Profane's disassembling dream dream?

[Michael Bailey]

 Mark Kohut wrote:

>   To Profane, alone in the street, it would always seem maybe he was
> looking for something too to make the fact of his own dissassembly
> plausible as that of any machine. [... skipping paragraphs] This was
> all there was to dream; all there ever was: the Street."
>
> Things fall apart...An early foreshadowing of V.'s final disassembled
> demise...The screwdriver symbolism of the flaneur?
>


alice's pointed out the Mechanical Bride syndrome...
that fits pretty well here

lacking that when I originally read the book, what I empathized with
was how he had had a home with a Mom, grew up and out of that, then
sort of had a home in the Navy, which (for the purposes of a rabidly
anti-militaristic reading, which probably doesn't completely square
with the author's intentions, since he himself entered the Service,
although it isn't ruled out since he did leave the Service) provided
him with a sort of jaundiced viewpoint regarding hierarchy ("Down with
all you rich bastards") and also a mechanical familiarity with
dissasembly derived from prolonged proximity to engines both of
destruction (artillery and their effects in use) and propulsion (and
the continuing mechanical maintenance and stripping down and
rebuilding and applying tools)

 the colonialist impulse masquerades as a mechanical fix to the
problems which anyone from a more advanced culture can see in a
primitive culture, sending in skilled workers to the figurative engine
room - but (and unavoidably, since defraying the expenses of the
endeavour entails appropriating the potential capital with which the
primitive society could develop, and the denizens' reasonable
objections aren't taken seriously, as a rule...) more often than
anybody would like, really comes to mean the application of the
appetite for destruction... that is to say, in the dream/joke
mingling, the tree of nature bears a strange fruit containing a tool,
and in a friendlier dreamscape, this would entail the ensuance of
existentiality (whoops, quoting Joyce again, same passage as the "mead
for misery" or pretty close...) ...
RESET
...rather, in a friendlier dreamscape, there would be other tools to
deal with the butt that had been removed, bore it out or whatever,
open up the innards ("stomach, oilpan, same difference" - wasn't that
a Cheech and Chong routine?), revamp the holding assembly - probably
some kind of reference to the dependence on parents that the
navel-placement of the golden screw points to - maybe pull in a
designer (there are a bunch of skilled designers that used to work
around Detroit that could probably do this, eh...and quite likely some
more ex-NASA dudes and dudettes...) to design some kind of snap-ring
or strut arrangement that would clasp the arse directly to the hips -
and replace the gaskets and put it back on, and most of all there'd be
a shop or drydock in which this was taking place...but instead he's
out on the Street and only has the one tool...

worse than Rommel's plight in GR - at least he had his ass handed to
him ("Ach, mein Arsch!") - Benny just sees the part fall off and,
because he's a schlemihl and inanimate things do not love him so much,
he's unprepared to reapply the part although really that sort of
upgrade/retrofit would seem like a really good idea for a guy like
him!



-- 
Yippy dippy dippy,
Flippy zippy zippy,
Smippy gdippy gdippy, too!
- Thomas Pynchon ("'Zo Meatman's Gone AWOL")