V-2 - Chapter 9 - Deviations, fantasies and secret amulets

[Robin Landseadel]

This collection of scenes has the look and feel of the real Corinthian  
leather interior found in this 1973 Gravity's Rainbow that you'll  
viewing in our glaring, overlit factory showroom that I'm yelling in  
today, TV cameras invasively exposing all the scars of an unvirtuous  
youth on today's, modern, high-tech High Def broadcasts, now beaming  
50% more of my fabulous commercials directly to your frontal cortex.  
This section has more of the sound of the earlier, London-based/Blitz  
episodes of the WWII epic, not so much the higher-flying and rather  
stoned "Journey into the Mind [s] of Woods" stories found in the later  
"In the Zone" episodes of our long running serial, "The Potsdam Dig"  
that's featured tonight here on Al Crowley's "Duke of Madness Motors  
Cinema" here on "TV Eye" channel 14.  This baby's got it all, howling  
ghosts, the far side of existence, consciousness teetering right on  
the edge of extinction, pre-echos of "The Holocaust", Sick Sex --  
literally --, S & M party dance moves, Krazy Kostumes, catchy tunes  
and the kind of transitions one would expect from "À Bout de Soufflé"  
or "Don't Crush That Dwarf, Hand Me The Pliers" . . .

		It had only to do with the destroyer and the destroyed, 	
	and the act which united them, and it had never been that
	way before. Returning from the Waterberg with von Trotha
	and his staff, they came upon an old woman digging wild
	onions at the side of the road. A trooper named Konig
	jumped down off his horse and shot her dead: but before he
	pulled the trigger he put The muzzle against her forehead
	and said, "I am going to kill you." She looked up and said,. "I
	thank you." Later, toward dusk, there was one Herero girl,
	sixteen or seventeen years old, for the platoon; and Firelily's
	rider was last. After he'd had her he must have hesitated a
	moment between sidearm and bayonet. She actually
	smiled then; pointed to both, and began to shift her hips 	
	lazily in the dust. He used both.

This horrific Elect/Preterite nightmare is more fully expanded in GR,  
into the suicide cult of the Hereros in Germany and the 175's  
perfectly "Gnostic" Nightmare of a religion towards the end of WWII  
among many other rather disagreeable, disturbing and déclassé topics.

Jump to:

		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."

Very sudden transition here, abrupt, without warning. How did we get  
from the bloodbath of 1904 to the sickbed of 1922? TRP has picked up a  
cue or two from the jump cuts working their way into the language of  
the cinema circa 1960. Pynchon, after all, did offer up his talents as  
a movie critic to some major publication -- Esquire? A-a-and just wait  
'til we get to that part with the Gorilla . . .

Sorry, wrong book . . .

	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. . .

Death from above, must be a Raptor -- "Hedwig Vogelsang?" "Warrior's  
Birdsong?"

	. . . 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: . . .

. . . as compared to the Cacausian Chalk circle cited before. "Theater  
of Cruelty" has already left its make, make way for Jesus Arrabal.

	. . . 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.

		"Where is Godolphin," he cried. "She has him."	

		"O God ... "

. . . all suggesting dark sexual sorcery à la Morgana in Arthurian  
legend and other popular Romances.

One of the turn-offs of "V." for me is the "V." character herself, in  
some ways the evil witch of the fairy tales, the crone of Hänsel und  
Gretel. What can I say? I got pulled into "Reclaiming," still feel  
like they're my "peeps." I suppose I should just get over it, but this  
is an aspect of Pynchon's writing that I very much disliked in his  
early work and one of those things that has undergone significant  
revision from "V." to "IV" -- Sortilège is one of the most dependable  
and essentially decent characters in Pynchon's most recent novel,  
perhaps Pynchon's most essentially decent character -- ever.  Of  
course, Pynchon's the one to obsessively recast his thoughts, it's a  
long journey from Entropy to Inherent Vice -- even if only a matter of  
nuance or inflection those sorts of taxominal differences subdivide  
shit 'n' shinola. The Vera/Vogelsang split personality gets riven much  
deeper in GR. Katje Borgesius seems to be in many ways analogous to  
"V." but now we have a mirroring positive "Orphic" Witch in Geli  
Tripping. Both Katje and Geli perform Black Magic* but to seemingly  
opposite end results. But perhaps I should give Katje more credit --  
like Judas, she has a particularly difficult role to perform.

And I always liked Yoko Ono anyway.

The fantastical nature of the depiction of these scenes owes a lot to  
Poe's Masque, but that is only one among whole new phyla of horrors  
Pynchon was about to un-pack in his taxonomic plotting over the next  
ten years or so. There is the same jumbling of frames in the depiction  
of K & H's coupling -- the same hallucinogenic de-coupling of the  
space-time continuum -- that can be found in Raymond Chandler's vistos  
of deep inebriation, usually featuring Marlowe in the locked ward of a  
Doctor with dubious credentials, questionable morals and a rap sheet  
from the narco squad. Philip's all loaded up on a headful of "hop" and  
there's a real bruiser blocking the exit, with a meeting scheduled  
with Bernie Ohls in an hour. Tough times, time to light up a fag,  
assess the situation . . .

