slothrop, Bianca // ramblings in response

[Michael Bailey]

D D D D D D D
Slothrop here's been dreaming about Llandudno, where he spent a rainy
furlough once drinking bitter in bed with a tug skipper's daughter. Also
where Lewis Carroll wrote that Alice in Wonderland. So, they put up a
statue of the White Rabbit in Llandudno. White Rabbit's been talking to
Slothrop, serious and crucial talk, but on the way up to waking he loses it
all, as usual.

-- so, I looked at a YouTube of Friedrich Kittler the other day, and darn!
he looks a lot like the White Rabbit in it.

He lies staring at ducts and raceways overhead, asbestos-covered elbows,
pipes, gages, tanks, switchboards, flanges, unions, valve-wheels and all
their thickets of shadow. It's noisy as hell. Sunlight filters down the
hatches, so that must mean it's morning. In a corner of his vision now, he
catches a flutter of red.

- Slothrop waking up in the hold of Gory Gnahb's boat, right?

"You mustn't tell Margherita. Please." That Bianca. Hair down to her hips,
cheeks smudged, eyes hot. "She'll kill me."
"What time is it?"
"The sun's been up for hours. Why do you want to know?"
Why does he want to know. Hmm. Maybe he'll go back to sleep, here.

- unique in my experience or reading: somebody asking when they wake up
"what time is it?" and the other person asking "why do you want to know?"
Compare Chicago song, "does anybody really know what time it is?"


"Your mother upset with you, or something?"
"Oh, she's gone out of her mind, she just accused me of having an affair
with Thanatz. Madness, of course we're good friends, but that's all… if she
paid any attention to me she'd know that."
"She sure was paying attention to your ass there, kid."

-- whatever Bianca's wearing besides hair down to her hips doesn't
apparently cover the bruises.


"Oh, dear," lifting her dress, turning so she can also watch Slothrop back
over a shoulder. "I can still feel that. Did she leave marks?"
"Well, you'll have to come closer."
She moves toward him, smiling, pointing toes each step. "I watched you
sleep. You're very pretty, you know. Mother also said you're cruel."
"Watch this." He leans to bite her gently on one cheek of her ass. She
squirms, but doesn't move away.

- so, umm, that sort of manufactures consent...I guess...in a dream


"Mm. There's a zipper there, could you…" She shrugs, twists as he unzips
her, red taffeta slides down and off and sure enough there's one or two
lavender bruises starting to show up on her bottom, which is perfectly
shaped, smooth as cream. Small as she is, she's been further laced into a
tiny black corset, which compresses her waist now to the diameter of a
brandy bottle and pushes pre-subdeb breasts up into little white crescents.

- somebody had to be complicit in this style of dress, to assist her into it

 Satin straps, adorned with intricately pornographic needlework, run down
each thigh to hold up stockings with tops of dark Alencon lace. The bare
backs of her legs come brushing softly across Slothrop's face. He starts
taking giant, ass-enthusiast bites now, meantime reaching around to play
with cuntlips and clit, Bianca's little feet shifting in a nervous dance
and scarlet nails digging sharp as needles underneath her stocking tops and
into her legs as he goes planting hickeys, red nebulae across her sensitive
spaces. She smells like soap, flowers, sweat, cunt. Her long hair falls to
the level of Slothrop's eyes, fine and black, the split ends whispering
across the small of her white back in and out of invisibility, like rain…
she has turned, and sinks to her knees to undo his pleated trousers.
Leaning, brushing hair back behind her ears, the little girl takes the head
of Slothrop's cock into her rouged mouth. Her eyes glitter through fern
lashes, baby rodent hands race his body unbuttoning, caressing. Such a
slender child: her throat swallowing, strummed to a moan as he grabs her
hair, twists it… she has him all figured out. Knows exactly when to take
her mouth away and stand up, high-heeled Parisian slippers planted to
either side of him, swaying, hair softly waving forward to frame her face,
repeated by the corset darkly framing her pubic mound and belly. Raising
bare arms, little Bianca lifts her long hair, tosses her little head to let
the mane shiver down her back, needle-tipped fingers drifting then down
slowly, making him wait, down over the satin, all the shiny hooks and
laces, to her thighs. Then her face, round with baby-fat, enormous
night-shadowed eyes comes swooping in as she kneels, guides his penis into
her and settles slow, excruciating till he fills her, stuffs her full…
Now something, oh, kind of funny happens here. Not that Slothrop is really
aware of it now, while it's going on-but later on, it will occur to him
that he was-this may sound odd, but he was somehow, actually, well, inside
his own cock. If you can imagine such a thing. Yes, inside the metropolitan
organ entirely, all other colonial tissue forgotten and left to fend for
itself, his arms and legs it seems woven among vessels and ducts, his sperm
roaring louder and louder, getting ready to erupt, somewhere below his
feet… maroon and evening cuntlight reaches him in a single ray through the
opening at the top, refracted through the clear juices flowing up around
him. He is en-
closed. Everything is about to come, come incredibly, and he's helpless
here in this exploding emprise… red flesh echoing… an extraordinary sense
of waiting to rise…

