V2nd various vagaries and vacillations, veering in the general direction of Ch 7

[Michael Bailey]

moving sideways to tack forward

(there was some kids game where among other things one had, sometimes, a stable,
and there was a plastic horse and a plastic molded saddle hay and a
comb and some small weirdly shaped molded plastic thingie that the
instructions said was the "tack" for the horse, you had to shell out
play money for the tack and I always used to wonder if the horses
could get along without it -
I think I tried to not buy it but my cousins and sister insisted)

anyway, anent this:
or just in from the Midwest, humped, cursed at, coupled and recoupled
beyond all remembrance to the slow easy boys they used to be or the
poor corpses they would make someday

does anybody join me in feeling the urge to change "remembrance" to resemblance?

But that's the kind of little savory word-trick he would do, with
"coupled to" becoming the more significant trope, and "remembrance to"
actually not being meant to join up in signification with each other,
but with other words in the sentence?  But which words and joined how?

Do I not have a life or what?  (But this is interesting to me!)

------------------

brief glance backwards (but only - really! - because it points forward):
p 145, the Feast of San' Ercole dei Rinoceronti, which comes on the
Ides of March.

I can't help but think of Cheech and Chong's Sister Mary Elephant
(Class...class...)

Ecclesiastical history is fascinating!

There are like 34 Ercoles in the Catholic encyclopedia, and one of
them was the Pope's Legate to the Council of Trent (where they kicked
out the Lutherans) but he wasn't a saint...seemingly...
http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/06635a.htm

There are no Rinocerontis in it.

March 15  (Saint list from the web,
http://www.catholic.org/saints/f_day/mar.php)

    * St. Louise de Marillac - founded the Sisters of Charity of Saint
Vincent de Paul (interestingly was dissuaded from becoming a nun as a
teenager by her spiritual advisor, but became one after her husband's
death)
http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/09133b.htm

    * St. Matrona - seems to've been guardian of the head of St John
the Baptist at some point, but doesn't have her own entry
http://www.newadvent.org/utility/search.htm?safe=active&cx=000299817191393086628%3Aifmbhlr-8x0&q=matrona+&sa=Search&cof=FORID%3A9#495


    * St. Aristobulus - a bishop of Thmuis, in Egypt
http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/14658a.htm

    * Bl. William Hart - http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/15631a.htm
apparently killed in England in the 1580s for being a Papist or
something?

    * St. Clement Maria Hofbauer - this is interesting: an energetic
priest, "Indeed it was to Clement Hofbauer perhaps more than to any
single individual that the extinction of Josephinism was due."
-- in light of V., the extinction of Josephinism (Fina = Josephine as
Benny somehow knows, I wouldn't consider it a slam dunk, Benny's
either sharper than he seems or her family yells her full name at her
in his hearing), but hey, "the extinction of Josephinism" (whatever
that is...  here's a brief statement: "the State recognizes religion
as the principal factor in education: "The Church is a department of
police, which must serve the aims of the State until such time as the
enlightenment of the people permit of its relief by the secular
police"" ...
http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/08508b.htm)


    * St. Leocrita - was beheaded (growing shorter on patience, I
found a grid listing of the rest of them and nice concise descriptions
here: http://ausmedjugorje.webs.com/miracle.html  (a-and, how about
that Medjugorje, anyway?))

    * St. Mancius - Bought as a slave by Jewish traders and killed for
his beliefs

    * St. Raymond of Fitero - The Order of Calatrava was founded by
St. Raymond, Abbot of Fitero, in La Rioja, who, in 1158, undertook to
defend the stronghold of Calatrava, abandoned by the Templars. Its
habit is white with a red cross.
(this one wasn't @ the Medjugorje site, so back to Catholic
Encyclopedia: nestled well down the page under the "Spain" entry
http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/14169b.htm

    * St. Nicander - Beheaded for giving aid to Christian prisoners

    * St. Menignus - Removed anti Christian edict from wall. Tortured,
fingers cut off and beheaded.

    * St. Monaldus of Ancona - Missionary slain by Pagans.


--------- but anyway, how about that street fair - it's not forgotten
in Chapter 7, but prefigured or remembered (or coupled beyond all
remembrance to the other image in Chapter 6) in the eyes, not of a New
York woman, but of Signor Mantissa!  "You would be drawn inevitably
again to these eyes, linger as you might have on the rest of the face:
any Visitors' Guide to Signor Mantissa must accord them an asterisk
denoting special interest.  Though offering no clue to their enigma;
for they reflected a free-floating sadness, unfocused, indeterminate:
a woman, the casual tourist might think at first, be almost convinced
until some more catholic light

[ some more catholic light ???? ]

moving in and out of a web of capillaries would make him not so sure.
What then?  Politics, perhaps.  Thinking of gentle-eyed Mazzini with
his lambent dreams, the observer would sense frailness, a
poet-liberal.  But if he kept watching long enough the plasma behind
those eyes would soon run through every fashionable permutation of
grief - financial trouble, declining health, destroyed faith,
betrayal, impotence, loss - until eventually it would dawn on our
tourist that he had been attending no wake after all: rather a
street-long festival of sorrow with no booth the same, no exhibit
offering anything solid enough to merit lingering at."


A street-long festival of sorrow...

every fashionable (fashionable not connoting only "modish", I think,
but also the elevated meaning ( - and in thinking of elevated diction,
of course we hearken back to _Ulysses_ where young Stephen is drawing
the distinction by comparing somebody's (Newman's?) sentence, "He was
detained in the full company of saints" with the everyday "I hope I'm
not detaining you" and of course, sublimely, Mr Deasey (right?
Deasey?  the bullock the bard befriended, the Buffalo buffalo who
uttered the Englishman's proudest boast, "I owe no man"...that guy)
sez, "No, it's quite all right" ie you're not detaining me...)

the elevated, or etymology-aware meaning of "fashionable" then being,
"able to be fashioned, shaped, created"

So, like, we are alerted by the asterisk in the Mantissa Baedeker to
"every fashionable permutation of grief" in old Mantissa's eyes (and,
as I was just noticing, in the Lives of Saints)

Aaaaand therefore we know, that like Joe Walsh in his tune Eyes of the
Confessor (which his representatives seem to have removed from
YouTube, but that's ok), Pynchon age 23 had wanted to direct readers'
attention to the gentleman's eyes in especial...

and to how that might be the fate
lying in wait
for a schlemihl, to eventually grow old and have eyes like that?




-- 
"I have left my book,
I have left my room,
For I heard your voice
singing through the gloom" - James Joyce