		Sometimes impotent, sometimes aroused despite his
	lassitude, Mondaugen stayed neutral, neither enjoying her
	attentions nor worrying about her opinion of his virility. At
	length she grew frustrated. He knew what she was looking
	for.

		"You hate me," her lip quivering unnaturally as a forced
	vibrato.

		"But I have to recuperate."

		In through the window came Weissmann with his hair
	combed in bangs, wearing white silk lounging pajamas,
	rhinestone pumps, and black eyeholes and lips, to steal
	another oscillograph roll. The loudspeaker blithered at him
	as if it were angry.

Another jump-cut, the surreal entrance of our futurist demi-God of  
fashion trends  -- here's a Shout-out from Lady Ga-Ga, some forty-odd  
years later -- another indication that the Sferics are the transmuted  
voices of angry ghosts. Or perhaps this is all a hallucinogenic  
nightmare, the hallucinations of fever dreams, always a difficult  
Bardo state, one of those bridges between the land of the living and  
the dead, filled with angry ghosts and long negotiations with the dead  
-- here's a relevant passage from Gravity's Rainbow:

	. . . mba rara m'eroto ondyoze ... mbe mu munine m'oruroto
	ayo u n'omuinyo ... (further back than this is a twisting of
	yarns or cordage, a giant web, a wrenching of hide, of
	muscles in the hard grip of something that comes to wrestle
	when the night is deep ... and a sense, too, of visitation by
	the dead, afterward a sick feeling that they are not as
	friendly as they seemed to be . . . he has wakened, cried,
	sought explanation, but no one ever told him anything he
	could believe. The dead have talked with him, come and
	sat, shared his milk, told stories of ancestors, or of spirits
	from other parts of the veld-for time and space on their side
	have no meaning, all is together).  	

	"There are sociologies," Edwin Treacle, his hair going all
	directions, attempts to light a pipeful of wretched leftovers-
	autumn leaves, bits of string, fag-ends, "that we haven't
	even begun to look into. The sociology of our own lot, for
	example. Psi Section, the S.P.R., the old ladies in
	Altrincham trying to summon up the Devil, all of us on this
	side, you see, are still only half the story."  	

	"Careful with that 'we,' " Roger Mexico distracted today by a
	hundred things, chi-square fittings that refuse to jibe,
	textbooks lost, Jessica's absence ....  	

	"It makes no sense unless we also consider those who've
	passed over to the other side. We do transact with them,
	don't we? Through specialists like Eventyr and their controls
	over there. But all together we form a single subculture, a
	psychical community, if you will."  	

	"I won't," Mexico says dryly, "but yes I suppose someone
	ought to be looking into it."  	

	"There are peoples-these Hereros for example-who carry
	on business every day with their ancestors. The dead are
	as real as the living. How can you understand them without
	treating both sides of the wall of death with the same
	scientific approach?"
	P155/156

Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. From the Meridian Room in the Park  
Plaza hotel in New York City, we bring you the music of Ramón Raquello  
and his orchestra . . .

		Later Foppl appeared in the door with Vera Meroving,
	held her hand, and sang to a sprightly waltz melody:

		I know what you want,
		Princess of coquettes:
		Deviations, fantasies and secret amulets.

		Only try to go
		Further than you've gone
		If you never want to live to see another dawn.

		Seventeen is cruel,
		Yet at forty-two,
		Purgatory fires burn no livelier than you.

		So, come away from him,
		Take my hand instead,
		Let the dead get to the task of burying their dead;
		Through that hidden door again,
  		Bravo for '04 again; I'm a
		Deutschesudwestafrikaner in love ...

Foppl is that "Anarchist Miracle," the Plutocratic Colonialist. Vera/ 
Volsang/"V." seems to be an even more dangerous Diva or Devi, some  
essential killing force, one of the aspects that inform "entropy,"  
like Kali.

Or maybe Stencil's just got Mommy problems?

And after this further interruption/Greek Chorus we find ourselves  
merging into the dreamworld again, landing on the most harrowing wing  
of this creature, Sarah's Story.

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*Rather explicitly and I strongly recommend that you wear lead armor  
with full electrical grounding [heavy cable, we're moving beaucoups  
amps] while reading that shit, otherwise you might experience a full- 
on karmic phase reversal and that kinda heartache's way too expensive  
to risk taking any chances with -- no way will anyone insure your  
mental health after exposure to those memes. I'll bet Pynchon spent  
most of the seventeen post-GR years doing a lot of psychic detoxing,  
just to get all that shit out of his head. And, again, it points to an  
obsession with the Heretical that expands far beyond the traditions of  
"American Romance."

And speaking of "American Romance."

http://xroads.virginia.edu/~hyper/cabell/title.htm

	Although escapist, Cabell's works are ironic and
	satirical. H. L. Mencken disputes Cabell's claim
	to romanticism, characterized him as "really the
	most aciduous of all the anti-romantics. His
	gaudy heroes... chase dragons precisely as
	stockbrockers play golf." Cabell saw art as an
	escape from life, but once the artist creates his
	ideal world, he finds that it is made up of the
	same elements that make the real one.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Branch_Cabell

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	Comrades – friends, we are gathered here
	not only to accept in behalf of one recluse –
	one who has found that the world in itself
	which seems to be a time not of the toad. . . .