P-related: on Barthelme's 'The Balloon': SPOILER ALERT (If you want to read this story pure)

[Mark Kohut]

This story has entered AtD possibilities for reasons beyond chance. Chumminess, in fact. [TRP and DB knew each other and well, it seems]
 It is copyrighted 1966 by Barthelme. It appeared first in The New Yorker then was in his "Unspeakable Practices, Unnatural Acts"
and, latterly, in some anthologies....where I found it. 

A couple-three resonances.....the balloon is large like the Chums. " sliding weights on the inside"...anchored....."the vari-shaped mass
at a number of points.".....'Why don't we go stand on top, and take the air, and maybe walk about a bit"....."Sometimes a bulge, blister,
or subsection would carry all the way east to the river"....[this after a remark that the ballon was admired for "not being limited or defined"....]

The balloon is loved by children. "Exciting" as against the city's "flat, hard surface" [It is hanging above NYC]...although it is 'for adults". 
The underside is a colorful pleasure to look at.....

One man might see it as a system of "unanticipated rewards"....an example follows......."ideas of 'bloat' and 'float' were introduced, as well
as concepts of dream and responsibility."..."this ability of the balloon to shift its shape, to change, was very pleasing..."....

Here's a distinct Pynchon theme w echoes: "the balloon offered the possibility of its randomness, of mislocation of the self, in contradistinction to the grid of precise, rectangular pathways under our feet."......"the steadily growing importance of complex machinery...[means] 
more and more people will turn, in bewildered inadequacy, to solutions for which the ballloon may stand as a prototype or "rough draft"......

Nod to Robin L: "the balloon is a spontaneous autobiographical disclosure"................and was put away in West Virginia "awaiting some other time of unhappiness, sometime, when we are angry with one another."......

That the balloon is what Eliot (and others ) call an objective correlative seems the major meaning........as Barthelme plays it for a story about projected 
meanings ....."unlimited, undefined"................          yet also he has this line early: 'at the moment there was only 'this balloon', concrete particular, hanging there"...
Art means and just IS............... ..........................