Re: BEER: Ch. 8—SCrying

[John Bailey]

Oh and Robin I forgot to thank you for posting this section, which to
me is the kind of Pynchon people love in M&D but seem to overlook in
BE:

"They sit there side by side, mutually invisible, the partition
between inscribed in marker pen, eye pencil, lipstick later rubbed at
and smeared by way of commentary, gusting across the wall in failing
red shadows, phone numbers with antiquated prefixes, cars for sale,
announcements of love lost, found, or wished for, racial grievances,
unreadable remarks in Cyrillic, Arabic, Chinese, a web of symbols, a
travel brochure for night voyages Maxine has not yet thought through
making."

If you stare at that paragraph long enough, as I have just jetlaggedly
done did, you can read that partition as Pynchon's own writing coming
to terms with itself. The toilet wall described here is Pynchon's
oeuvre, complete with in-jokes (Mucho Maas back in the car sales
business in his post-Count Drugula dotage?) and where does this web of
symbols lead...

Two women who have a fair bit to say to each other, but are separated
by an edifice of the already written.


On Sun, Nov 10, 2013 at 11:17 PM, Robin Landseadel
<robinlandseadel at comcast.net> wrote:
> Fantastic. Thank you. I painted a Temperance card myself, it is the single
> card in the deck that speaks to me the most.
>
>
>
> On Nov 10, 2013, at 3:54 AM, Kai Frederik Lorentzen wrote:
>
>>
>> A female Tarot deck which fits perfectly into the BE context is Suzanne
>> Treister's Hexen Tarot 2.0:
>>
>> http://ensemble.va.com.au/Treister/HEXEN2/TAROT_COL/HEXEN_2_TAROT.html
>>
>> (Treister's take on the Tarot is artistic; the deck is of limited use for
>> actually spiritual purposes.)
>>
>> Do note that the Archer in DeepArcher is also Sagittarius which is related
>> to the Tarot trump card
>> "Temperance" (Waite) bzw "Art" (Crowley)!
>>
>> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Temperance_%28Tarot_card%29
>>
>> "Temperance is almost invariably depicted as a person pouring liquid from
>> one receptacle into another. Historically, this was a standard symbol of the
>> virtue temperance <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Temperance_%28virtue%29>,
>> one of the cardinal virtues <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cardinal_virtues>,
>> representing the dilution <http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/dilution> of wine
>> <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wine> with water. In many decks, the person is
>> a winged person <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Person>/angel
>> <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angel>, usually female or androgynous, and
>> stands with one foot on water and one foot on land.
>>
>> In addition to its literal meaning of temperance or moderation, the
>> Temperance card is often interpreted as symbolizing the blending or
>> synthesis of opposites. An influential tradition originating with the
>> Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn
>> <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hermetic_Order_of_the_Golden_Dawn> associates
>> Temperance with the astrological sign
>> <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Astrological_sign> Sagittarius
>> <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sagittarius_%28astrology%29>. It is also
>> commonly associated with the letter *ס* (Samekh
>> <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samekh>) in the Hebrew alphabet
>> <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hebrew_alphabet>."
>>
>> Interesting in the Pynchon context is also this reference to the world of
>> the dead, which makes me think not only of those people in BE who search in
>> DeepArcher for a virtual cemetery but also of Vineland's thanatoids and the
>> zombies of Inherent Vice:
>>
>> "In some traditions, Temperance does the judging. In those schools, the
>> cups in Temperance’s hands are the functional equivalent of scales, and
>> Temperance, like Maat <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maat>, an Egyptian
>> goddess of wisdom, judges the soul’s worth before passing it on to the
>> beasts of the underworld <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Underworld>. In some
>> stories, Maat both judges the souls against a feather and protects the scale
>> from being tipped by Set <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Set_%28mythology%29>.
>> If the soul is heavier than a feather, it will be fed to the eater of souls.
>>
>> In other traditions, Temperance is the remixing of life, accepting the
>> dead <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead> into the underworld, into the
>> blessed lands, and deciding what to send back into the fray. Every atom in
>> our bodies has passed through thousands of forms, and will pass through
>> thousands more. Temperance reminds us of our connection to the greater
>> forces."
>>
>> The alchemical character of the card ('Solve et coagula' - dissolve and
>> combine) is emphasized in the Crowley/Harris deck; on the Tree of Life the
>> path associated with Temperance/Art leads from Yesod to Tiphareth (which
>> has, at least for Crowley, tantric implications).
>>
>> In Suzanne Treister's deck the Temperance card refers to the Arpanet:
>>
>>
>> http://ensemble.va.com.au/Treister/HEXEN2/TAROT_COL/TAROT_Temp_Arpanet.html
>>
>> No mystical reason for this, I guess, but it makes the reader think of
>> Inherent Vice. The question arises in which relation IV's Arpanet and BE's
>> DeepArcher do stand to each other in Pynchon's poetic universe.
>>
>> Not sure all these things add up to anything coherent, but the continuity
>> of female graphic design from Tarot decks to websites, that the novel
>> evokes, certainly has to have some meaning.
>
>
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