BtZ42 Scene 16, Roger, Jessica, love, demob, religious longing and Puccini, et al.

[Joseph Tracy]

Perhaps these midgets are just the midgets we all feel ourselves to be when we glimpse love, that  wild, sensual, emotional, heart rending giant wave, not knowing whether to leer, weep, run away or surrender.  Some kind of sermon about love seems to me what Pynchon is trying to conjure here. That thing born in the unlikeliest circumstances, so impossible to hold on to. To my mind  the power of love gains strength in P’s work from GR on. Here, as in V, he is deeply suspicious. Is it lurid prurience, is it a self desctructive missile guidance system culturally implanted like a gyroscope bringing destruction in its wake, is it the heroic attempt to escape from a weaponized humanity,  is it the infinite tenderness and pleasure of lovers, is it the messiah, is it every child born of love,  is it a Hollywood scam, is it the simple gravitational arc of going up and coming down?    
   It seems to me that Pynchon wants to put these questions into play, and has Roger bend away from his natural arc while in thrall to his own questions about love in order to enter a church. To crack the door to another way of knowing. The music and light and sermon only summon more questions, but they are  of a different nature and closer to Roger’s internal questions. They are questions that cannot be answered either by  determinist  logic or  analysis of the random. 
  In this chapter we are returned in some ways to something Dante-like, particularly his contemplation’s of Beatrice  and the contrast between that idealization of love and the hellish realities of war. 

If there are shortcomings to the love considered in GR it seems to me to be a youthful lack of consideration of the role of daily comittmrent, work,  simple kindness, genuine listening and respect- all those more mundane acts of giving that are the fuel for enduring families , communities, friendships and marriages.  This is a shortcoming in my mind principally because it seems to me to be this pragmatic kind of love is what is the most effective counterforce to the cruelties of accumulated and unaccountable power.


 
> On Jul 9, 2016, at 8:47 AM, Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> Moral midgets, some sort of Central European government-in-exile, jockey and leer at topless Jessica. Just another throwaway moral judgment joke from our Marx Brothers
> Appreciator. Just another blow against the State, all of them. 
> 
> I have always envisioned this clown car ( metaphorically what we often say about politicians) as like the one of clown mimes at the end of BLOW-UP, esp In his description of them crammed in and self-positioning. ( Remember we do know he translated one story from the Cortazar book this movie came from--one story of) 
> 
> 
> 
> Sent from my iPad
> 
>> On Jul 7, 2016, at 10:39 AM, Joseph Tracy <brook7 at sover.net> wrote:
>> 
>> Here is my current version of chapter summary. A bit more than a map, as there is not that much plot to map, but leaving plenty of room for elaboration. Can we revive this group read? I really personally am  hoping for more inputs during the zone section which I feel less sure about my own understanding. The reading thus far has been more energizing and surprisingly relevant than anticipted. 
>> Scene+++16
>> Jessica and Roger have intense sexual pleasure with each other and play sweetly, there is scene where she takes off blouse in car and they are stared at by midgets in truck. He is jealous of possible rival in Jeremy. One day he wakes in White Visitation with a strand of J's hair in his mouth. She hadn't been there and he begins to freak out a bit with all the psi people about, he wants to get away realizing the only thing that matters to him is Jessica, that his mother the War may be jealous.  He sees her as a wave of life that has put him out of reach of past and future, on the beach( under the pavement, the beach) He is ready to abandon his cynicism. Jessica has stable 3 year relation with Jeremy who is more cheerful than the dour, when not having sex, Roger.   They are passing a church on Christmas and R, to J's surprise wants to go in and she does also. Jamaican man is singing in choir, the writing solemn and graceful and weirdly surreal with lists. Pynchon's long, 7th Christmas of the War sermon letting light sing like evensong through the endless details of the machinery and humanity of wartime London;  not  a children's story, a messa++ge for adults only a call past war id's, past false boundaries and caesar appointed roles and addresses, sounding the way home.
>> There is a contrast being drawn here where the sermon becomes a prayer for humanness, for the holding to one's breast of a child who is just a child of God not messiah,  not king but a call to freedom from assigned identities and assigned enemies and all the planted guidance mechanisms of culture , even perhaps a profound rejection of culture itself. This sermon gains its power and beauty by being contrasted with the machinations of authority, Feldspath's ghost and the aspiration to shaping  internal control systems, the implanted gyroscopic guidance of a rocket or any tool of imperial will, the plans of Pointsman. The sermon seems to rise from the debris of the war, from the sordidness, beauty and ordinary carrying on of London in 1944 and Jerusalem in the last days of the Herodian dynasty.  
>> 
>>> On Jul 6, 2016, at 9:13 AM, Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com> wrote:
>>> 
>>> pp 120-136. I am not going to do a summary, since the map is not the territory,  but anyone can
>>> who wants to can and it should be appreciated by all and with or without that, I urge all to
>>> simply reread these few pages again after following along so far, no matter how many times and
>>> how busy you are. 
>>> 
>>> Because the flag is flagging as it does. 
>>> 
>>> Because to feel the verbal territory anew is like fresh water in summer and, I bet, if you follow 
>>> the bouncing verbal ball in your head, you will feel/see something NEW or something old you
>>> haven't thought of since your last reading. (and I'm gonna try to make a few new connections)
>>> 
>>> It's about Love, after all.  
>> 
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