Baseball Mandala2

[Steelhead]

There is another thread to the "baseball" paragraph, the reference to
Tchitcherine and Dzaqyp Qulan on their linguistic quest in the deserts of
Kirghizistan. Note the play on the words "game" and "play."

Here from page 340: "They [the Russain settlers] hunted Sarts, Kazakhs,
Kirghiz, and Dungans that terrible summer like wild game. Daily scores were
kept. It was a competition, good natured but more than play. Thousands of
restless natives bit the dust. Their names, even their numbers, lost
forever. Colors of skin, ways of dressing became reasonable cause to jail,
or beat and kill...[my cut] This native uprising was supposed to be the
doing of foreigners, an international conspiracy to open a new front in the
war. More western paranoia, based solidly on the European balance of power.
How could there be Kazakh, Kirchiz-Eastern-reasons? Hadn't the
nationalities been happy? Hadn't fifty years of Russian rule brought
progress? enrichment?"

Then we get Galina and her "waiting for the annhilation, the blows from the
sky, drawn terribly tense, with the waiting, unable to name whatever is
approaching, knowing," (Just like the Pointsman passage, eh?) and then the
bit about the "star-blotting Moselm angels" who will "trample spoorless the
white marketplace,"  and a reference to Enzian (Tchit's black half-bro) who
waits "out across unnumbered versts of lowland and of zonal light that
slants as their autumns come around again each year, leans along the
planet's withers like an old circus rider..."

Then we get this.

"Facing east, the black face keeping watch from some winter embankment or
earth-colored wall of a fine-grained stone into low wastes of Prussia, of
Poland, the leagues of meadow waiting, just as Tchitcherine grows each
month now more taut and windsmooth at his westward flank, seeing History
and Geopolitics move them surely into confrontation as the radios go
screaming higher, new penstocks in the night shudder to the touch with
hydroelectric rage, mounting, across the empty canyons and passes, skies in
the day go thick with miles of falling canopies, white as visions of rich
men's heavenly dzurts, gaming now and still awkward, but growing, each
strewn pattern, less and less at play..."

So we can follow the leads of the baseball passage back, deep into the
heart of this novel, back to its second page, in fact, its first
dreamscape, and back out again. Go back to page 508... and the comical
pairing of Narrisch and Slothrop. Where we find "Holy-Center-Approaching is
soon to be the number one Zonal pasttime. Its balmy hey is nearly on it.
Soon more champions, adepts, magicians of all ranks will be in the field
than ever before in the history of the game. The sun will rule all
enterprise [a white marketplace?], if it be honest and sporting. The Gauss
curve (a "normal" or parabolic curve) will herniate toward the excellent.
And tankers the likes of Narrisch and Slothrop here will have already been
weeded out."  Then we get some slap and tickle with Thanatz and Greta and
this, a clincher of sorts:  "a long look from the top of some Low Country
dike into a sky flowing so even and yellowed a brown that the sun could be
anywhwere behind it, and the crosses of the turning windmills [another
mandala] could be spoke-blurs of the terrible Rider himself, Slothrop's
Rider, his two explosions up there, his celestial cyclist..."

Steelhead