Inherent Hands

[Monte Davis]

He does like to keep his hand in.

"If you look from the side at a planet swinging around in its orbit, split
the sun with a mirror and imagine a string, it all looks like a yo-yo. The
point furthest from the sun is called aphelion. The point furthest from the
yo-yo hand is called, by analogy, apocheir." (V. 27)

"Are you there, little fellow, Oedipa asked the Demon, or is Nefastis
putting me on. Unless a piston moved, she’d never know. Clerk Maxwell’s
hands were cropped out of the photograph. He might have been holding a
book." (CoL49 78)

"On the old schist of a tombstone in the Congregational churchyard back
home in Mingeborough, Massachusetts, the hand of God emerges from a
cloud..." (GR 26)


On Mon, Dec 1, 2014 at 7:18 AM, <m1ch1 at gmx.ch> wrote:

> Dear W.A.S.T.E.,
> I got this quirk for noting and collecting symbolical and/or metaphorical
> uses of hands (in literature etc.) and on my second tour de IV (I had to
> read it again, before Anderson's images try to impose themselves and
> greatly enjoyed it) I stumbled across the following, beautiful series,
> which I thought is worth sharing with You:
>
>  Ch. 9 where Doc and Denis head out to the Boards place:
> "Denis was along posing as his photographer, wearing a T-shirt with the
> familiar detail from Michelangelo's fresco The Creation of Adam, in which
> God is extending his hand to Adam's and they're just about to touch – except
> in this version God is passing a lit joint
> <http://s3.favim.com/orig/44/weed-Favim.com-374528.gif>." 124
>
> At the end of Ch. 12 where Doc dreamed he was a little kid again (talking
> about death and him finally needing to conform someday):
> "He woke up into this particular season of onshore fogs and the unnatural
> rumbling of jets taking off and landing at LAX all night long, as if some
> hand at a control board had pushed the bass to an unexpected level, and he
> found the Indian bedspread on the couch where he crashed running red an
> orange dye from what could only be his tears. He walked around well into
> the mornig with a dim paisley pattern across half his face." 206
>
> At the end of Ch. 14 after contemplating about John Garfield's last
> picture before being blacklisted, where he dies in the gutter:
> "… and here was Doc, on the natch, caught in a low-level bummer he
> couldn't find a way out of, about how the Psychedelic Sixties, this little
> parenthesis of light, might close after all, and all be lost, taken back
> into darkness . . . how a certain hand might reach terribly out of darkness
> and reclaim the time, easy as taking a joint from a doper and stubbing out
> for good." 255
>
> There are further instances in IV consistant with this (e.g. Wild Bill
> Hickok's last poker hand (228), Coy faking his own death: tempting the hand
> of fate (300), Adrian killing the pornographer who tried to blackmail
> R.Reagan: your hour is at hand (322)), but they don't add much in terms of
> beauty of the sequence above. I think that part of what's so fascinating
> about Pynchon, at least for me, is this consistant (but nonetheless
> evolving) use of metaphors/symbols throughout his oevre. Every here and
> there you are reminded of a passage somewhere else. You get stuck in this
> web, webbing or text(ure) and happily roll over (re-read!) to entangle
> yourself further...
>
> Kind regards,
> Michael
>
>
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