MDMD(5)----Rebekah

[Christine Karatnytsky]

Quoth Eric:
>Why does Rebekah require protection from betrayal?  

You know, I’m mulling over Eric’s reading of Rebekah as a former
prostitute, and I think he’s on to something, but can someone help me
clarify a few points that may relate?    

At the end of Ch. 15 we find the two friends sitting there together in
the pub.  Mason in some desperation poses Dixon a series of questions,
the upshot of which is:  how Exactly is Mason supposed to go about the
business of recovering from Rebekah's untimely death?  In return, Dixon
offers some practical advice, if not consolation, to our Ghastly Fop that
he has no choice but to “get on with it.”  (Apropos of Rebekah, n.b.
definition of ghastly as ghost-like, pallid). Going off on a tangent
already, can someone explain what Mason means by asking here, "How has
Getting On With It been working out for you, then?"  This question
implies some knowledge on Mason’s part, doesn't it, of a comparable
bereavement on Dixon's part.  To which experience is Mason making
reference?  Have I forgotten something, or am I over-interpreting here?

Back to Rebekah.  Mason says, "Tell me then,--what if I can't just
lightly let her drop?  What if I won't just leave her to the Weather, and
Forgetfulness?  What if I want to spend, even squander, my precious time
trying to make it up to her?   Somehow?  Do you think anyone can simply
let all that go?"  These questions seem to be Weighed Down with something
more than the distress one would normally associate with an on-going and
still acute mourning.

To wit:   “Lightly let her drop?”  (Drop?  Hasn’t she already dropped? 
What does he mean, lightly?)  "Make it up to her?"  (What "it?"  Do we
know how Rebekah died, btw?)  " Let all that go?"  (All what?  If Mason
means their life together, hasn’t he let it all go already--in a worse
fashion, some might say--by leaving Rebekah’s children, his children,
behind in England as he gallivants around the world?)  Is Mason, failed
Orpheus, admitting to a crime more serious than the one he commits by
virtue of his status as widower?  (That he lives--while Eurydice Rebekah
lies in the Plutonian kingdom, forever irretrievable.)

Answering my own question, it seems to me that a partial explanation is
found a little earlier in Ch.15, p.164:

Mason “tries to joke with himself.  Isn’t this supposed to be the Age of
Reason?  To believe in the cold light of this all-business world that
Rebekah haunts him is to slip, to stagger in a crowd, into the embrace of
the Painted Italian Whore herself, and the Air to fill with suffocating
incense, and the radiant Deity to go dim forever.  But if Reason be also
Permission at last to believe in the evidence of our Earthly senses, then
how can he not concede to her some Resurrection?--to deny her, how
cruel!”

About this paragraph, Eric asks:
164.10`the Painted Italian Whore' ---The Catholic Church?
Just an ordinary British Protestant rude name for that institution,
or attached to some particular episode?

It seems to me that the PIW is biblical, maybe out of the Revelation?  Is
that the Whore of Babylon story?  (Goodness, after flaunting those
stripes I earned under the Dominicans you’d think I’d remember such a
thing, but no.)  Or maybe it’s something else.  Could it be a Dantean
allegory?  (Hellooo, Heikki!  Hellooo, Monte!)  In any event, the phrase
seems clearly representative of the cravings of the flesh, which is
compatible with Eric’s reading of Rebekah as a former prostitute.

Anyway, I am beginning to think that Mason’s “betrayal” of her has
something to do with the responsibilities a man of Reason owes to
Science, and with the responsibilities a man of Astronomy owes to the
Stars.  This would make Rebekah’s exhortation to listen to the earth all
the more poignant and necessary.  Has Mason missed her--her earthly body,
that garden of paradise--because he’d been looking up, Star-Gazing, too
much?  (Are you there, Jude?  You had something to say to me relating to
this.  It bears repeating, I think.)  

Does he "make it up to her" now by spinning a grand tale in her honor,
the creation story of their meeting, in which a great giant cheese runs
rampant down a hill, the machina of luv?  And what is the mythical Moon,
symbol of the heavens, most often composed of but cheese?  Mason even
confuses it as such, as the "cylindrickal Onslaught", symbol of his art
and profession, approaches to squash him in allegorical sacrifice from
which he is rescued by Rebekah.  Alas that he cannot in turn save her
from the natural decay of flesh.

But then, another tack:  "Victim of a Cheese malevolent?"  I hardly think
so.  Victim of  Hypotheses Ambivalent is more like it.  For, by
fashioning a tale of courtship so improbable, however lovely and charming
it may appear, doesn't  Mason, to use somebody's pop psycho-babble, deny
the reality of Rebekah's past?  By making a Country Wife out of this City
Wife doesn't he also deny something about himself?  Does he "make it up
to her" in this fashion by embodying the person of the Ghastly Fop?  Why
isn't he making it up to her by raising her sons?

Two more things:  The sexy, overpowering smell of incense in this
section, and the sensuality of cloths and fabrics farther down the line. 
However much he attempts to deny or suppress (and I'm not utterly
convinced of this, I just have a lot of questions), Mason is a
sensualist, with a particular affinity for the smells associated with
women as the objects of sexual desire.  His furtive sniff of Susanna
Peach’s bed silks and his susceptibility to the heady aromas of incense
correlate to Dixon’s experience of the previous chapter in the
whorehouse.  The smells, the luxurious fabrics--reminds me of Mr. Bloom’s
(not that one, *that* one) affinity for appoponax soap and ladies'
undergarments.

But help me here, ladies and gents, I don't know what Tellurick means
other than earthly.  That's a pretty critical notion, and one that would
certainly help make sense of these half-formed thoughts.

Chris