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proximoception) wrote2009-07-27 07:39 pm
proximoception) wrote2009-07-27 07:39 pm
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1. Same (convent school?) clothing in the Invocacion horn-blower and the girls of the triptych. Not found in any other Varo pictures I'm aware of, which might have led Pynchon to associate them.
2. In the one, you make the world - though you're not alone, and seem to have a curious taskmaster. The girls are a bit Deneuvian but have Remedios' face. The world is being spun, but out of the sort of gaseous potion in the hourglass apparatus. The dreamstuff is stirred by the faceless entity, who carries a book he isn't looking at. None of the girls are looking back at this, the true source of their world, except the one on the left, who glances back slyly. A revision of Plato's cave? Is the entity displaying the utter inability to care of Frost's Demiurge?
3. In the other, you're invoking something. The place seems half-cave, half-hall. What's evoked is coming out of the wall, seems to be covered with moss (?), seems to be a party of apathetic aristocratic party-goers. Apathy is a hard expression to decipher in Varo because almost everyone displays some version of it. The novice carries a golden ball or something, in addition to the horn. It's probable that she sees the wall-people - otherwise her eyes must be rolling back in her head. But they do come from behind her (reminding me, again, of "The Demiurge's Laugh" as does the moss).
4. At the end of Crying, "The men inside the auction room wore black mohair and had pale, cruel faces" (183). I haven't seen the original, but in the not so great reproduction below there are some dark regions by the moss? If Pynchon was trying to reference the painting, maybe mohair is the closest plausible garment to what Varo depicts.
5. Pynchon's image of Tristero, a dark order that may be integral to the world (or one of two or more warring orders), as compared to the other possibility Oedipa faces, a universe that is a patternless chaos one attempts to knit into order, is a bunch of guys dressed in black who come out and murder you. Presumably if you dare blow the horn this happens, or if you force Tristero into sending representatives by putting up horn stamps for public sale - being murdered is one of Oedipa's possible fates at the end, hence those guys.
6. The novel's last words are its title, as is the last line of "Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came" by Robert Browning. There a 'childe' - knight aspirant - after long journeying suddenly comes upon the tower in a waste land where his predecessors were all killed by a giant (or by something). The last line is what his slughorn announces - that he has come to meet his fate too, whatever it is.
7. Bloom's most famous reading of the poem was that the predecessors, who actually mostly seem to have met their deaths disgracefully, hence not at the tower in any literal sense, are predecessor poets. Pretty much the Romantics, who many of Browning's other poems allude to sympathetically - Wordsworth in "The Lost Leader," Byron in a couple, Keats in that "murex" one, Shelley virtually everywhere but esp. "Pauline" and "Cenciaja" - and double esp. "Memorabilia." Browning is showing up where the Romantics failed, and presumably to fail with them though we don't actually see that happen. For Bloom this failure is one of complete individuation from the poetic past - the failure to become Milton or Shakespeare rather than their annotator.
8. Pynchon's making Browning's never-seen giant into a bunch of obscured assassins could be read as assimilating the giant and precursors into one entity. His famous eclecticism in his early books, tackling all of history and politics and music and art and literature at once, could be read Bloomiously as anxiety: a great talent greatly alarmed by how little was left for it to become not just famous but permanent, preeminent, by doing. Perhaps Pynchon's choice was between chaos and orders woven by others - a world seeable only through the visions of those others, never purely his own. The very substance of that world is theirs.
9. This doesn't cancel any of the meaning of the other problem, basically that of Frost's "Design" - our sucky life either has no intention behind it or a vile one, some mad or evil God (though here nature is not indicted, just society - so not a God, a conspiracy), and neither unhappy possibility is quite preferable. Artists know we don't care about their influence dramas, so they find ways to assimilate their own issues to broader ones.
10. Also doesn't cancel out Pynchon's later self-diagnosis, in the "Slow Learner" intro, that he wasn't ready for politics yet - not yet awake, like those around him, to the possibilities of change and of becoming part of that change.
11. The combination of the horn issue with the mails is where "Bartleby" comes in, as the representative of the other possibility, where you call the world and it never answers, either because you're too small to catch its eye or it has no eye at all. Hence the horn on the mailbox, which also seems to be a trashcan at one point. The possibility of dead letters. The irony of the "Bartleby" story is that the NARRATOR is the one Bartleby wants to listen to him. The narrator dodges his responsibility. Was it ironic of Pynchon to miss that, or did he not miss it? The night walk scene may be despairing or it may be a judgment, one aiming at productivity. It's easy to be hard on your past self, but in my limited experience almost every idea you have in later adulthood you had earlier, in some embryonic form.
I'd have to reread it to go into any more detail.
2. In the one, you make the world - though you're not alone, and seem to have a curious taskmaster. The girls are a bit Deneuvian but have Remedios' face. The world is being spun, but out of the sort of gaseous potion in the hourglass apparatus. The dreamstuff is stirred by the faceless entity, who carries a book he isn't looking at. None of the girls are looking back at this, the true source of their world, except the one on the left, who glances back slyly. A revision of Plato's cave? Is the entity displaying the utter inability to care of Frost's Demiurge?