- much more prurient than Pointsman's bus station memory we were invited
into way back in London...esse est percipi, right, I mean kids are really
far out and certainly she is being turned on and fulfilled by this
interaction but like isn't this sort of, well, wrong...a person bent on
finding moral guidance might see this as the sort of temptation that the
War has placed before many a soldier...interestingly flashing forward to
how he will remember this, it's not "those were wild times, we went wild"
but "I was inside my erection"

She posts, his pretty horsewoman, face to the overhead, quivering up and
down, thightop muscles strung hard as cable, baby breasts working out the
top of her garment… Slothrop pulls Bianca to him by her nipples and bites
each one very hard. Sliding her arms around his neck, hugging him, she
starts to come, and so does he, their own flood taking him up then out of
his expectancy, out the eye at tower's summit and into her with a singular
detonation of touch.

- continuing the conceit of being inside his penis

Announcing the void, what could it be but the kingly voice of the Aggregat
itself?

- the Aggregat is what, again?  The gemeinschaft, the being-in-common?  Or
the life force itself, her young nubility catalyzing a concentration so
intense as to link him up with an oversoul?

Somewhere in their lying-still are her heart, buffeting, a chickadee in the
snow, her hair, draping and sheltering both their faces, little tongue at
his temples and eyes on and on, silk legs rubbing his flanks, cool leather
of her shoes against his legs and ankles, shoulderblades rising like wings
whenever she hugs him. What happened back there? Slothrop thinks he might
cry.

- having had the bulldozer (earthmoving) orgasm he's no longer inside his
dick, he's once again referred to by name

They have been holding each other. She's been talking about hiding out.
"Sure. But we'll have to get off sometime, Swinemunde, someplace."
"No. We can get away. I'm a child, I know how to hide. I can hide you too."
He knows she can. He knows. Right here, right now, under the makeup and the
fancy underwear, she exists, love, invisibility… For Slothrop this is some
discovery.
But her arms about his neck are shifting now, apprehensive. For good
reason. Sure he'll stay for a while, but eventually he'll go, and for this
he is to be counted, after all, among the Zone's lost. The Pope's staff is
always going to remain barren, like Slothrop's own unflowering cock.
So when he disentangles himself, it is extravagantly. He creates a
bureaucracy of departure, inoculations against forgetting, exit visas
stamped with love-bites… but coming back is something he's already
forgotten about. Straightening his bow tie, brushing off the satin lapels
of his jacket, buttoning up his pants, back in uniform of the day, he turns
his back on her, and up the ladder he goes.

- a bit like the scene on Catch 22 where Yossarian throws away the girl's
phone # (or address?)
The Man's branch office in Slothrop reasserting social norms, he's doomed
to be preterite and accepts this fate without a fight

The last instant their eyes were in touch is already behind him…
Alone, kneeling on the painted steel, like her mother she knows how horror
will come when the afternoon is brightest. And like Margherita, she has her
worst visions in black and white. Each day she feels closer to the edge of
something. She dreams often of the same
journey: a passage by train, between two well-known cities, lit by that
same nacreous wrinkling the films use to suggest rain out a window. In a
Pullman, dictating her story. She feels able at last to tell of a personal
horror, tell it clearly in a way others can share. That may keep it from
taking her past the edge, into the silver-salt dark closing ponderably slow
at her mind's flank… when she was growing out her fringes, in dark rooms
her own unaccustomed hair, beside her eyes, would loom like a presence… In
her ruined towers now the bells gong back and forth in the wind. Frayed
ropes dangle or slap where her brown hoods no longer glide above the stone.
Her wind keeps even dust away. It is old daylight: late, and cold. Horror
in the brightest hour of afternoon… sails on the sea too small and distant
to matter… water too steel and cold…

- ladies first, Bianca's thoughts, because they keep running Seinfeld
reruns I think of Elaine responding to Jerry feeling like damaged goods
after maybe being ravaged under anesthesia by his dentist and possibly the
hygienist: "welcome to the club!"

Her look now-this deepening arrest-has already broken Slothrop's seeing
heart: has broken and broken, that same look

- here is where we swing over to the older memory, swinging on the star of
her last longing look, the exact same look the waitress ...

swung as he drove by, thrust away into twilights of moss and crumbling
colony, of skinny clouded-cylinder gas pumps, of tin Moxie signs gentian
and bittersweet as the taste they were there to hustle on the weathered
sides of barns,

- things that even a few years later I remember seeing on childhood road
trips

looked for how many Last Times up in the rearview mirror, all of them too
far inside metal and combustion, allowing the days' targets more reality
than anything that might come up by surprise, by Murphy's Law, where the
salvation could be…

- emotion rebels against the overdetermined over defined over planned life
demanded by the machines, the many encounters he lusts after requiring a
mercilessly equal, or nearly so - fated to wonder mightn't there be one
that can stay, but not this one - number of partings
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://waste.org/pipermail/pynchon-l/attachments/20131103/7b26e3e6/attachment.html>