MDDM Last Transit Ch. 74 (Mason's Melancholy)

[Terrance]

"Misses his Family," the Servants tell it. "No sleep." 719

According to Burton one cause of Melancholy is Venus Omitted. 

Venery!

What do you get if you omit Venus in Kepler's theory of music? 

Burton, not unlike Robert Graves or Stencil or Henry Adams, chases down
every connection. Paranoia, how the human mind connects to make sense of
chaos or all the sense data flooding the mind, connects all the facts,
all the artifacts, is not a bad thing for a detective, a
scholar/researcher, a historian, even a novelist. We find Wicks and Co.
discussing the  "missing Mason letters." Of course he can just
fictionalize it, Maunchausen it. Is that the honorable thing to do? Or
do we dishonor the possibility that the letters, if discovered would
tell a different tale, provide another tale teller a different spin on
things, if we speculate what Might have been in them, what Mason may
have said, or may have thought or felt? 

Venus omitted. Venery. It drives Pig Bodine mad enough that he tries to
rape Paola. 
Nobody is gettin any in P's novels. Or if they do, it's always Venus the
hard way. 

Nope, I still don't think Dixon gets any. Lady L. what? Come now. 

History sends Mason to Northern Ireland. But Pynchon sends him there
too. 
I like Mason. He's much more interesting than most of P's characters. To
put him out there on the earth, on the peat, is perfect. 

Another cause of melancholy is pride, class pride, a conflict with the
father's work and too much book learning and study. 

If only Mason would pick up the damned slane and dig, but he can't. 

The best cure for melancholy in men, I've no doubt, is venery and labor
with other men. 

By God, the old man could handle a spade.
Just like his old man. 

	Digging, Seamus Heaney

http://www.bbc.co.uk/voices/pages/profilepages/heaneys2.shtml



  

The Wasteland/worm/dragon/St. Geroge/Prometheus

http://www.wwnorton.com/nael/beowulf/welcome.htm