M & D Deep Duck "Elan or Esprit or whatever...."

[alice malice]

 James Joyce had a bad eye. He had it worked on a lot,  but it was a
vey bad one and sometimes he covered it with a patch, like a pirate.
Do that, cover one eye, or close one, and the world seems rather flat.
That stereoscopic vision is retarded. Not much depth in the land of
the blind, not even for the king, who has, one eye. Joyce wrote
Ulysses. The novel is, in part, runs parallel to the Odyssey.  In one
episode of the Odyssey, an epic, of Homer, who, by tradition, was a
blind bard, Polyphemus, the Cyclopes, is blinded by Odysseus, who is
the hero of the book. Joyce, a Cyclopes, of sorts, plays with the
themes of blindness, of crippled vision, lost depth perception. His
book too is a buddy tale, a lost fathers and sons to buddy story that
would make Horatio give a grand speech about fathers and friendship.
At times our buddies here are like the whales, sperm and right,  in
another buddy tale, so the eyes are not screwed  into the front of the
head together, but are on the sides of the massive head, about where
you have ears. So, according to Melville, the whale sees not exactly
ahead nor exactly astern. Our buddies have much in common with the
contrasts Melville makes betwixt whale and  human vision and with the
contrasts Melville makes of the philosophies the whale heads
represent. Both men have large heads, like the whale's heads theirs
are too large to read,  and both are products of the Enlightenment. At
least, that's how history and biography measure them. But we know, so
far, that neither is a model of Reason, and, while together they
measure and calculate, apart, they are independent in vision and in
visions secular and in sacred. That neither can see anything ahead
because America is shrouded in darkness and mystery, and that looking
back is history. That history is bent by dreams and desires, clouded
by magic and the irrational.

Two telescopes only extend the length of their divided and distorted
views of the American Mystery.

But, not to worry, they have the contract. The machine, the line, the
work, Britannia's Dream. All subjunctive's are exchanged for
declaratives, all visions are corrected, control,
control...grounded...till all lines are singled up and we fly toward
Grace again.

On Sat, Jan 17, 2015 at 7:48 AM, Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com> wrote:
> Dixon is VERY CLEARLY again contrasted with Mason, I say
> also obviously......
>
> p.26---"he can't keep from flirting"
>
> "beneath her layers of careful Decrepitude .....[there was] a
> shockingly young Woman hard at work"
>
> Don't you love "layers of Decrepitude"?.....takes a sensualist
> Puritan to see/say it that way, eh?....
>
> We.of course, know he KNOWS this, he isn't just undressing her with his eyes.
>
> Two approaches to life? Life Force embodiment and Death Wish embodiment?
> So far.
> -
> Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l
-
Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l