M & D Read: Relevant to Gaze?

[alice malice]

Yes. There are many ironies in the Black surrogate, who will breed
with a White, Rational man of Science and Society and sell the
Mulatto, and one is the fact that the enslaved woman is willing and is
well versed in the arguments of Enlightened Women and Men who use
Reason and Natural Law and Natural Rights to challenge
Male-White-Christian Supremacy. Surely this is not the first Mason is
hearing of female subjugation, of the emancipation of women from
marriage and family bonds. In deed, both of boys are well schooled in
the arguments for and against the emancipation of women, the enslaved,
sailors, Catholics....but that Mason continues to abstain from life
and its natural laws and rights and  to keep, locked in his
melancholic heart, his wife's ghost, and also himself, observing,
religiously, their marriage bonds, while observing scientifically, the
planet Venus, whilst about him vroom, in orbits that tug at his
calculated control of lunacy, must drive him to desperate measures, so
potions, spells, vestments to conceal the mass and velocity in his
corpora cavernosa.

On Sun, Feb 8, 2015 at 11:44 AM, Joseph Tracy <brook7 at sover.net> wrote:
> 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
>
> -
> Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?listpynchon-l
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