Response

Lesbian Pics: Finally Relevant to SchoolI’ve been sitting here a few hours and (between solitaire and the removal of a tenacious little Windows Vista sticker) compiling important passages, themes, and symbols against the luminous leer of WordDocument4, trying to make complete sense of the book. As I look over what I’ve written I’ve really got to hand it to otherworld me: I’ve got a point. Why do this? I take these key passages and reduce them, squish them together like a demonic puzzlehead until they fit. So what’s the picture on the puzzle? To His Coy Mistress with a quantum spin. If you don’t know Marvell’s poem it unfolds like a rose and means “get it while it’s good” (There! I did it again). So, “get it while it’s good”. With a quantum spin.
Like Sumire’s aesthetic theory, you’re a beautiful, messy, confusion of dichotomies. Inside of all of us there’s a frigid you, “an empty shell”, and the one that blossoms with and embraces love. That’s the duality by which our characters are split. Miu spurns love from a soldier on a park bench and a fiftyish Spanish guy with a mammoth penis (classic hamartia). Instead of looking out from the isolation of her room, she instead looks in at her other self (does her other self live in a Ferris wheel?), her possible worlds self who embraced love. Seeing this, the beautiful chaos of her dichotomies rearranges itself and she is split into frigid Miu and she-who-strokes-mammoth-penis Miu.
Sumire falls in love with Miu and decides she must profess her love or else fade away into nothing. She appears in Miu’s room in shock (resembling Miu’s incident), tries to make love to Miu, and is rejected. Then she goes into the dream world, where she can love otherworld Miu. How do you get to the dream world? By sharpening her knife and slitting a dog’s throat somewhere (“symbolically” is the operative word here I think; so far I’ve had no luck). Symbol, according to K, is a one-way street. In the end, Sumire is in a world that is “too semiotic”.
K never tells Miu he loves her. He has lost the “precious flame”. He’s going to fade away into nothing, he’s going to be alone, in longing and regret. In dream world Miu and Sumire make love while he reads Balzac. Besides Sumire, he has been alone since his dog died. He has some fit, brought on by music and moonlight wherein he sinks into a state of consciousness, maybe on the edge of the dream world, but resists and returns. Miu invites him to come and get her in her semiotic world which she entered symbolically: “I cut something’s throat. Sharpening my knife, my heart a stone.” (209) He didn’t slit any throats anywhere, there are no bloodstains on his hands. “The blood must have already, in its own silent way, seeped inside.” (210).
The dog, with the knife, somewhere (otherworld Clue). How does it all tie together? All the little details that lead to “get it while it’s good”? “I conceive a dream, a sightless fetus called understanding, floating in the universal, overwhelming amniotic fluid of incomprehension…The technical, and moral, skills needed to maintain a supply line on that scale are beyond me.” (136) I’ll go with that.