Crying of Lot 49, another key scene.

[Mark Kohut]

p. 107 the anarchist dance,...a sublimely conceived scene,
brilliant, as 'original', as wonderful as anything
in Pynchon. I suggest

Reread again,  I suggest. Let it unfold.

"each couple on the floor danced whatever was in the fellow's head"..A
shared empathic understanding, so to speak?

Human beings in primal interaction--since deaf and mute; just as bodies. Is
Nietzsche's
Zarathustran 'to dance is to live" somewhere behind this? Interacting in
synchronicity,
naturally, avoiding collisions without even worrying about collisions, a
brilliant way
to indicate rationality and self-consciousness gone and for the better...

yes
a magnificent symbolic embodiment of (certain) anarchistic ideas---no
need for orders from a leader, no need for rules, just the best selves of
human beings
celebrating together. ..."in which each couple meshed easy, predestined"....
Isn't that Calvinist religious word a surprise?....a GOOD meaning of
predestined..
a meaning of 'grace' that TRP will deepen? (and change noticeably, imho)
over
his career.

And in a dance? love-making in public (as John-Boy Updike is always saying)

Yet Oedipa at this point, curtsied (calif deb move?) and fled, demoralized.
Still
too caught in the real, surface world, the tower still almost everywhere.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://waste.org/pipermail/pynchon-l/attachments/20160129/0e766826/attachment.html>