V2nd, C3: pov in sec. viii

[Ian Livingston]

Alice wrote:
> To compare Sphere's gig with the wind: In V. the wind  blows
> through Man's lost and found faith,  his threadbare
> community, his sense of sterility, of alienation, of being
> alone, vulnerable to entropy, nihilism, despair. The wind,
> indeed the entire cosmos is indifferent. But this Void, this
> great big white hole, this un-wholeness, we might say
> "anti-paranoid" universe is too much for anyone to stand for
> long and so by a new paranoia, a stencilezed quest, not the
> religious paranoia of the mythological quests of the past,
> but of religious dimensions, man becomes a new JOB, a Man
> caught in a new history, a history that is being controlled
> by anti-human, anti-mythical, anti-natural, forces. Man
> (Job) is now caught between cosmic indifference and a
> conspiracy against life.
>

"Heaven gives,
  and all things turn out for the best
The Sage lives,
  and all things go as Tao goes
  all things move as the wind blows"
      -Laotze, Tao Te Ching, Trans.: Jonathan Star. Penguin, 2001.

I find myself in almost complete agreement with everything you say in
this post, Alice. And I am curious as to your source for the Gnostic
info you cite here, as one of the texts I am currently reading is
Mead's Echoes from the Gnosis, which seems a likely P. source, or
source of a source, of course. And I keep expecting to find something
that affirms just what you say in this post. It is a theme it seems to
me P. works extensively with in GR, VL, M&D and AtD. "Light" and
captive "light."

