GR translation: mirror-rotation of sorrow

[Prashant Kumar]

"Mirror rotation" means what it sounds like, but is a rather
mathematically-inflected way of describing it. The thing to "get" here is
that any transformation expressed as a reflection (in some mirror plane)
can be recast as a 180 rotation about a point fixed in that mirror plane --
the operations of rotation and reflection are mathematically *dual*.

The implication being that impotence is in some sense (the maths reference
making the relationship artificially precise) the *inverse* of sorrow --
Pynchon is portraying the two as somehow dual. In combination with what
Laura has said, this provides a relationship between Pökler's internal
state: sorrow; and, how he appears in a mirror, and thus also to others:
impotent.

P.


On 22 August 2013 07:07, Mike Jing <gravitys.rainbow.cn at gmail.com> wrote:

> V432.32-433.8  (p439.37-440.13)   The odors of shit, death, sweat,
> sickness, mildew, piss, the breathing of Dora, wrapped him as he crept in
> staring at the naked corpses being carried out now that America was so
> close, to be stacked in front of the crematoriums, the men’s penises
> hanging, their toes clustering white and round as pearls . . . each face so
> perfect, so individual, the lips stretched back into death-grins, a whole
> silent audience caught at the punch line of the joke . . . and the living,
> stacked ten to a straw mattress, the weakly crying, coughing, losers. . . .
> All his vacuums, his labyrinths, had been the other side of this. While he
> lived, and drew marks on paper, this invisible kingdom had kept on, in the
> darkness outside . . . all this time. . . . Pökler vomited. He cried some.
> The walls did not dissolve—no prison wall ever did, not from tears, not at
> this finding, on every pallet, in every cell, that the faces are ones he
> knows after all, and holds dear as himself, and cannot, then, let them
> return to that silence. . . . But what can he ever do about it? How can he
> ever keep them? Impotence, mirror-rotation of sorrow, works him terribly as
> runaway heartbeating, and with hardly any chances left him for good rage,
> or for turning. . . .
>
> What is "mirror-rotation" referring to?  Also, what is the meaning of the
> "turning" at the end of this passage?
>
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