V-2 - Chapter 9 - Love is a lash

[Robin Landseadel]

On Oct 18, 2010, at 6:28 PM, alice wellintown wrote:

> What does "pegged" mean? Satirized?

TRP satirizes everybody. But there's a decidedly different M.O. going  
on with Readers and Advisors, Cabalists, Alchemists and other  
practitioners of what Lenny Bruce deliciously called: "Non-Scheduled  
Theologies." Those who can, do and it looks like Miles Blundell,  
Sortilège and Geli Tripping most certainly can, as least as far as  
Pynchon's novels are concerned.

Compare & contrast time again kiddies -- let's put two Pynchon songs  
side by side, see if anything rhymes . . .

	Love's a lash,
	Kisses gall the tongue, harrow the heart;
	Caresses tease
	Cankered tissue apart.

	Liebchen, come
	Be my Hottentot bondsman tonight,
	The sjambok's kiss
	Is unending delight.

	Love, my little slave,
	Is color-blind;
	For white and black
	Are only states of mind.

	So at my feet
	Nod and genuflect, whimper for me:
	Though tears are dried
	Their pain is yet to be.

Note that Kurt is "Enchanted."

Not that that's necessarily a good thing.

Thanks [in part] to that whole fin de siècle mis en scene -- hell,  
just Google fin de siècle, fer Christ's sake . . . .

http://tinyurl.com/2dptv9c

http://tinyurl.com/26fkvfw

Women don't come off too good in that messy scene, and frankly they  
don't come off too good in "V." either, if ya catch my drift.

Anyway, with a-one and a-two . . .

	Love never goes away,
	Never completely dies,
	Always some souvenir
	Takes us by sad surprise.

	You went away from me,
	One rose was left behind
	Pressed in my Book of Hours,
	That is the rose I find ....

	Though it's another year,
	Though it's another me,
	Under the rose is a drying tear,
	Under my linden tree ....

	Love never goes away,
	Not if it's really true,
	It can return, by night, by day,
	Tender and green and new

	As the leaves from a linden tree, love,
	that I left with you.

Shall I make a long short story shorter? Monaugen gets as sucked into  
the masque of Red Death as much as anyone in the story -- save perhaps  
those who go all the way to that other side, those who go "epidermal."  
There is the tolling of "Dies Irae" everywhere

	. . . Somewhere out in the house (though he may have dreamed that  
too) a
	chorus had begun singing a Dies Irae in plainsong. It got so loud it  
woke
	Mondaugen. Irritated, he lurched to the door and went out to tell  
them to keep
	quiet. . .

wonder where it's tolling from . . . must be a mass of sorts, and  
considering the overall degenerate mis-en-scene, I'd harbor a guess  
that it's some sorta Black Mass.  . . . a-a-a-and there's that cute  
little Hedwig Vogelsang -- her name pretty much associative with the  
battle-cry of a Raptor, come here Wernher my liebschen, here's a Baby  
Ruth . . .

What is it exactly that this Raptor's Battlesong does to Mondaugen?  
Does it send him raving?

	''No. For God's sake," Mondaugen raved, "don't leave the room. Hyenas  
and jackals are
	padding up and down those little corridors. "

But Wait! There's more!

	. . . When through some levitation he again found himself on top of  
the bed,
	Hedwig Vogelsang was just entering the room astride a male Bondel who  
crawled
	on all fours. She wore only a pair of black tights and had let her  
long hair down.

	"Good evening, poor Kurt." She rode the Bondel as far as the bed and
	dismounted. "You may go, Firelily. I call it Firelily," she smiled at  
Mondaugen,
	"because of its sorrel skin."

Firelilly's a code word, see?*

	Mondaugen attempted a greeting, found himself too weak to talk.  
Hedwig was
	slithering out of the tights. "I made up only my eyes," she told him  
in a decadent
	whisper: "my lips can redden with your blood as we kiss." She began  
making love
	to him. He tried to respond but the scurvy had weakened him. How long  
it went
	on he didn't know. It seemed to go on for days. The light in the room  
kept
	changing, Hedwig seemed to be everywhere at once in this black satin  
circle the
	world had shrunk to: either she was inexhaustible or Mondaugen had  
lost all
	sense of duration. They seemed wound into a cocoon of blond hair and
	ubiquitous, dry kisses: once or twice she may have brought in a  
Bondel girl to
	assist . . .

