Re: BEER: Ch. 8—SCrying

[Fiona Shnapple]

The Periods, the blood is not there, though Maxine looks for it to be
flowing under the doors, Cas tells here she's pissing not opening a
vein. So no W.A.S.T.E., no Periods, only V,  only waste, or in this
chapter, only piss. The ladies' john of CL49 is but a waste hole in
the shadow of the towers where the tapestry is woven by ironmen.

On Sun, Nov 10, 2013 at 7:57 AM, John Bailey <sundayjb at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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.
>>
>>
>> -
>> Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?listpynchon-l
> -
> Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?listpynchon-l
-
Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l