ATDTDA 724-746

[Mark Kohut]

As in many a western, the owner-villian squeezes
his lackey, who starts to resent it.....Vibe knows
from Foley's evasions that Kit knows.........Foley
distances himself from "we"...........foretelling?

Foley's hands are
enacting the return of what iis repressed....?

"In 1500, the whole Western world believed in
the [Christian] God", writes Charles Taylor in
A Secular Age. Others have noticed this, including
Henry Adams, a TRP influence.

In this section TRP makes up---it seems---a work of
art called The Sack of Rome. [But]...."The World's End",
he writes..........


----- Original Message ----
From: Glenn Scheper <glenn_scheper at earthlink.net>
To: P-List <pynchon-l at waste.org>
Sent: Monday, February 4, 2008 10:09:38 AM
Subject: ATDTDA 724-746

I read that a "scene" is everything that happens
at one time and location, and I thought to divide
my section into scenes. Even that was not trivial.

First we have Foley and Scarsdale dining, discussing
Kit's disappearance. And I'm thinking, what would be
missing if this scene were not here? Nothing. I'd rip
it out. This guy must be writing a novel on the quota
system: 1000 pages and not one less. He must have a
captive audience and delights in his own patter.

You can't call it a scene transition if he backs out
to talk about the nature of Northern Italy, and then
goes in a flashback to the story of the sacristan;
Or introduces the chronic fact of embarassing tasks,
one of which seems to be the smooth transition to a
new scene, Foley manning the pump as Scarsdale dives.

That scene doesn't really end, but as if by a camera
reversal, to reveal Reef watching through binoculars.


While on mere writing mechanics, I realized P has a
thousand ways to avoid "he said". For example, p 729:
...are all"--he shrugged--"gone." A species of giggle.


Why would anyone chastise a truffle? It makes no sense.
It must be that Scarsdale would like to chastise Foley,
but he cannot. Why not? The mixing and mystery suggests
to me marriage, the one relationship with an arbitrary
interminability, which resembles two fighters, tied by
the left hands, circling with knives in the right hands.
This idea ties to Foley's hands approaching the air pump.


Reading about Squarciones and Mantegna was a fascinating
side trip, links are coming up shortly. I would point out
that one of the few Mantegna room paintings to survive
the war and art restoration is called the marriage suite,
or Camera degli sposa, which sounds a lot to me like the
Casa Spongiatosta of ATD.

One of the last lines of Wabash contains "my angel" and
is perhaps why singing such a song--as if to profess
ownership--might induce the giving up of an angel.

The lagoon: Venice is built in the lagoon of a delta
where a river meets a sea, which afforded protection
from invaders, as walled cities did elsewhere.

The scene: It looks like Pynchon could have taken days
on this description, packing it with things for us to
unpack. There is the salient merchants hanging upside
down from their masts, the tarot's hanged man again.
It seems like "Judgement" would be the approprate card
for the mural's topic, but that is a different card.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hanged_Man

Description and symbolism
In modern versions of the tarot deck, the card depicts a man hanging by his foot upside down, typically from a cross or gallows.

In his book The Pictorial Key to the Tarot, A. E. Waite, the designer of the Rider-Waite tarot deck, wrote of The Hanged Man :

The gallows from which he is suspended forms a Tau cross, while the figure -- from the position of the legs -- forms a fylfot cross. There is a nimbus about the head of the seeming martyr. It should be noted (1) that the tree of sacrifice is living wood, with leaves thereon; (2) that the face expresses deep entrancement, not suffering; (3) that the figure, as a whole, suggests life in suspension, but life and not death. [...] It has been called falsely a card of martyrdom, a card a of prudence, a card of the Great Work, a card of duty [...] I will say very simply on my own part that it expresses the relation, in one of its aspects, between the Divine and the Universe.

Waite continues, "He who can understand that the story of his higher nature is imbedded [sic] in this symbolism will receive intimations concerning a great awakening that is possible, and will know that after the sacred Mystery of Death there is a glorious Mystery of Resurrection."

Some of those using tarot as an aid in an attempt to gain occult or psychological insight have seen this card as expressing themes connoted by a number of keywords, including:

Sacrifice ----- Letting go ----- Surrendering ----- Passivity 
Suspension ----- Acceptance ----- Renunciation ----- Patience 
New point of view ----- Contemplation ----- Inner harmony 
Conformism ----- Nonaction ----- Waiting ----- Giving up 

Yours truly,
Glenn Scheper
http://home.earthlink.net/~glenn_scheper/
glenn_scheper + at + earthlink.net
Copyleft(!) Forward freely.


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