Gold, Man, Sax and Violins CH 6 V-2

[Michael Bailey]

 the unemployable recent Navy vet, who signed up for not just a job
but an adventure,
and after that's over, going "what have I learned? what marketable skills?"
Benny, sitting on a stoop, is willing to tell tales (like Gnossos) to
beguile his way into a lady's affections....and it works!


Stencil's stencil, the pattern that he uses to imagine scenes out of
history (later referred to as boilerplate in AtD) - shapes all the
material he hears...
and the stencil, well, that, one's mind gets stencilized from
attending classes at a good school and reading enough books, and
eventually after hearing tell of enough tales,

and it turns out that the strange attractor toward which all the tales
gravitate is also a lady

Not Freudian exactly, not exactly anybody else's methodology
arguably ("it's not his mother") it might be "sort of" his mother in
an "eternal feminine" kind of way...

and then in Vineland it's all literalized, "de-stylized", made
visceral and emotional ("just another animal with a full set of pain
receptors") and Prairie really is longing for her flesh-and-blood
mother