V2nd, C3

[Ian Livingston]

That is very well-said, Laura. Kudos! And congratulations, too, on
your recent work of bringing a new daughter to the world. The work
seems to have touched something. I like your reading of things as they
stand so far. It rings true.

On Mon, Jul 19, 2010 at 11:40 AM, David Payne <dpayne1912 at hotmail.com> wrote:
>
> On Sun, 18 Jul 2010 15:55:50 -0400, kelber at mindspring.com wrote:
>
>> Ian writes:
>>
>>>I'll have to leave this hanging with Waldetar's secret about
>>>Baedeker's world: "the permanent residents are actually humans in
>>>disguise." That is, men become their inanimate devices.
>>
>> Which underscores that Stencil's not so much interested in intrigue in
>> 19th Century Egypt as he is in intrigue in Baedeker-land. If V. is a
>> "thing" as Stencil the elder's question implies, then Stencil needs to
>> search for her origins in a place where inanimate people exist. This
>> section of the chapter has a particularly disturbing image of that sort of
>> person - not just a flight of fancy about tourists treating the locals as
>> inanimate props, but Bongo-Shaftsbury revealing himself - terrorizing a
>> little girl in the process - as partially inanimate. B-S (using his
>> sidekick Goodfellow as the initial seducer) will ultimately recruit
>> Victoria Wren into the spying 9and inanimate) life. So Stencil's mentally
>> stumbled into her origins as a thing in this section.
>
> That switch-in-the-arm scene reminded me of the golden screw dream & I got to thinking (a bit of a fart): the golden screw was in the navel, but usually, it's the umbilical chord that's screwed into the navel. The umbilical chord ties us to Mother, of course, and if V might be Mother, then to unscrew is to break the link to V, just the opposite of what Stencil's trying to do!
>
> Sidenote: My new baby's umbilical chord actually just fell of two days ago, & it feels like this weird break toward independence from my daughter being part of her mother...
>
> But back to the unscrewing--once the screw is removed, the legs fall off! Seeking independence from the screw, our lad is instead immobilized; he's become inanimate as if he's lost his soul (to jump back to Stencil's thoughts as he rides the imaginary train).
>
> But there's something wrong in my reading of this dream, I think, because I want the quest to remove the golden screw to conflate with the quest for V.  -- but here my reading totally falls apart because I read the loss of the golden screw as a independence from Mother, whereas the quest for V might be more of a seeking to return to Mother ...
>
> So maybe instead of trying to conflate the two quests, I should see the "quest" for removing the screw as Benny's journey: He wanders w/o purpose, and rather than gaining some humanizing independence from his lack of ties to others, he has lost his soul, his purpose, his golden screw--and turned himself inanimate like a yo-yo. Although even a yo-yo has ties, and Benny has Rachel.
>
> And I should further see Benny's journey as contrary (rather than conflated) with Stencil's quest.
>
> And maybe the the intersection of these two paths on their golden mean shapes a V.
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-- 
"liber enim librum aperit."