Inherent Hands

[Becky Lindroos]

Nice!  Thanks.  And that “webbing” effect can be addictive - heh - 

I did a similar thing with “windows”  (looking in, looking out,  no windows, what’s outside of the windows, etc.),  for some reason - particularly in Joyce - especially Dubliners.  It knit (webbed) all the stories together in another way. 

Bekah    


> On Dec 1, 2014, at 4:18 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." 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
>  
> <addressbook.vcf>

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