GRGR(6) A rush of images 129-135 (toothpaste tubes)

[rj]

Jeremy:
> Each tube is separate,
> yet part of a continuous flow -- but the war does not acknowledge this,
> it is contrary to the war's aims. (This last bit seems to my ear a bit
> garbled -- it is all I can get for meaning out of the last 6 or 7 lines
> of p. 130.)

The comment " -- it is true return -- " is set apart here. I think the
point of 130.35-41 is that there is a natural cycle at work in this
process of metamorphosis, an interconnected routine of human travail and
expectation, one which the British War bureaucracy refuses to
acknowledge and effectively thwarts, dividing it up into entirely
separate and distinct compartments: domestic routines maintained (public
morale), Home Front (defence), arms production (industry), military
offensive (war) etc. The comparison with the German "folk-consciousness"
seems to me to be offering a potential distinction between the way that
the German people en masse apprehend the war, and the way that the
Britons do. In both cases, though, this public apprehension has been
"engineered": "ein Volk ein Fuhrer" vs "For King and Empire". (Although
that doesn't seem all that different, come to think of it. Irony?)

> 
> The War desires only to have the communal bonds between people sundered
> so that everyone is alone. (Top of 131) -- but wait, maybe that's
> reading too much in, "who can presume to say *what* the War wants", the
> idea of the War as a consciousness is perhaps just a vain construct.

But individual human consciousnesses in and of "the War"? (Is the sum of
these what the notion of the War "as a awareness" amounts to?) The
patient an extreme instance of the average Briton's pov? 
> At "The White Visitation" there's a long-time schiz, you know, who 
> believes that *he* is WWII. (131.5)
The "you know" makes it sound like a conversational anecdote, one Roger
has mentioned to Jessica perhaps, and which she incorporates into her
meditation here. Has the War developed into an accepted and comfortable
and *acceptable* domestic routine in itself, with the people at home
(and the soldiers as well?) wishing to preserve and prolong this harmony
(?) and being actually resistant to changes (i.e. 'winning' the war, and
thus ending it)? Work, family, holidays, Christmas -- all the cultural
traditions seem to have *more* purpose and significance now? Especially
so for Rog and Jessica's "love"?

Further, is the ironized Nativity scene which follows this, with "gifts
of tungsten, cordite, high octane", a parable reconstructed, or
mirrored, from the miracle of the toothpaste tubes envisioned on the
previous page? The children's gifts of embossed zinc and soapy-licorice
moments and phantoms of peppermint to "the real king" (i.e. the War) are
being returned in kind? God *is* on "our" side, isn't he?

best