M & D Read: Relevant to Gaze?

[Joseph Tracy]

I think both of these ideas are pointed in the same direction. Mason's relation to death and his unresolved questions and mourning all  are describing a man who wants to be able to cross the barriers of death and science to obtain something worth knowing, something to give meaning to the loss and emptiness within him.  It is an emptiness he  also sees with growing clarity  in the power games of his world. With that in mind he can be both a man with little concern or recognition of his own appearance, and a man looking for something on the other side of the mirror.
   When Austra challenges his view of English marriage and compares it to sex slavery, this must have troubled him deeply, touching the most real thing he has known.  The thing that keeps Mason going and gives his life structure and resilience is the hierophany of science and duty. It is this discipline which will define his social and outward life. 
  In short, Mason's characterization is not flat. But while there is a complex, and even a deeply moral inner life here; there is also the meaningless line to which he is pointed. The one, in P's estimate does not preclude the other.
On Feb 8, 2015, at 10:16 AM, Keith Davis wrote:

> I think it just means that he's not aware of the effect of his appearance on others.
> 
> There is something else here that caught my attention this time, though, relating to another thread on M. 
> Bottom of pg 62, "...an impassioned, young-enough Fool willing to sail oceans and fight sea-battles just to have a chance to watch Venus, Love Herself, pass across the Sun...."
> Maybe by observing Venus, he will gain some understanding about love. He is desperate for this understanding.
> 
> 
> Www.innergroovemusic.com
> Sent from Beyond the Zero
> 
>> On Feb 8, 2015, at 6:31 AM, Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com> wrote:
>> 
>> pp61--62....About Mason coming ashore, etc. : "None of this has
>> appear'd to him in any
>> mirror he has consulted"......
>> 
>> What means, this sentence? And, if it means what it seems to--Mason had
>> nowhere to look to understand his experience---, why phrased this way?
>> 
>> 
>> Or? The Mirror of Mindfulness is a presentation of Tibetan Buddhist
>> teachings on the endless cycle of experience, the four bardos -- life,
>> death, after-death, and ...
>> -
>> Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l
> -
> Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list

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