48-54 The Problem of the Pavlovian Penis

[Joseph Tracy]

 I am re-reading and see that my first take was naive. It is  probable that there are no actual children in St. Veronica’s. What Keith is sayng makes much better sense. The metaphor is repeated several times and I took it literally. Clearly Spectro and Pointsman think of the patients as children, PP to such a degree that they inspire pedophiliac Pavlovian fantasies:

“How Pointsman lusts after them, pretty children. Those drab undershorts of his are full to bursting with need humorlessly, worldly to use their innocence, to write on them new words of himself, his own brown Realpolitik dreams, some psychic prostate ever in aching love promised, ah hinted but till now . . . how seductively they lie ranked in their iron bedsteads, their virginal sheets, the darlings so artlessly erotic. . . .”

This passage goes well with my chapter title. Again and again Pynchon is showing how  lusts transform from sex to personal and institutional aggression. The worst we can say about Slothrop is that he is having a windfall of sex with lonely, horny  English women. If more is actually projected by his arousal than that, it is the degree to which he has been made the tool of other lusts. He himself is distrustful of these larger erections, is trying to break from the ultimate Calvinist controller of destinies, master of restraint and judgement, chooser of sacred seed. The English girls, even if some are fantasies, are helping. The new map of the heavens he is building has a feminine face.
   Pointsman, or PP#1, and Prentice, or PP#2, have both redirected their need for love and sex to align their lusts with power and control; they want to be the practical earthly version of Slothrop’s Lord of Hosts.  PP#1, the director/philosopher/experimentor, wants to write his name into history and join the immortals of his cult,  and PP#2, the agent/dream-rider, wants to retire in style with the cozy and private elite. 


Excerpt From: Thomas Pynchon. “Gravity's Rainbow.” iBooks. https://itun.es/us/7vp3F.l”

Excerpt From: Thomas Pynchon. “Gravity's Rainbow.” iBooks. https://itun.es/us/7vp3F.l
> On May 6, 2016, at 8:40 AM, Keith Davis <kbob42 at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> Is St. Veronica's taking in children for experiments? I took it that the "new children" referred to on pg 50 refers to a kind of rebirth as a result of treatment, and the following scene of the bus station, etc. as a colorful fantasy about Pointsman's search for new subjects. It plays on a sexual theme, which makes it, in a way, even more perverse.
> 
> Www.innergroovemusic.com
> 
> On May 6, 2016, at 6:33 AM, Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
>> I like that joke perception. I also like the gratuitous fox joke. 'Try not to think about a fox as you run three times around 
>> the building."..haha....why does P play on that old joke? 1) plays with the mentioned laws of contradiction of Pavlov, however we are to understand them? 2) plays with the return of the repressed notion in a quotidian jokey way? What we are told to repress we simply can't. (Return of the Repressed might have larger meanings within GR (and other works, esp AtD again, maybe Vineland?)) 3) is sort of a joke about the impossibility of absolute conditioning despite everything? about some inherent human freedom to oppose no matter the conditioning? I can link speculatively albeit loosely about the Epilogue of 1984. I think of Wm James wrestling with his scientific/philosophical depression over the possibility that he has no free will, his life, all life, is determined inevitably. He breaks out of his depression by believing that his sure act of free will will be to believe in free will. (a mental health preserving kind of Carteesian move, so to analogize). 
>> 
>> On Thu, May 5, 2016 at 10:45 AM, kelber at mindspring.com <kelber at mindspring.com> wrote:
>> Don't have the book with me right now, but isn't there some mention of a fast or running fox? So Pynchon is setting up a joke about the quick brown fox jumping over the lazy ( Pavlovian) dog.
>> 
>> Laura
>> 
>> Sent from my Verizon Wireless 4G LTE DROID
>> 
>> 
>> Joseph Tracy <brook7 at sover.net> wrote:
>> 
>> Kevin Spectro- a spectral presence sitting in the annulus( technologic ring) of ( mysterious) night , holder of Book, manager of experimental subjects with little apparent choice( like Von Braun’s slaves?), leader in the of cult of Pavlov, despiser of ethical restrictions,upholder of scientific method, despiser of “old” order, spiking Foxes with painkiller, withholding them from Pointsman’s avarice/lust, "not the devil” are you?”, destined for death and destruction via V2 with St. Veronica’s and therefor identified with the rocket( nuclear weapon) as “a ghost in the sky". 
>> 
>> Why call patients Fox? In Japan fox is trickster, in england object of hunt, in 70s sexy woman. But why a predator for a patient that seems more prey?
>> 
>> 
>> > On May 5, 2016, at 7:48 AM, Joseph Tracy <brook7 at sover.net> wrote:
>> > 
>> >  please feel free to jump in as you will, p-listers.
>> > 
>> > To St. Veronica's hospital where Pointsman and Spectro (also a Pavlovian scientist) discuss Pointsman’s desire to have access to experiment with Slothrop as subject and we find with full clarity that Slothrop is somehow predicting the location and time of the fall of the rockets with his map of erections. Spectro says it can't be experimentally justified because there is just one subject. They wonder how Slothrop's predictive ability works, comparing phenoma of erection then rocket strike to  the arrival of a rocket first,  and then the rocket sound. We find Slothrop was also patient/ experimental subject of Laszlo Jamf. Pointsman wants same access to human subjects, reflecting Nazi medical experiments and known western experiments.
>> > The "hospital' takes in children, apparently survivors of bomb blasts etc. Some odd "therapy" is hinted at, possibly shock therapy. It is said that a thousand children are about to leave. Alive? To go where?)
>> > 
>> > note:
>> > St. Veronica is a Catholic legend of a woman who offers Jesus a cloth to wipe his face on the way to calvary and the cloth bears the image( Ver I can = true image in Latin) of his face. This may be related to shroud of Turin but very sketchy what the source is. The idea though is an image showing the utmost in suffering and abuse born in the face of Jesus. It is interesting that Jesus face is traditionally almost hermaphroditic apart from the beard so both the feminine and masculine are conveyed.  In the novel St Veronica's carries a dominant sense of misery, sounds of wailing reminiscent of the screaming at start of novel- science in the service of scrying bones.-
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>> 
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