MDDM cock fights in the ring

[Terrance]

 They sail south off Lizard Point, to  Tenerife,  at about 28 degrees
north latitude, and we are introduced to captain grant,  the Admiralty
Fopling, and the fifer.

The new captain is adverse to sailing in formation. Recall that the
Seahorse earn her  glory by sailing in formation as a diversion on that
day of Miracles. 

Grant, once in the open sea, takes on the wind and comes about, he flies
his curiously embellished Jolly Roger, a flag he won off the  sailing
master of the old H.M.S. Unreflective in a game of Swedish Rummy (crazy
eights, some Brits call this card game Black Jack) and sails at the
Brilliant. 
More men in a circle wagering, but the stakes, are only a symbol, a
jolly roger. 


If not for the timely appearence off sail of the Brest who knows how far
the affair might have been taken? 

A cock fight. A battle royal.  And Mr. Dixon and Mr. Mason are arguing
again and nearly end up in the ring. Dixon asking Mason if he should
call in witnesses before they fight.  I'll give odds on the dry Quaker. 

But they don't come to blows. The fight is a verbal one. This is a very
important theme and we recall that it runs through GR. Most importantly
in that novel as in this one, when the ring is formed by humans and the
fight is a verbal one, a traditioanl duel of voices, of song, of
insults, no blows are stuck, nothing is settled, but  agression is
vented but no dialectic occures. 

The cocks fights, the fight betweeen the Fop and the dog take place in
Rings. 


The Mandela is a visual expression of the struggle to achive order--
even paradoxically  within diversity--and of the desire to be reunited
with the pristine, non-speacial and non-temporal Center as conceived in
symbolic traditions. 

Recall that Jung was fascinated by the Mandela, a symbol he said, was
like a therapuetic safety valve, it counters chaotic and disorderd sates
marked by conflict and anxiety and expressed the idea of safe refuge, of
inner reconcilliation and wholeness. 

But in Pynchon there is no reconciliation, the tension is paradoxially
sustained w/o ending in either vilolence or peace. And they break into
Comic song.