Obviously, Hedwig Voglesang ain't exactly Shirley Temple. But and  
still, in the context of this story, she seems like a sort of  
psychopomp, escorting Kurt to a land of the dead, said Deadlands being  
Deutschesudwestafrika during its great time of death, the 1904 that  
Fopple, sick fuck that he is, can't stop celebrating. Still, creatures  
may have uses that masters are unaware of. I see many of the  
characteristics of Hedwig in Geli. I'd rather have a date with the  
decidedly "Ecological, Neo-Marxist and Feminist "Reclaiming" types"  
than scary, diseased, faux fin de siècle types but both are magical  
creatures of sorts. Still, you ought to know that dating these sorts  
of flaming creatures is usually a lot more trouble than it's worth,  
you're just going to have to trust me on this one. Whatever else she  
might be among constellation of horrors found within Fopple's non-stop  
Fasching, Hedwig Vogelsang appears to have elements of her character  
that were more fully realized in Geli Tripping.

> On Mon, Oct 18, 2010 at 8:30 PM, Robin Landseadel
> <robinlandseadel at comcast.net> wrote:
>> On Oct 18, 2010, at 4:45 PM, alice wellintown wrote:
>>
>>> Literary Ecology and Postmodernity in Thomas Sanchez's Mile Zero and
>>> Thomas Pynchon's Vineland
>>
>> Got as far as finding big bleeding hunks over at Google Books,  
>> makes some
>> rough places plain. I've long had a deep connection with the  
>> Ecological,
>> Neo-Marxist and Feminist "Reclaiming" movement. If you mentioned  
>> the New
>> England Transcendentalists sooner there may have been fewer smoke and
>> flames. And let's face it Charlie -- a lot of those "Ecological,  
>> Neo-Marxist
>> and Feminist "Reclaiming" types" are pegged in Against the Day,  
>> even moreso
>> in "Inherent Vice." Particularly as they leard to adapt to the "New  
>> Age."

Gotta "leard" to read my own stuff before breathlessly pressing the  
"send" button.

>> On Oct 18, 2010, at 4:45 PM, alice wellintown wrote:
>>
>>> see Orphic Contra Gnostic.
>>
>> I guess you're pointing to the last chapter of  Dwight Eddins' "The  
>> Gnostic
>> Pynchon"?

	. . . For Plato, primordial nature is the cave we must escape in  
search of
	the "Good," whereas for Pynchon it is precisely this nature-properly
	apprehended-that constitutes the Good. The "flesh" that works to  
obscure
	transcendental vision for the ancient philosopher becomes the very
	vehicle of that vision for the modern novelist, who discerns in the  
enlight-
	ened defectors from the cult of death a "striving subcreation" (GR,  
720), a
	reflection of Earth's timeless processes in human sexuality: "how can  
flesh
	tumble and flow so," asks the author-persona, "and never be any less
	beautiful?" This minor mirroring of Creation opens an escape route  
through
	the narrow interstices of pervasive nonbeing, or-as Pynchon so  
poignantly
	phrases it-"into the rests of the folksong Death (empty stone rooms),  
out,
	and through, and down under the net, down down to the uprising." It  
is "the
	green uprising" of life to which he refers, a burgeoning symbolically  
linked
	here to the resurrection of the primordial Titans and inseparable  
from the
	"down down" of the "Earthliness" which threatens to "forget" us.

	The mechanisms of the two quests, however, Pynchon's and Plato's,  
finally
	suggest a common archetype that embraces even their antithetical  
valuations.
	Both represent a constant striving to move, in Plato's words, "from  
the deeper
	dark of ignorance into a more luminous world ami:the greater  
brightness" (p.
	751)-a movement that makes "deformed" human consciousness the medium
	between an inanimate realm of husks and shadows parodying life, and a
	polarity that images an impossibly radiant fullness of life. In the  
case of
	Pynchon's personae, the "art" of "producing vision" is the art of  
Orphic
	praising, but it is an art which-paradoxically-demands artlessness, the
	spontaneous unlearning of culturally conditioned injunctions against  
seeing
	Earth wholly and sympathetically.

