her fecund power, he thrusts
his boy into an artificial womb, and blasts him from earth,
wired, shrouded in plastic. 


Katje learns from those who use her that the rocket
ascending, programmed in a ritual of love...at Brenschluss
it is done, the Rocket's purely feminine counterpart, the
zero point at the center of its target, has submitted. 

The female role is perceived as being submissive or
subservient to some masculine force.


Any notion of  "love" (Blicero's notion of  "love") in such
a context is not love at all, but an expression of  "morbid
dependency." 


Enzian, schooled by Blicero, makes a discovery that love,
among these men, once past the simple feel and orgazming of
it, had to do with masculine technologies, with contracts,
with winning and losing. Demanded, in his own case, that he
enter the service of the Rocket...Beyond simple steel
erection, was an entire system away from the feminine
darkness, held against the entropies of lovable but
scatterbrained Mother Nature.

 That was the first thing he was obliged by Weissman to
learn, his first step toward citizenship in the Zone. He was
led to believe that by understanding the Rocket, he would
come to understand truly his manhood. 


Acquiring a dominant position in the hierarchy is proof of
masculinity. 


Enzian's views concerning the Rocket and technology are
tempered somewhat by his personal assessment of Blicero and
his later pondering of the role the Hereros may really be
playing in the Zone. 


Pointsman's view of power and the bureaucracy, like the
Faustian Nazi bureaucrat Weissman's is also arranged
according to sexist notions from which he never deviates: 

"It all comes down as it must, to the desires of individual
men. Oh, and the women too of course, bless their empty
little heads. But survival depends on having strong enough
desires-on knowing the System better than the other chap,
and how to use it. It's work, that's all it is, and there's
no room for any extrahuman anxieties-they only weaken,
effeminize the will: a man either indulges them, or fights
to win, und so weiter." 

 Here, we can see that  Blicero/Weissman and Pointsman are
allied. They both also lust after Children. Pynchon's
children are treated with tenderness, not Pointsman and
Blicero/Weissman. 

Pokler is captivated by Alpdrucken and female sexual
submission, as is Marvy. 



Pokler, however, undergoes a change of view through the loss
of his wife and, more importantly, through his relationship
with "Ilse " and a growing awareness that finally culminates
in his understanding that Blicero, has been saving and using
him. Yet this does not make Pokler immune to Zeitgeist
influences. Pokler experiences a Nazistic vision, in his
deeper excursions into the Mare Nocturnum. 

"He found delight not unlike a razor sweeping his skin and
nerves, scalp to soles, in ritual submission to the Master
of this night space and of himself, the male embodiment of a
technologique that embraced power not for its social uses
but for just those chances of surrender, personal and dark
surrender, to the Void, to delicious and
screaming collapse. ..." 

See Doug's comments on Polker's act of contrition and
Christian "marriage." 

Pokler envisions himself as associated with elements of
technology characterized as masculine and superior which
provide an opportunity for the submission to the romance of
extinction.

Gravity and Rainbow Come



Just as Brenda serves as a spokesperson for the twentieth
century in her poem in V,  Nora Dodson-Truck sums up the
view of nature and technology that the sexist view
maintains. It is reminiscent of Victoria Wren's view of
herself as embodying a female force: "

In recent weeks, in true messianic style... her real
identity is, literally, the Force of Gravity. I am that
against which the Rocket must struggle, to which the
prehistoric wastes submit and are transmuted to the very
substance of History...her wheeling freaks, her seers,
teleporters, astral travelers and tragic human interfaces
all know of her visitation, but none see any way for her to
turn.

 Nora's seeing herself in this light puts into sharp
contrast the exaggeration of stereotypes by both sexes.
Oppositions drive this novel. The complex notions of
salvation, destiny, and culturally derived or imposed sex
role identifications, the distinction of Elect and
Preterite, the definition of neuroses as the
ultraparadoxical, and the sexual stereotypings of male and
female. Blicero sex is sterile, his seed flows into feces,
he fails to usurp the powers of mother nature. 

He trusted to have equaled the most high or low, and waged
impious and cowardice war against her. He sacrifices the
boy, not himself, he knows it his war is a futile one, but
he sends the boy he says he loves to death.   

"I begin to feel those bits of color floating up into
me-deep in me. That streak of green from the june-bug light,
the purple from the berries trickling along my thighs,
Mama's lemonade yellow runs sweet in me. Then I feel like
I'm laughing between my legs, and the laughing gets all
mixed up with the colors, and I'm afraid I'll come, and
afraid I won't. But I know I will. And I do. And it be
rainbow all inside." 		
			(Toni Morrison)