Grasping for V. Group Read: first V. mention; second sighting

[Ron Judy]

Not sure these mercury-vapor lamps are "ugly", since I read this, our
first V, as an echo of Eliot's "at the violet hour", where (Wasteland,
'Fire Sermon', ln 215-23) Tiresias says:

At the violet hour, when the eyes and back	
Turn upward from the desk, when the human engine waits	
Like a taxi throbbing waiting,	
I Tiresias, though blind, throbbing between two lives,	
Old man with wrinkled female breasts, can see	
At the violet hour, the evening hour that strives	
Homeward, and brings the sailor home from sea,	
The typist home at teatime, clears her breakfast, lights	
Her stove, and lays out food in tins.

The (V)iolet hour that allows the feeble prophet to see--see things,
sailors especially, moving homeward. This Pynchon V-light at the end
of the day is artificial, yes, but its appearance also seems to stake
out Pynchon's intervention into High Modernism that comes later. At
another level, yo-yoing as Homeric return, and Pound's Canto I, where
Odysseus, in Hades, encounters Tiresias as well:

And Anticlea came, whom I beat off, and then Tiresias Theban,
Holding his golden wand, knew me, and spoke first:
"A second time? why? man of ill star,
Facing the sunless dead and this joyless region?
Stand from the fosse, leave me my bloody bever
For soothsay."
And I stepped back,
And he strong with the blood, said then: "Odysseus
Shalt return through spiteful Neptune, over dark seas,
Lose all companions."

Profane, wandering/returning sailor, man of ill star, loser of
companions, returns to the infernal city of Norfolk through this
V-"vision"--and so we begin in the finest epic tradition.