On Sat, Jul 24, 2010 at 9:11 AM, alice wellintown
<alicewellintown at gmail.com> wrote:
> As we move through the text it becomes more and more apparent that
> Baedeker Land is a Stage--a theatre/theater. That Victoria plays with
> her dolls reminds us of how playwrites and others who write for the
> theatre, and some novelist too no doubt, use dolls to act out their
> plots on a mini-stage. Sullivan is seen doing this in Topsy-Turvey (a
> film I recommend).  A recent production of Ibsen's A Doll's House
> featured little people actors. Anyway, the micro-cos mic events, the
> statge within the stage or play within the play here, the mirror
> world, is lit with stage lights and P applies stage theory and stage
> lighting theor here in V.--an idea he will expound upon in GR, VL, and
> so on. In any event, one reason I read Sphere, not to dismiss the
> brilliant Monk reading because, again, P mixes in Biography with his
> parody and romance here, as a negative figure, as a Puppet, under the
> spot light, despite the fac that the ivory sax can be read as Monk's
> piano keys, is that he plays an ivory sax and ivory is a negative
> symbol in this text--Heart of Darkness. Why wouldn't McClintic be
> subjected to the same inanimating
> forces that affect the others? The description of him begins
> with his "swinging his ass off" (his screw is turned) and his  "hard skin, as if
> it were part of his skull: every vein and whisker on that
> head stood out sharp and clear under the green baby spot:
> you could see the twin lines running down from either side
> of his lower lip, etched in by the force of his embouchure,
> looking like extensions of his mustache."
>
> To compare Sphere's gig with the wind: In V. the wind  blows
> through Man's lost and found faith,  his threadbare
> community, his sense of sterility, of alienation, of being
> alone, vulnerable to entropy, nihilism, despair. The wind,
> indeed the entire cosmos is indifferent. But this Void, this
> great big white hole, this un-wholeness, we might say
> "anti-paranoid" universe is too much for anyone to stand for
> long and so by a new paranoia, a stencilezed quest, not the
> religious paranoia of the mythological quests of the past,
> but of religious dimensions, man becomes a new JOB, a Man
> caught in a new history, a history that is being controlled
> by anti-human, anti-mythical, anti-natural, forces. Man
> (Job) is now caught between cosmic indifference and a
> conspiracy against life.
>
> I think the inanimate affects even Jazz here in V. An Ivory
> sax is not what Coleman played. There is some Irony of
> course, after reading GR, that he did play a plastic sax.
>
> Will the wind ever remember/
> The names it has blown in the past/
> With its crutch, its old age, and its wisdom/
> It whispers, no, this will be the last/
> And the wind cries Mary...
>
> "On an evening in 1946…on the western coast of Mallorca; the
> sun was setting into think clouds, turning all the visible
> sea into a sheet of pearl-gray. Perhaps they may have felt
> like the last two gods-the last inhabitants-of a watery
> earth; or perhaps-but it would be unfair to infer. Whatever
> the reason, the scene played as follows:" V.HP.48
>
> Graves wrote The White Goddess on the island of Mallorca.  I
> think we might bear in mind that Stencil, a typical
> Pynchonian character, a character like Slothrop or Greta,
> with too many identities, is invested not only with the
> writings of Henry Adams, Robert Graves, several others, but
> with their biographies as well.
>
> Note how Berger, in his essay on VL, demonstrates that
> Pynchon works with overlapping stereotypes,  ideologies of
> extreme, generating huge laughter through the use of parody
> and irony.
>
> A submarine scungille farm? Strange! Mr. Pynchon may not be
> a black humorist, that term may be of no use here, but he is
> certainly trying very hard, here as a young man up to his
> hips in books, to stumble about in Joyce's giant overshoes.
> HHH, VVV, MMM, what fun Mr. Pynchon is having with Mr.
> Graves.
>
> scungille shell:  Stencil's scungille farm, 62; 178; what
> Botticelli's Venus seems to be standing in; "There's nothing
> inside. Only the scungille shell." 370; 384; [Education of
> Henry Adams]
>
> http://www.hyperarts.com/pynchon/v/adams.html#virgin
>
> Graves tells us that scungille,  periwinkle, scallop, were
> aphrodisiacs, sacred to Aphrodite, identified by the shell,
> the mirror ("know thyself") and vanity, the comb (originally
> a plectrum for plucking lyre strings) and heartlessness,
> associated with the Moon Goddess Eurynome, Botticelli's
> Birth Of Venus is an exact icon of her cult, in English
> ballad poetry she is the bitter sweetness of love and danger
> for travelers, mariners in foreign ports, like the ports of
> Malta.  See The White Goddess Chapter 22, Ophielia's song in
> Shakespeare's Hamlet, the introduction of the idea of
> Romantic Love in Western Europe, Love In The Western World,
> Denis De Rougemont.
>
> Merry, May,  Marah (Hebrew for brine), myrrh the gift of one
> of those wise guys, MARY, Merry old England and Merry Robin
> (can't get more phallic than Robin) Hood, "Who'll hunt the
> Wren?" cries Robin the Bobbin, who is the Devil, the dark
> deep in the middle of Stencil's shells, the black mass and
> kiss his ass, down where only GOD knew what lived.
> What is living down in that Rock? White Ivory?
>
> This is the "nacreous mass of inference, poetic license
> [...] imaginative anxiety or historical care, which is
> recognized by no one."
>
> some fragments:
>
>
> Inside and outside Romans 2:28
>
> Vera: Truth-Christ / Veronica: Image of the Truth-Christ
>
> I am the kight, the light, the vera, and the way.
>
> So what has this stage lighting theory to do with gnostic light?
> Gnostics believed in a spiritual form of light, a
> preternatural Light, existing beyond the dualism of light
> and darkness, a light that casts no shadow, in fact
> it has no form, and it is immutable.  Because of a
> cosmological drama, explained differently by various sects,
> the preternatural light became imprisoned, and for Gnostics,
> redemption is tantamount to collecting, salvaging, and
> carrying to heaven the sparks of this divine light. Pynchon inverts
> the myth. Remember, the world in Pynchon's fiction is often inverted,
> or a reflection or, as with the Tweeds, not a double or twin, but a
> mirrored existence.
>
> In GR, recall, that the  divine light of the
> Gnostics ("the pure light of the Zero" , "the light of
> "revelation", "the light of illumination") which emanates
> from the "Center" or the "the zero" is Not a Pleromatic
> light but a terrifying and destructive radiance, identified
> with the brightness of the Rocket.
>
> An orange on orange light?  A white light.
>
>
>  This is the light shining from "the Presence feared and wanted." This is the
> light that is  "definitely not human" but of perfect
> whiteness and void of heat just like  the "Poisonous Angel",
> this is the light in "all its bleaching and terror" that is
> totally indifferent to humanity.
>
>
>  III Maccabees
>
>  The Greek book called The Third Book of Maccabees itself
> has nothing to do with the Maccabean period. Its content is
> a legend, a miraculous story of deliverance, which is also
> independently told--in another historical context--by
>  Josephus (Against Apion II, 5). In III Maccabees the story
> takes place during the reign of Ptolemy IV Philopator
> (reigned 221-203 BCE). The central episode of the book is
> the oppression of Egyptian Jews, culminating with an
> anti-Jewish decree by the King. The Jews who were registered
> for execution were brought into the hippodrome outside
>  of Alexandria; the King had ordered 500 elephants to be
> drugged with incense and wine for the purpose of crushing
> the  Jews, but by God's intercession "the beasts turned
> round against the armed hosts [of the king] and began to
> tread them  under foot and destroy them." The Jews fixed
> annual
> celebrations of this deliverance. The book was probably
> written at  the end of the 1st century BCE by an Alexandrian
> Jew in a period of high anti-Jewish tension.
>
>
>
> On Fri, Jul 23, 2010 at 11:38 AM, Krafft, John M. <krafftjm at muohio.edu> wrote:
>> Intriguing suggestion that the pov is that of the allegorical statue of Tragedy: could it see itself turned orange by the sun? Would Stencil's (experimentally?) adopting such a pov have to redound so much to his ethical discredit?
>>
>> Has anyone tried to block the scene? Do all the actors in it enter from the same, stage end of the corridor? Is the window at that end? (Assuming the theater is an actual historical one, we might find out which direction it faced and deduce whether the stage side had a west-facing window.) The statue? If Lepsius enters Box 2 from the stage end, does everyone else come in at the other end and enter Box 3, or come in the other end and pass box 2 to get to 1, or come in the stage end and pass Box 2 to get to 3, or come in the stage end and enter Box 1, or what?
>>
>> jmk
>>
>> --
>>
>> John M. Krafft / English
>> Miami University–Hamilton / 1601 University Blvd. / Hamilton, OH 45011-3399
>> Tel: 513.785.3031 or 513.868.2330
>> Fax: 513.785.3145
>> E-mail: krafftjm at muohio.edu
>> WWW: http://www.ham.muohio.edu/~krafftjm or http://PynchonNotes.org
>>
>



-- 
"liber enim librum aperit."