Chasing ... Cutting

[Mark Wright AIA]

Howdy

I read Pirate's Dream as one incorporating material from other German
sources than the Jews bound for and in the camps.  I have always been
struck by the similarity of the "evacuees ... taken in lots" (lots of
meaning in those words alone) and the elevator imagery to several
sequences in the 1920's German film "Metropolis," made by Lang at UFA.

If Pirate's gift is under the tight control of the SOE, then we might
look for a source closer to home, more useful to the Allies. The White
Visitation's resident expatriate German filmmaker Gerhard von Goll is a
good candidate.  Useful for the moment, an unstable artistic-type that
wants coddling, German, probably worked with Fritz Lang at that UFA.
(Does Greta make an explicit Lang connection later in GR? I don't
recall.)

I don't think we are given good reason to believe Pirate's Condition is
under such iron control, however.  In which case the source(s) of the
imagery might be less well focused and less useful to the SOE. If
Pirate's gift is uncontrolled (but useful to Them withal) and a sort of
broad-band retrieval of dream-imagery from the most stressed
populations is plausible, then the material could indeed be sifting
through to him from the Jews though I see no *specific* cues.  But this
dry little dusting of horrors would surely not be enough to "manage"
the experience  or even the daydreams of anyone in a Ghetto or on a
train or dying in an extermination camp or under the Mountain at Dora.

And Pirate, given his clearances and his running of double-or-triple
Agent Katje, probably knows as much about the Holocaust as she does
herself.  Hell, he might even have facilitated her sending those
"crypto-Jewish" families "east". So all the material could as easily be
his alone.

Do I have a point?  Perhaps not. I thought I might discover one if I
kept going...
Mark

 
--- jbor <jbor at bigpond.com> wrote (snipping Otto with comment):

> > The margin in my *Die Enden der Parabel* has a note from 1982: 
> "Auschwitz
> > ?" - I see the first mentioning of the Holocaust on p. 3-4 in
> Pirate's
> > dream, dreamily disguised as London-evacuation. The images that
> come up are
> > of deported Jews. Remember Pirate's special talent explained in
> Episode Two.
> > This is what millions of Jews encountered at "die Rampe," at the
> real "oven"
> > at Auschwitz, where the final selection, the final judgment without
> appeal
> > took place:
> >
> > "(...) places whose *names he has never heard* . . . (...)" (3.
> italics by
> > TRP)
> > "(...) they are under the final arch: brakes grab and spring
> terribly. It is
> > a judgment from which there is no appeal.
> > The caravan has halted. It is the end of the line. All the evacuees
> are
> > ordered out. They move slowly, but without resistance. Those
> marshaling them
> > wear cockades the color of lead, and do not speak. It is some vast,
> very old
> > and dark hotel, an iron extension of the track and switchery by
> which they
> > have come here. (...) . . .  the evacuees are taken in lots, by
> elevator--a
> > moving wood scaffold open on all sides (...)." (4)
> >
> > The double-meaning of *scaffold" should alarm every reader at once.
> >
> OK. But run with this insight a little further. To what uses are
> Pirate's
> special talent being put by the War Office? If Pirate dreams it then
> don't
> the English doctors who monitor him daily know about it? And, how
> does his
> "gift" actually function? He experiences the fantasies of others --
> he
> steals their dreams so to speak -- it is his ability to "take over
> the
> burden of *managing* ... their exhaustive little daydreams for them".
> (12)
> Does this mean the victims no longer face the horror of that mocking
> voice
> on p.4:
> 
>      "You didn't really believe you'd be saved. Come, we all know who
>     we are by now. No one was ever going to take the trouble to save
> *you*,
>     old fellow. . . . "
> 
> Perhaps Pirate's actual sleeping dreams are of a different timbre to
> the
> conscious gift he has nurtured, however, if this is Pirate
> *intercepting*
> the dreams of the Jewish prisoners it means that they *aren't* having
> them
> at all (cf. the Rumanian royalist on 11.12, Lord Blatherard Osmo on
> 16).
> Doesn't this imply that that moment of horror that the death camp
> victims
> suddenly experience at the realisation of their fate *isn't* real for
> them?
> Or is it only that their misgivings about where they were going which
> have
> been intercepted?
> 
> I can accept the possibility of this interpretation of the opening
> sequence
> but I still find it problematic.
> 
> best


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