V-2 - Chapter 9 - Love is a lash

[Mark Kohut]

Makes me want to read GR again, to work out Gelli in more detail. Thanks.

couple-three small obs:
Dies Irae..not surprisingly a 13th c hymn...in the RC Mass until the end of the 
sixties.
My still-Catholic oldest buddy thinks it is the essence of olde Catholicism, of 
Catholicism.

Black or otherwise, that Mass is bad shit.....the decky-dance of RC belief?

And, see 'scurvy'...a disease of not enough fruit/veggies grown in the sun. 
Tropical fruit....another looping tie-in to P's 'South is where it's at' 
trope....




EXTRA, EXTRA, pure unadulterated speculation via a spotty memory:
I seem to remember a scene with a woman with black stockings and
a faux-crop in La Dolce Vita, the 1960 Fellini movie?...And one sorta like
it...the crawling on all fours part anyway in a Noel Coward anecdote----we 
remember
TRP's words on Mr. Coward....

But the image seems almost archytypical. Bet it is in The Satyricon
or another such that I don't know......



----- Original Message ----
From: Robin Landseadel <robinlandseadel at comcast.net>
To: pynchon-l at waste.org
Sent: Tue, October 19, 2010 6:00:09 PM
Subject: V-2 - Chapter 9 - Love is a lash

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 . . . .