Ch 5 V really

[Joseph Tracy]

Well I kinda got fucked up there because I don't have my own copy of  
V.  Just didn't get to it , but I have a digital text in which the  
chapter headings are  small and attached to the preceding paragraph,  
which contributed to my confusion. Someone else just didn't get to  
separating the chapters.

So while I think the intro to alligator hunting was apropos, it  
wasn't my proper responsibility. And it is late and I've been out  
playing loud music in a bar and reciting Gary Snyder's Smoky the Bear  
Sutra. Look it up if you don't know it.


So anyway CH 5 of V following close on the heels, or more like the  
septum, of Esther's nose Job. Esther was a savior of the Jews during  
the Babylonian captivity.  She used her beauty to marry the emperor  
and her favor with the emperor to stop a pogrom.  Nothing that I  
recall about her nose.  She did it all without a nose job, but could  
probably outshimmy  sister Sue. What about Esther's children? Why can  
only women pass on the chosen status?

"The alligator was Pinto"

I once had a job where a perk was membership in a workout club. While  
there I met a man who was un-mixed race. Black and white parents ,  
but he was pinto, all over. Could such a one be president? What do  
you call such. He was handsome and had a remarkable sense of humor.

"It wouldn't be his first kill. He'd been on the job two weeks now  
and bagged four alligators and one rat."

Even a schlemiel has an inner hero,  Harmakhis, Horus of the  
Horizon,  a god/beast, hawk headed man, human faced lion, a hunter of  
alligators,  a marine, a follower of orders.  Pynchon, like many of  
us, is powerfully conflicted about this kind of thing.  Let's face  
it;  these alligators are largely imaginary. 9 times out of 10 the "  
enemy" is neither mighty nor threatening.  Most of what is celebrated  
as heroism is a sojourn into a shit-filled rat-hole.

."Zeitsuss was always saying how proud he was, and despite his loud  
mouth, his AF of L way of running things, his delusions of high  
purpose, they liked him. Because under the sharkskin and behind the  
tinted lenses, he was a bum too; only an accident of time and place  
kept them all from sharing a wine drunk together now. And because  
they liked him, his own pride in "our Patrol," which none of them  
doubted, made them uncomfortable - thinking of the shadows they had  
fired at (wine-shadows, loneliness-shadows); the snoozes taken during  
working hours against the sides of flushing tanks near the rivers;  
the bitching they had done, but in whispers so quiet their partner  
didn't even hear; the rats they had let get away because they felt  
sorry for them. They couldn't share the boss's pride but they could  
feel guilty about making what he felt a lie, having learned, through  
no very surprising or difficult schooling, that pride - in our  
Patrol, in yourself, even as a deadly sin - does not really exist in  
the same way that, say, three empty beer bottles exist to be cashed  
in for subway fare and warmth, someplace to sleep for awhile"

Zeit: age or time period     Suss: to check out, examine for  
accuracy, quality or condition.  Every leader of every age approves  
of its own time, and usually sees i through the lens of heroic deeds  
of yore. Zeitsuss could be the young true believer lieutenant, a  
union leader. a teacher who believes education will heal the world, a  
missionary to heathen shores. A president without a clue.

The alligator leads them through Fairing's Parish .  A subterranean  
wonderland of good intentions gone profoundly strange. This is where  
the reader realizes he has been plunged  into Pynchon's map of the   
collective unconscious, Dante with a definite twist.  You don't know  
whether to laugh your head off or run screaming to keep it firmly  
attached. This is what happens when you chase rabbits and tangle with  
gods in the depths of the earth, in the lake with Grendel's Mother,  
only to find you have no gills and the air tube has been disconnected.