Section the Third, pg.17-19: Watch the Skies!

[Mark Kohut]

Haven't yet read DuifHuyzen's piece but sure will but want to be innocently
'my way' first, as per just-previous post. Here maybe
the map IS the territory, realistic or as a projected firmament wherein
psychic powers 'rule'.
But I've also always read it as a power out of S's control, since it is
(except were he to stop his assignations) so, obviously, Death against Life
and once aware of it/something, don't we have the necessity--chance motif
in full play here? He isn't 'free' to fuck anymore; his fucking is
necessarily conditioned, so to speak.



On Tue, Mar 29, 2016 at 12:48 PM, Monte Davis <montedavis49 at gmail.com>
wrote:

> "The stars pasted up on Slothrop’s map... a constellation... a cluster...
> a violet density... a nebular streaming... this glossy, multicolored,
> here and there peeling firmament..."
>
>
> Slothrop could have used colored pushpins or thumbtacks or dots of ink.
> Colored gummed stars might be simply because many US (and other?) kids
> encountered them in school, but were they routinely used in marking up maps
> in WWII? Would either, or both, account entirely for this concentration of
> insistently stellar, astronomical language? is it purely a poetic riff?
>
>
> The *sky* is certainly with us from the first sentence of GR on, and later
> there'll be rockets to a death kingdom on the moon, and Gottfried's final
> wishing star... but by and large the stars and significances thereof are,
> uhh, thin on the ground in GR -- certainly compared to M&D's omnipresent
> "as above, so below."
>
>
>  As noted before, I still find Duifhuyzen's 1981 "Starry-Eyed Semiotics"
> (available in pn006.pdf <http://www.ham.miamioh.edu/krafftjm/pn/pn006.pdf> at
>  http://www.ham.miamioh.edu/krafftjm/pn/ ) the best starting place for
> what Slothrop's stars mean, don't mean, are mistakenly thought to mean,
> etc. But it doesn't really engage with the  stars _qua_ stars.
>
>
> Still, I'll lean on it, and on "constellations" and "firmament," to
> advance the quarter-baked notion that Pynchon is pointing here to astrology
> as much as (or more than) astronomy. Constellations are our 2-D
> *projections*, not real spatial groupings of stars: of two stars very close
> on the imagined shell of the ancient/ medieval firmament, one may be a
> hundred times as far away as its apparent neighbor. The same goes in spades
> for the zodiac, those "special" constellations that fall on the ecliptic.
> So there's a prosaic, "realistic" map of London that corresponds in
> conventional, reliable ways to the real London outside... overlaid with a
> projected firmament.
>
>
> So maybe, while the daytime narrative of Bloat's intra-Allied spying (and
> hundreds of pages to follow) are telling us that Slothrop's stars are the
> key to occult psychic powers, maybe the key to missile defense in the next
> War... the stars are whispering that it's all pictures in our heads?
> Patterns that aren't really "out there" at all?
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://waste.org/pipermail/pynchon-l/attachments/20160330/5956a4e1/attachment.html>