VLVL2 (9): Outro / Wayward Thoughts (Father, Son and and Holy Atropos GR.643)

[Terrance]

‘Tis better to be lord of men than of WASTE: since neither
  walled town nor ship is anything, if it is void and no men
  dwell with thee therein.” 

-- Priest of Zeus to Oedipus

Pynchon seems to like Greek plays. And Shakespeare's Henry/Richard
Plays. 
He sure gets a lot out of Oedipus. Born with a MOIRA determined by
Apollo: he will kill his father and marry his mother. 

Fate. Ah, that old Catholic/Pyncheon. 

Of course FATE is the word that is written on the wall in Hugo's
Hunchback of Notre-Dame. 


Just another tired old tried and true theme, fathers and sons and fate.
Grover, the boy genius with flaws in TSI can't talk with his father.
Communication and Murder. Pernicious Pop and the floundering few. Yup,
all very Freudian. 

In this chapter of Vineland Pynchon is dipping back into some old GR
stuff. 

Takeshi si watching the Bionic Woman when Sister R comes in to tell him
her minathropic tale of blame. 

Ralph's haircut and Takeshi's addiction to speed. 

Sounds like GR. 


MOIRA -- the pattern of life- "a sort of jigsaw puzzle that
the hero's life would fill in-with the added complexity that
the individual never knew what the picture would be
when it was finished nor when it was completed." 

Moira, the portion at the apportionment of the world,
becomes, by a kind of amalgamation of Eileithyiai and
Erinyes, a group of three very powerful goddesses: Klotho,
he Spinning, Lachesis, the Lot-casting, and our dear
Atropos, the Unturnable, in Hesiod they are Daughters of
Night and Daughters of Zeus and Themis. Fates, Fata, Fatum,
spoken or decreed.  They were allotters of a new born
child's portion in life. 

In GR, Pensiero cuts hair, he takes hours, often days to cut each
one a different length. 

"God is who knows their number." GR.643



In Milton's Lycidas come the blind Fury (not Furies, but
  Fates) with the abhorred shears, and  "slit the thin spun
  life, But not the praise."   

The life in this poem is a poet cut down in his prime (notice the single
syllables, slit thin spun life). 

Three there are conjoined Fates, robed in white, whom Erebus begot on
Night. 

By name Clotho, Lachesis, and Atropos. Of these Atropos is the smallest
in stature, but the most terrible. This myth seems to be based on the
custom of weaving family and clan
 marks into a newly-born child's swaddling bands, and so allotting him
his place in society. 

Text, from the Latin texere, "to weave," also perhaps related to the
Greek
tekton ("builder, carpenter"), techne ("art, craft, skill"),
cf. that Remedios Varo painting in The Crying of Lot 49, very good
...Bordando
el Manto Terrestre / Embroidering Earths Mantle  [1961]

http://aries17.uwaterloo.ca/~dmg/remedios/picture11.html

The three Danaids, also known as the Telchines, (GK
grammarians, thelgein) or "enchanters", who named the three
chief cities or Rhodes, were the Tripple Moon goddess Danae
(worshpped by the matriarchal Greeks, who were persecuted
 and wiped out by the invading patriarchal Hellens. 

The Moerae (a portion or phase, the trinity of the
moon--New, Full, Old) , or the Fates, the triple moon
goddess (white robed, the thread is sacred to her as Isis).
When Zeus (the big bully) becomes leader of the Fates,
assuming the prerogative of measuring Man's life, Lachesis
disappears, but Plato, Aeschylus, and Herodotus doe not take
 his claim to be their father seriously.    



   Pensiero cuts hair, he takes hours, often days to cut each
  one a different length. 

  "God is who knows their number." GR.643


   "Go not into the way of the Gentiles and in any city of the
  Samaritans enter ye not: But go rathert to the lost sheep of
  the house of Israel...And into whatsoever city of town ye
  shall enter, enquire  who in it is worth...and whosoever
  shall not receive you, nor hear your words, when you depart
  out of that city, shake off the dust of your feet. Verily I
  say unto you, It shall be more tolerable for the land of
  Sodom and Gomorrah in the day of judgment than for that
  city. Behold I send you forth as sheep in the midst of
  wolves....it is not ye that speak but the spirit...But the
  very hairs of your head are numbered...."  Matthew 10:1-42

“Sophocles implies that incest and exile, too much unity and
  too much diversity, are not opposites but are, literally,
  two sides of the same coin. He also suggests, what the
  audience believed, that incest and parricide are acts that
  obliterate the distinction between man and beast, inside and
  outside, the wild and civilization. What Oedipus lacks (and
  Thebes as well) is some middle term, an Aristotelian Polis
  that mediates between our divinity and animality, making us
  whole in a community constituted by diversity.” 287
  So says,  J. Peter Euben in  The Road Home: Pynchon’s The
  Crying of Lot 49, the concluding chapter of his The Tragedy
  of Political Theory. [1990]

  “If there is any hope in the novel, it rests with Oedipa.
  She is the only one who does not give up the quest
she is
  the middle term
.” 302