3. In the other, you're invoking something. The place seems half-cave, half-hall. What's evoked is coming out of the wall, seems to be covered with moss (?), seems to be a party of apathetic aristocratic party-goers. Apathy is a hard expression to decipher in Varo because almost everyone displays some version of it. The novice carries a golden ball or something, in addition to the horn. It's probable that she sees the wall-people - otherwise her eyes must be rolling back in her head. But they do come from behind her (reminding me, again, of "The Demiurge's Laugh" as does the moss).
4. At the end of Crying, "The men inside the auction room wore black mohair and had pale, cruel faces" (183). I haven't seen the original, but in the not so great reproduction below there are some dark regions by the moss? If Pynchon was trying to reference the painting, maybe mohair is the closest plausible garment to what Varo depicts.
5. Pynchon's image of Tristero, a dark order that may be integral to the world (or one of two or more warring orders), as compared to the other possibility Oedipa faces, a universe that is a patternless chaos one attempts to knit into order, is a bunch of guys dressed in black who come out and murder you. Presumably if you dare blow the horn this happens, or if you force Tristero into sending representatives by putting up horn stamps for public sale - being murdered is one of Oedipa's possible fates at the end, hence those guys.
6. The novel's last words are its title, as is the last line of "Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came" by Robert Browning. There a 'childe' - knight aspirant - after long journeying suddenly comes upon the tower in a waste land where his predecessors were all killed by a giant (or by something). The last line is what his slughorn announces - that he has come to meet his fate too, whatever it is.
7. Bloom's most famous reading of the poem was that the predecessors, who actually mostly seem to have met their deaths disgracefully, hence not at the tower in any literal sense, are predecessor poets. Pretty much the Romantics, who many of Browning's other poems allude to sympathetically - Wordsworth in "The Lost Leader," Byron in a couple, Keats in that "murex" one, Shelley virtually everywhere but esp. "Pauline" and "Cenciaja" - and double esp. "Memorabilia." Browning is showing up where the Romantics failed, and presumably to fail with them though we don't actually see that happen. For Bloom this failure is one of complete individuation from the poetic past - the failure to become Milton or Shakespeare rather than their annotator.
8. Pynchon's making Browning's never-seen giant into a bunch of obscured assassins could be read as assimilating the giant and precursors into one entity. His famous eclecticism in his early books, tackling all of history and politics and music and art and literature at once, could be read Bloomiously as anxiety: a great talent greatly alarmed by how little was left for it to become not just famous but permanent, preeminent, by doing. Perhaps Pynchon's choice was between chaos and orders woven by others - a world seeable only through the visions of those others, never purely his own. The very substance of that world is theirs.
9. This doesn't cancel any of the meaning of the other problem, basically that of Frost's "Design" - our sucky life either has no intention behind it or a vile one, some mad or evil God (though here nature is not indicted, just society - so not a God, a conspiracy), and neither unhappy possibility is quite preferable. Artists know we don't care about their influence dramas, so they find ways to assimilate their own issues to broader ones.
10. Also doesn't cancel out Pynchon's later self-diagnosis, in the "Slow Learner" intro, that he wasn't ready for politics yet - not yet awake, like those around him, to the possibilities of change and of becoming part of that change.
11. The combination of the horn issue with the mails is where "Bartleby" comes in, as the representative of the other possibility, where you call the world and it never answers, either because you're too small to catch its eye or it has no eye at all. Hence the horn on the mailbox, which also seems to be a trashcan at one point. The possibility of dead letters. The irony of the "Bartleby" story is that the NARRATOR is the one Bartleby wants to listen to him. The narrator dodges his responsibility. Was it ironic of Pynchon to miss that, or did he not miss it? The night walk scene may be despairing or it may be a judgment, one aiming at productivity. It's easy to be hard on your past self, but in my limited experience almost every idea you have in later adulthood you had earlier, in some embryonic form.
I'd have to reread it to go into any more detail.
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There is a Hand to turn the time,
Though thy Glass today be run,
Till the Light that hath brought the Towers low
Find the last poor Pret'rite one...
Till the riders sleep by ev'ry road,
All through our crippl'd Zone,
With a face on ev'ry mountainside,
And a Soul in ev'ry stone....
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I just taught the Hansel and Gretel section of G's R (which I've quoted here more than once: the black indomitable oven; the sweat peak of energy passed....)
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You guys are going to have to somehow behave and not let sweat energy peak passages out of the bag.
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Somehow, I didn't know about the "Invocacion" painting - but, yes, how could he not have had it in mind, the one he does mention an invocation of the other.
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Oedipa sees an unidentified Varo painting on p. 101, I believe.
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http://www.wired.com/special_multimedia/2009/pl_print_1708
(Pynchon map of LA)
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