GRGR(6) A rush of images 129-135

[Jeremy Osner]

Roger seems more human in the church than he had before -- but no, maybe
that's just Jessica's wishful thinking. ("or is that how she wants it to
be?", 129, is exactly parallel to "Which do you want it to be?", 131.)
The camera pulls back away from R & J, to the church and congregation,
as a segue into talking about the war -- the War is introduced in
churchly terms. "Evensong" = vespers, the evening service; "canonical
hour" = one of the 7 periods during the day assigned to prayer. Vespers
is a canonical hour.

So the movement is R & J, the church, the War; now the camera pans
slowly across England, the setting of the war. We see Wrens working in a
shipyard (I think) on the coast; the steel they are using is recycled
from thousands of old toothpaste tubes. While describing the genesis
(exodus, I guess) of the toothpaste tubes, the following extraordinarily
beautiful sentence is tossed off almost glibly: "...the morning mouths
growing with the day tobacco and fish-furred, dry with fear, foul with
idleness, flooded at thoughts of impossible meals, settling instead for
the weeks's offal in gland pies, Household Milk, broken biscuits at half
the usual points, and isn't menthol a marvelous invention to take just
enough of it away each morning..." Does anyone know what the
significance of capitalized "Household Milk" is? 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 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. --
And here the narrator is identifying with Jessica's doubting on 129 (and
is about to accuse the reader of the same thing). An example is offered
of someone who does not suffer from self-doubt -- but he is insane. He
is (like a soldier) one of those selected to die so that King War can
live. -- A beautiful segue into Nativity, where King War becomes one of
the kings coming from the East; rather than gold, frankincense and
myrrh, they bear tungsten, cordite and high-octane. "Serai" = inn, or,
as my dictionary likes to term it, caravansery. We see the baby looking
up at the king, and another beautiful bit of prose, "what possible
greeting or entente will flow between the king and the infant prince?"
And here the reader is included in the circle of doubt that has run
throughout the paragraph.



--
"Write for those who can read,
 fart for those who can only smell."

--Stirling Newberry