Work & the Black Messenger

[ish mailian]

Pip, though over tender-hearted, was at bottom very bright, with that
pleasant, genial, jolly brightness peculiar to his tribe; a tribe,
which ever enjoy all holidays and festivities with finer, freer relish
than any other race. For blacks, the year’s calendar should show
naught but three hundred and sixty-five Fourth of Julys and New Year’s
Days. Nor smile so, while I write that this little black was
brilliant, for even blackness has its brilliancy; behold yon lustrous
ebony, panelled in king’s cabinets. But Pip loved life, and all life’s
peaceable securities; so that the panic-striking business in which he
had somehow unaccountably become entrapped, had most sadly blurred his
brightness; though, as ere long will be seen, what was thus
temporarily subdued in him, in the end was destined to be luridly
illumined by strange wild fires, that fictitiously showed him off to
ten times the natural lustre with which in his native Tolland County
in Connecticut, he had once enlivened many a fiddler’s frolic on the
green; and at melodious eventide, with his gay ha-ha! had turned the
round horizon into one star-belled tambourine. So, though in the clear
air of day, suspended against a blue-veined neck, the pure-watered
diamond drop will healthful glow; yet, when the cunning jeweller would
show you the diamond in its most impressive lustre, he lays it against
a gloomy ground, and then lights it up, not by the sun, but by some
unnatural gases. Then come out those fiery effulgences, infernally
superb; then the evil-blazing diamond, once the divinest symbol of the
crystal skies, looks like some crown-jewel stolen from the King of
Hell. But let us to the story.

He saw God’s foot upon the treadle of the loom, and spoke it; and
therefore his shipmates called him mad. So man’s insanity is heaven’s
sense; and wandering from all mortal reason, man comes at last to that
celestial thought, which, to reason, is absurd and frantic; and weal
or woe, feels then uncompromised, indifferent as his God.



https://www.wikiart.org/en/remedios-varo/embroidering-the-earth-s-mantle-1961

On Fri, Sep 1, 2017 at 11:07 AM, ish mailian <ishmailian at gmail.com> wrote:
> The Black message, as Melville described it, is the Truth. It is Pip,
> the Black boy in M-D,  who, having seen God's foot on the treadle of
> the loom after he is abandoned by the crew, by the white men who hunt
> the white whale, that, like the weavers in Remedios Varo's painting,
> works the shuttle that weaves the tapestry that is the world, Pip, mad
> Pip, like Lear's Fool, Pip, who knows the Black Truth, who is the
> Black Messenger.
>
> On Fri, Sep 1, 2017 at 11:00 AM, ish mailian <ishmailian at gmail.com> wrote:
>> In his "On Schlemiels in Thomas Pynchon’s “V” – Part II" Menachem
>> Feuer focuses out attention on Benny's "depression" as he looks for
>> work. In a section titled " The Schlemiel’s Epiphany," Feuer writes:
>>
>> The Schlemiel’s Epiphany
>>
>> Immediately following this reflection, Pynchon places Profane in an
>> employment office marking his isolation and awkwardness. He is alone
>> and “didn’t see Fina.” It’s as if his mother dropped him off. After
>> filling out his employment application, something of an epiphany
>> occurs by way of an African-American “holy messenger.” He wears a
>> similar jacket to the one Profane usually wears (a black suede one):
>> “As he handed the competed form to a girl at the desk, a messenger
>> came through: A Negro wearing an old suede jacket….and for a second
>> his eyes and Profane’s met” (157).
>>
>> Profane reflects on the mystical messenger and has an epiphany:
>>
>> Maybe Profane had seen him under the street of at one of the shapeups.
>> But there was a little half-smile and a kind of half-telepathy and it
>> was as I this messenger had brought a message to Profane too, sheathed
>> to everybody but the two of them in an envelope of eyebeams touching,
>> that said: Who are you trying to kid? Listen to the wind. (157)
>>
>> The fact that “he listened to the wind” suggests something prophetic
>> about this epiphany. It announces a new moment in Profane’s life. And
>> this is marked when, after the messenger leaves the room, he goes to
>> the window and has a vision of the wind and his new, changed life.
>> Now, it seems, he is truly free:
>>
>> It was as if he could see the wind, too. The suit felt wrong on him.
>> Maybe it was nothing after all to conceal this curious Depression
>> which showed up in no stock market year-end report. ‘Hey, where are
>> you going’, said the receptionist. ‘Changed my mind,’ Profane told
>> her. Out in the hall and going down in the elevator, in the lobby and
>> in the street, he looked for the messenger, but couldn’t find him. He
>> unbuttoned the jacket of old Mendoza’s suit and shuffled along
>> Forty-Second Street, head down, straight into the wind. (157-58)
>>
>> A book can be written on the wind in Pynchon novels, but I'm
>> interested in this encounter, this epiphany. The advice, to listen to
>> the wind is a far more important idea than the one that critics have
>> fixated on, the Keep Cool but Care, and though the two are related, to
>> work of course, the gig of the jazzman's cool message, as Dinerstein
>> discusses it at some length in his Origins of Cool book evolves,
>> though that look in the eye, as Dinerstein describes it from Miles, so
>> key to the cool, in any event, the Black Messenger in BE has lost his
>> job, and here the messenger in V. provides the cool, the Black Man is
>> always in a depression in the employment sense of it. When is
>> unemployment ever not what half the household is?
>>
>> A few have noted the similarities of the Black Messenger in V. and the
>> Black Messenger in BE.
>> Why Black Messengers?
>>
>> Unemployment and the Cool of that Gig that is in the wind if you listen.
>>
>> And Benny, Pynchon here, he listening.
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> posted earlier, but here is the link again:
>> http://www.berfrois.com/2017/05/menachem-feuer-thomas-pynchons-v/
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Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l