V2nd, C3

[Mark Kohut]

Great Congrats, Dave.....been dipping in Jung where he is big on the baby/Mother 
as One for quite a while.

But, life aside...LIFE ASIDE!?....THAT'S what it is about:

you wrote this and I say Yes...
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 ... 




----- Original Message ----
From: David Payne <dpayne1912 at hotmail.com>
To: Pynchon-l <pynchon-l at waste.org>
Sent: Mon, July 19, 2010 2:40:19 PM
Subject: RE: V2nd, C3


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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