Profane's disassembling dream dream?

[Michael Bailey]

Ian Livingston wrote:
> Boy, I'd be ready to jump on board with this if I didn't know how the
> story ends. As it is, I have to ask: Does Benny become a thing which
> is then undone?
>

I couldn't help getting excited about
the implications of the golden screw dream -

lots of room for refinement or development,

such as the dream takes place in a city, and the tree where he finds
the screwdriver is near a streetlight, so some of the natural world
has survived on the Street, although its fruits are orange balloons,
so they have undergone a sea change too...

 such as the Mechanical Bride's offspring naturally bearing tokens of
the mechanization in intimate places, or a Hegelian opposition of
being a child in a family, and then being a cog in a military machine,
with implications of a synthesis that involves finding a home-style
place for himself within the world delineated by Stencil's quest!

According to the lore, wasn't one of Pynchon's preliminary title
suggestions "And then his ass fell off"?  which would show that he
thought the joke was importantl in the book...

> There are some resonances with the street, especially The Street as
> all that ever was, that strongly echo Taoism. I brought this up before
> to resounding silence, but, given the cultural milieu in which Pynchon
> wrote V., I have to raise it again. Taoism and Zen where everywhere
> with the hip scene. Zen had the greater popular following, but Zen is
> a hybrid of Buddhism and Taoism with a Japanese twist, so, either way,
> the Tao figures there. The Tao is the way, the path, the street; it is
> all that ever is, just as it is, nothing fancy. But if you try to
> exclude yourself or anything else from it, you get wonky in the world.
>

I don't know much about Taoism, honestly it sounds interesting and
could well apply.  I think, but do not know, that a street is what we
call a road while it passes thru a town or city?  So I'm thinking
about "the road goes ever, ever on" in The Hobbit, and those pictures
of Chinese landscapes with big mountains and verdant forests and a
little winding path and that is the Tao (? sort of ?), and the path in
the wilderness is like the wavy dividing line between yin and yang...


> So I ask: Does Benny become a thing which is then undone, or does he
> just get wonky in the world?
>

he evolves from a schlemihl who badly needs regrooving
into an accomplice in Stencil's revisionist history...


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