V-2nd - 2: clocks and mirrors

[Mark Kohut]

Thanks and back atcha since flattery and agreement works on me.....

Here are first bloviating speculations based on what you and janos have written 
and my own pea-brain: 


Clock IS the Cartesian clockwork universe, OR at least the Dynamo, the Machine 
per Adams, all wound up--no free will here, as you suggest---and mechanically 
working. Those fully-described gears of gravity and balanced entropy per Janos 
lead one to the larger generalization naturally, I think.

This clockwork future is what the mirror reflects, which sits behind the 
clock.  Rachel sees it.(at a 45* angle!...sharp human cutting angle in Pynchon?)
and it reflects that future through the window..onto the Street?...Chap 1 and 
his story Entropy full of the street.......

And then I have run out of bloviation and must read it again...


 


----- Original Message ----
From: "kelber at mindspring.com" <kelber at mindspring.com>
To: pynchon-l at waste.org
Sent: Wed, June 30, 2010 11:47:59 AM
Subject: Re: V-2nd - 2: clocks and mirrors

I agree, Mark.  One gets the feeling that Pynchon's describing a specific clock 
that he either saw in a museum, or perhaps read about.  Any theories?  I 
couldn't find any on-line images of a 19th century clock remotely resembling the 
one he describes, although the more ornate images I found seemed to be French in 
origin.  Such an ornate clock mechanism seems kind of anachronistic for the turn 
of the century (unless it was the turn of the previous century).  The first 
electric clock was patented in 1840, and that must have been the wave of the 
future in clock design by the turn of the century.

Is Pynchon counterposing the ornate mechanics of the clock not just to the 
animate, but possibly, nostalgically, to the rising electronics industry (in 
which he was immersed)?  The advantage of a mechanical clock is that you can see 
how it works.  If you're not an electronics tech (or even if you are) you have 
to take the workings of an electronically-driven device at faith.  Later in the 
book, Pynchon describes music transmitted by a transistor radio.  Will have to 
think more about this when we get to that passage.

LK

-----Original Message-----
>From: Mark Kohut <markekohut at yahoo.com>
>Sent: Jun 29, 2010 7:39 PM
>To: kelber at mindspring.com
>Cc: pynchon -l <pynchon-l at waste.org>
>Subject: Re: V-2nd - 2:  clocks and mirrors
>
>I'm still puzzling before I bloviate BUT....
>
>I think the fact that it is a turn-of-the-century clock is somehow very 
>important. 
>
>
>Henry Adams always sez: 
>"In 1900, the continuity snapped". --Henry Adams
>
>And we know how important that time in history is to TRP....
>
>
>
>
> 
>
>
>----- Original Message ----
>From: "kelber at mindspring.com" <kelber at mindspring.com>
>To: pynchon-l at waste.org
>Sent: Tue, June 29, 2010 4:43:54 PM
>Subject: V-2nd - 2: clocks and mirrors
>
>After the off-putting navy-boy antics and human-car love scene in Chapter One, 
>here's what Chapter Two offers:
>
>Pages 40-41 (Harper Perennial)
>
>"Directly across the room from Rachel was a mirror, hung high on the wall, and 
>under the mirror a shelf which held a turn-of-the-century clock.  The double 
>face was suspended by four golden flying buttresses above a maze of works, 
>enclosed in clear Swedish lead glass.  The pendulum didn't swing back and forth 

>but was in the form of a disc, parallel to the floor and driven by a shaft which 
>
>paralleled the hands at six o'clock.  The disc turned a quarter-revolution one 
>way, then a quarter-revolution the other, each reversed torsion on the shaft 
>advancing the escapement a notch.  Mounted on the disc were two imps or demons, 

>wrought in gold, posed in fantastic attitudes.  Their movements were reflected 
>in the mirror along with the window at Rachel's back, which extended from floor 

>to ceiling and revealed the branches and green needles of a pine tree.  The 
>branches whipped back and forth in the February wind, ceaseless and shimmering, 

>and in front of them the two demons performed their metronomic dance, beneath a 

>vertical array of golden gears and ratchet wheels, levers and springs which 
>gleamed warm and gay as any ballroom chandelier.
>
>Rachel was looking into the mirror at an angle of 45 degrees, and so had a view 

>of the face turned toward the room and the face on the other side, reflected in 

>the mirror; here were time and reverse-time, co-existing, cancelling one another 
>
>exactly out.  Were there many such reference points, scattered through the 
>world, perhaps only at nodes like this room which housed a transient population 

>of the imperfect, the dissatisfied; did real time plus virtual or mirror-time 
>equal zero and thus serve some half-understood moral purpose?  Or was it only 
>the mirror world that counted; only a promise of a kind that the inward bow of a 
>
>nose-bridge or a promontory of extra cartilage at the chin meant a reversal of 
>ill fortune such that the world of the altered would thence-forth run on 
>mirror-time; work and love by mirror-light and be only, till death stopped the 
>heart's ticking (the metronome's music) quietly as light ceases to vibrate, an 
>imp's dance under the century's own chandeliers ..."
>
>This is why we obsess over Pynchon, is it not?  Intricate passages, not always 
>so easy to parse, that sends our minds in multiple directions.  There may have 
>been a few in his Slow Learner collection, but this is certainly the first and 
>finest that the world got to sample.
>
>V. is full of mirror and clock and clock-in-mirror imagery.  The story opens 
>with the elaborate sun sliced by a mirror image (although I still have 
>difficulty with that one:  I understand the image of the sun bisected by a 
>plane, but if that plane is a mirror, embedded in the sun, what's being 
>reflected where?).  Later, one of the V. versions will have a false eye with a 
>clock imprinted on it.  What does she see when she looks at the clock in the 
>mirror?
>
>The above description of the mechanized clock certainly sends me on flights of 
>fancy.  But Pynchon's emphasizing the mechanistic aspects - the demons have no 
>free will, on this side of the mirror, at any rate.  
>
>
>The mirror reflects the mechanized clock with its pre-determined demons, but 
>also the tree outside the window, moving with apparent freedom in the wind.  Do 

>these images of not-free and free cancel each other out in the mirror world.
>
>Proposed:  Clocks in Pynchon=mechanistic=lack of free will = bad.
>
>Mirrors=good?  They're rigid glass (owlglass?) but silvered over so that they 
>invite us to escape into other realms.  Are they free will or just a passage to 

>free will?
>
>Laura
>
>
>