mdmd(5) - Mason's Story of Rebekah

[Brian D. McCary]

(166:6)  ""...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 that all go?"
	Thou must," Dixon does not say.  Instead, (...) "Then tha must
break thy Silence, and tell me womewhat of her.""

Here I was disappointed in Mason:  Dixon offers some of the best advice
about Rebekah Mason is likely to hear, and Mason turns it down.  Dixon
is saying that there is an alternative to forgetting about her, and that
alternative is behaving as if she were truely alive, and just living 
back in merry old England, waiting patiently for Mason's return.  If she
were alive, Mason would be talking about her regularly, and Dixon would 
know alot about her.  Furthermore, Mason's stories, over time, would 
reveal the true Rebekah, and protective narrative lengths would fall
prey to detail and repetition.  Dixon, true to his self-prescribed role
as part of the cure for Mason, takes Mason's version at face value.  Mason,
on the other hand, fails to keep his side of the bargin: he tells a highly
entertaining but unlikely whopper that he would never tell if expected 
Dixon to ever meet Rebekah in person.  In doing so, the Rebekah he chooses
to keep alive is not the one he married...

Later, even Rebekah rebukes him: (172:15)
""Look to the Earth,"..."I've betray'd you" he cries. "Ah,- I should
have-" "Lit Candles? I am past Light. Pray'd for me ev'ry Day? I am
outside of time. Good, living Charles,...good Flesh and
Blood...."...She bares her Teeth, and pales, and turns, drifting
away..."

Here I think she is telling him to get on with his life, to live among
the living.  She is not looking for grand gestures, candles and
prayers, and she reminds him he is alive, warm flesh, capable of
enjoying other warm flesh.  He has the boys, who are alive, and who are
part of her; he could be with them, instead of helping Maskelyne, who
was getting on fine without him.  The most obvious meaning in her
remark about the earth is that of fertility, and boys are, in a sense,
their shared crop.  Seems to me she might have returned to give him
exactly this message, and tires, after a while, of the continual
pining, which is why her visits cease.

On the other hand, I think Mason 's general alienation is
representative of the temperments of the participants in the expansion
of western culture. It would take quirky, mildly lonely men to draw the
lines, build the roads, fight the battles, plow the fields. It is
difficult to imagine the M-D line being drawn by a couple of family
men with homes and holdings of their own. For better or for worse, it
took Masons to create America. I don't know where this is going, but
it's exactly what I felt when I thought about these passages.

Brian McCary