V2nd - Chapter 8 - Space/Time yoyo metaphor workout

[Michael Bailey]

"She's my yo-yo, I'm her string,
Listen to the birds on the high-wire sing,
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, singin'
Thank you - for a real good time!" - Loose Lucy (Grateful Dead)


Random thought: do the individual Whole Sickniks refer outwardly to
anybody in particular?  Fu, for instance, with his "was not that a
curious minstrel" - Rexroth with his Chinese poetry studies?  Roonie
Winsome - Outlandish Records, is that anything like Moses Asch, I
think was one of the premier folk music record-makers, or that other
guy, the one who taped Leadbelly?


aaanyway, the difficulties of connecting back into a job after, or
really during, a Depression whether it's a personal one or a Great
one...

In Space/Time's waiting room, the mother-in-law is the only one
"really caring" about a job...a cigarette dangling from and about to
burn her lipstick

glad somebody really cares...if people stop getting married, how will
mothers-in-law be able to exert this beneficent influence?

(Cigarettes were ubiquitous not so long ago.  In youth, from, oh, 1965
to 1970, I took trumpet lessons, and my teacher would occasionally
light up a Tareyton in the little practice room at the music store.
God, the smell was delicious!  You could and did see ladies smoking
with the cigarettes dangling from their lipstick.  I'm thinking of the
receptionist at South Quad, a big dorm at U of M, a lady like Selma on
Night Court whose glassed-in office had one of those payment slots to
pass payments through, an ashtray on the desk, and a nice perfume of
smoke all the time...not to mention the unfailingly courteous and
prompt service she rendered...)

"the quiet brush of [Rachel's] thighs, kissing each other in their nylon"
(schweet!) --- but anyway, it takes Profane a long, long time, doesn't
it, to recognize Rachel?  It's sort of like a schlemihl's version of
"after all one's travelings to return home and know the place for the
first time" --- but of course he gets it all wrong, returns to Rachel
and gets all excited when he doesn't know her, but then when he
finally does recognize her, compares his stochastic method to Russian
roulette...detumesces as the prospect of fucking emerges from
probability and becomes reality...

oh he's a sad case!

So there's a bit of a workout on the yo-yo metaphor, and again, you
can read as much into this as you want to.  Let's posit that Pynchon
has at least as much in mind and as many connotations to draw on as we
do (really not a dangerous bet), and join in the workout for a
second.... (5, 6, 7, 8):

a) "Any sovereign or broken yo-yo"
okay, right there: equating sovereignty with brokenness.  That is, if
you're a yo-yo, your natural condition is as a follower (this links
with the equation of schlemihl with follower, Benny's condition while
yo-yoing as distinct from that of the "king of the subway" -
sovereign, broken, nobody pulling his string)
(Just a victim, in a vacuum... is one place this points...)
-- let's just say that perhaps our Author is suggesting that the
natural condition of Man is to serve, that it's good for a yo-yo to
have a Guiding Hand propelling it
(a notion that's implicit here, explicit in "he's not sure he doesn't
actually prefer to have that reason" in GR, or something like that,
talking about the paranoid's relationship to the plot that controls
him...)

 b) "umbilical string reconnected" - again, a development of the
metaphor, in a way unflattering: not just infantile, but pre-infantile
- but if we're not real hung up on being accorded sovereign dignity...
(and why should we be, if sovereignty is brokenness?)
...then a positive suggestion, perhaps, that in the relation of
servitude there is a link that also supplies nourishment

c) "Hands it doesn't want to escape."  well, why would one?
although, if the question enters one's mind it starts to become an
issue...and I guess it is for him...

d) "Know that the simple clockwork of itself" - aha, here's a clock
again.  There's something deep flickering around that idea: time
measured by the applications of external power to a subject...but I'm
not prepared to do more than mention that...although this develops
into temporal bandwidth if you fertilize it, mmmm?

e) "no more need for symptoms of inutility, lonesomeness, directionlessness" -
ie, those very feelings that Mr Profane has been markedly exhibiting

f) "because now it has a path marked out for it over which it has no control."
This is a very bald undermining of every kind of
"consolation-in-commitment", isn't it?  I mean, to see it laid out
like that: oh, for instance, for me personally, I don't have to feel
I'm useless because I have to go in and watch the data network for
eight hours - just shows the insufficiency of that solution, the
begging of all kinds of questions, like is the data network itself
worth watching, is this something I should really be doing, are there
other things I could do better, and so forth...yet despite that, I do
take substantial comfort in that commitment, no doubt due to my own
insufficient sovereignty - but, of course, if sovereignty is
brokenness, then "Wer zum Teufel die Freiheit braucht?"
(although a better question if we're not absolutely sure that
sovereignty does in fact equal brokenness would be, "Wie zum Teufel
kann man die Freiheit gebrauchen?", how the heck can one make use of
freedom?)(and although Benny isn't up to that question at all - though
the narrator might be - he may be advancing to a point where "Wer zum
Teufel die Freiheit braucht" isn't a good fit anymore)

(and of course we might in this connection think of Pointsman telling
Roger to find consolation in work...and how that's a manifestation of
his wickedness...)

delta t) "That's what the feeling would be, if there were such things
as animate yo-yos."      This is a transitional, or bridge sentence -
on the left side of it, we've been traveling thru the thicket of the
narrator's thoughts.  On the right side of it, we're back in Profane's
mind.  He's not nearly as nimble...

gamma globulin) "Pending any such warp in the world Profane felt like
the closest thing to one"  see, again, thru a glass dimly with Benny
as he's kind of hung up on the notion of himself as yo-yo.  The
narrator is, like, deftly spinning all kinds of gossamer (which is the
dative case of goose?  well, no, I'm just a goof...and this sort of
interjection is the pluperfect tense of goffamer...) with the yo-yo
idea, while for Benny it's a stretch even to have the idea...even to
have *an* idea...

lost continent of mu)   "and above her eyes"
--- above her eyes?  Oh yeah, that's right, he's got this vivid
eidetic imagination going on and is still (in his mind) on top of her
in bed from the previous paragraph!

point)  "began to doubt his own animateness."
So, like, for him the big objection to being a yo-yo is that it's an
inanimate object.  He's got this big hangup about being alive...

***** I wrote a while back that merely preferring animateness to being
inanimate isn't much of a moral to base a story on; but was I correct?
 Hells, probably not!  It's probably the most important thing you've
got: because without it, you'd be dead!!!!
****************************************************************************

"How about a night watchman," she said at last.  Over you? he wondered.
And I think I can comfortably hum, "Someone to Watch Over Me" without
violating the envelope of allowable associations...


Okay, that was like a pretty fun little workout.  I used to take step
classes - God that was fun! - and this would correspond to one section
of a class...so like, "novel as mental workout rubric"?





"On another day
chasing the noses away" - Parliament/Funkadelic