In Mexico city they had somehow wandered into an exhibition of
paintings by the beautiful Spanish exile Remedios Varo; in the
central painting of a triptych, titled "Bordando el Manto
Terrestre," were a number of frail girls with heart-shaped faces,
huge eyes, spun-gold hair, prisoners in the top room of a
circular tower, embroidering a kind of tapestry which spilled out
the slit windows and into a void, seeking hopelessly to fill the
void: for all the other buildings and creatures, all the waves,
ships and forests of the earth were contained in this tapestry
and the tapestry was the world. Oedipa,
perverse,
had stood in front of the painting and cried. No one
had noticed; she wore dark green bubble shades. For a moment
she'd wondered if the seal around her sockets were tight enough
to allow the tears simply to go on and fill up the entire lens
space and never dry. She could carry the sadness of the moment
with her that way forever, see the world refracted through those
tears, those specific tears, as if indices as yet unfound varied
in important ways from cry to cry.... What did she so desire
escape from? Such a captive maiden, having plenty of time to
think, soon realizes that her tower, its height and architecture,
are like her ego only incidental: that what really keeps her
where she is is magic, anonymous and malignant, visited on her
from the outside and for no reason at all. Having no apparatus
except gut fear and female cunning to examine this formless
magic, to understand how it works, how to measure its field
strength, count its lines of force, she may fall back on
superstition, or take up a useful hobby like embroidery, or go
mad, or marry a disk jockey. If the tower is everywhere and the
knight of deliverance no proof against its magic, what else?
-- Thomas Pynchon. The Crying of Lot 49