Crying of Lot 49, another key scene.

[ish mailian]

How did she (Pynchon) get so old? That dance is no country for old
men. The dancers, caught in a sensual music, can neither hear nor give
voice to,  neglect monuments of unaging intellect. Nor are there
singing schools. And in the end the soul does not clap or sing, or
take a form from some unnatural thing. That theme is explored, of
course, and is one of the major subjects of Pynchon's work.



Sailing to Byzantium

BY WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS
I

That is no country for old men. The young
In one another's arms, birds in the trees,
—Those dying generations—at their song,
The salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded seas,
Fish, flesh, or fowl, commend all summer long
Whatever is begotten, born, and dies.
Caught in that sensual music all neglect
Monuments of unageing intellect.


II

An aged man is but a paltry thing,
A tattered coat upon a stick, unless
Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing
For every tatter in its mortal dress,
Nor is there singing school but studying
Monuments of its own magnificence;
And therefore I have sailed the seas and come
To the holy city of Byzantium.


III

O sages standing in God's holy fire
As in the gold mosaic of a wall,
Come from the holy fire, perne in a gyre,
And be the singing-masters of my soul.
Consume my heart away; sick with desire
And fastened to a dying animal
It knows not what it is; and gather me
Into the artifice of eternity.


IV

Once out of nature I shall never take
My bodily form from any natural thing,
But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make
Of hammered gold and gold enamelling
To keep a drowsy Emperor awake;
Or set upon a golden bough to sing
To lords and ladies of Byzantium
Of what is past, or passing, or to come.

see also, The last stanza of "A Dialogue of Self and Soul" where Yeats
affirms the living lot. As Pynchon will, but not without a dialogue
with the darkness of the soul, in GR.

On Fri, Jan 29, 2016 at 6:45 AM, Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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.
>
>
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Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l