	The reward of this visionary labor, of "looking further" to locate  
the Titans, is-
	appropriately-a sighting that overwhelms our limited human capacities:

		[We] leave Their [the Cartel's] electric voices behind in the  
twilight at the
		edge of the town and move into the constantly parted cloak of our
		nightwalk till

		Suddenly, Pan-leaping-its face too beautiful to bear, beautiful  
Serpent,
		its coils in rainbow lashings in the sky-into the sure bones of  
fright.
		(pp. 720-721)

	The appearance of this apparition as an immediate segue from the  
search for
	the Titans suggests that Pynchon has in mind a Titanic Pan, an  
interpretation
	borne out by the mythic genealogies that describe Pan alternately as  
the son
	of Uranus and Ge --t he parents of the Titans -- or as the son of  
Cronus and
	Rhea, who were themselves Titans. As such, he is the goatgod whom Greek
	myth places in the cortege of Dionysus and who signifies nature's  
Dionysian
	commonality-a significance reinforced by his name (the Greek for  
"all") and by
	his philosophical function as a symbol for "the Universe, the  
Totality.,,
  	Steven Weisenburger argues that this reference "pertains less to  
the Greek
	mythological figure than to the chief devil of European witchcraft"  
described in
	Grimm's Teutonic Mythology. Since the latter figure derives from the  
former
	and Pynchon tends to identify witchcraft with nature-friendly magic  
(as in the
	case of Geli Tripping), it may be that we can have it both ways-a  
possibility
	supported by the derivation of "saturnalia" from the Titan Saturn. At  
any rate,
	Pynchon metamorphoses Pan from faun to "beautiful Serpent," an image  
that
	better resonates with the normative symbology already established in  
the
	novel.

	Thomas Moore, glossing this passage, recalls Pynchon's allusion to  
Uroboros
	("the dreaming Serpent which surrounds the World," GR, p. 412), which  
he
	classifies as "one of ... two major mythological/psychic signs,,19  
that Pynchon
	uses to suggest "the One," the primordial unity from which we are  
alienated.
	Moore also speculates, convincingly, on a variety of other connections
	between Pynchon's symbol and mythological analogues, including "Ayido
	Hwedo, the beneficent Rainbow Snake of modern West Africa," and lung's
	mandalic symbol of union, the World Serpent. One of the most useful  
parallels
	he traces is D. H. Lawrence's description, in Apocalypse, of the "Sky  
Snake ...
	cast down as Lucifer" into "the black underworld." Pynchon's  
revaluation of
	the Eden myth is analogous in its denial of a Serpent-inspired Fall  
by which
	nature was supposedly devalued. Similarly, the "rainbow" of Pan's coils
	comes to signify a promise of nature's vitalizing permanence  
antecedent to
	the promise of the Serpent's opponent, the ]udaeo-Christian God, not to
	destroy Creation again.

	Occurring over nine-tenths of the way through the novel, the vision  
of Pan
	represents the last and perhaps the most decisive of the epiphanies  
by which
	Pynchon establishes his Orphic countertheology. . .

	Dwight Eddins - The Gnostic Pynchon, 126/127

. . . which sounds a whole lot like the Gaia Hypothesis on Acid.

  Always did come to think of it . . .
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	Today we must all be aware that protocol
	takes precedence over procedure. However
	you say -- WHAT THE -- what does this mean…

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*	It was a glorious day, December and hot, a bird somewhere gone mad
	with the season. Firelily, under him, seemed sexually aroused, she
	curveted and frolicked so about the line of march, covering five  
miles to
	the prisoners' one. From the side it always looked medieval, the way  
the
	chain hung down in bights between their neck-rings, the way the weight
	pulled them constantly toward earth, the force only just overcome as  
long
	as they managed to keep their legs moving . . . .