MDMD(5): Some Things Incomprehens'ble

[Dave Monroe]

Okay, this caught my eye as well ...

--- jbor <jbor at bigpond.com> wrote:
> 
> Michel Ryckx <michel.ryckx at freebel.net> wrote:
> 
> 1. (58.15) 'sepia-shadow'd Her[r]en XVII'.  Does
> the colour sepia refer to their faces? Is it a
colour 
> used in their robes and other clothing (but I know
> they were usually dressed in black). Is the use of
> sepia linked to richness, just as the use of the
> colour blue some centuries before was?
> 
> A lot of old photographs are done in sepia, and it's
> one of the pigments used in monochromatic sketching
> and to print engravings. I get the impression that
> his memory is fading into the past as if into sepia
> shadows.  Maybe a lithograph?

Me, I'd've slipped and typed "feces" rather than
"faces," of course, but(t) ... 

Well, keep in mind that Pynchonian, I don't know,
mediation, that tendency to describe through various
media, e.g., that "great glass sphere" in Gravity's
Rainbow (p. 723 in the Viking/Penguin eds.), David
Morris was very helpful to me there, astronauts on the
teevee.  So, here, drawings, engravings, indeed ...

But note that, whilst "sepia" undoubtedly, for us, for
Pynchon, in the age of photochemical reproduction,
carries nostalgic connotations ("sepia-toned"), note
that, for Mason and Dixon (if not for Mason & Dixon,
albeit also for our humble narrator, the Revd Wicks
Cherrycoke), "sepia" is another anachronism ...

Main Entry: se·pia
Pronunciation: 'sE-pE-&
Function: noun
Etymology: Latin, cuttlefish, ink, from Greek sEpia
Date: 1821
1 a : the inky secretion of a cuttlefish b : a brown
melanin-containing pigment from the ink of
cuttlefishes
2 : a print or photograph of a brown color resembling
sepia
3 : a brownish gray to dark olive brown color 

Main Entry: sepia
Function: adjective
Date: 1827
1 : made of or done in sepia
2 : of the color sepia 

Hm ... on the cuttlefish as an emblem of "cunning
intelligence" amongst the ancient Greeks, see ...

Detienne, Marcel and Jean-Pierre Vernant. 
   Cunning Intelligence in Greek Culture and Society.
   Trans. Janet Lloyd.  Atlantic Heights, NJ:
   Humanities Press, 1978 (Chicago: U of Chicago P,
   1991).

And on the color blue in Reniassance painting ...

Baxandall, Michael.  Painting and Experience in
   Fifteenth Century Italy: A Primer in the Social
   History of Pictorial Style.  NY: Oxford UP, 1986.

Kristeva, Julia.  "Stabat Mater."  The Kristeva
   Reader.  Ed. Toril Moi.  NY: Columbia UP, 1986.
   160-86.

But I digress (...).  Anyway, I recall noting a
similarly "pianterly" desription earlier ...

"Portsmouth Polls in strip'd and floral Gowns whose
bold reds, oranges, and purples are taken down in this
light, bruised, made oily and worn, with black mix'd
in everywhere, colors turning ever toward Night."
(M&D, Ch. 3, p. 24)

Opps, gotta run, so, if anyone has some period
illustrations they'd like to post ...

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