Chasing ... Cutting

[jbor]

----------
>From: "Terrance Flaherty" <lycidas2 at earthlink.net>
>

> I don't know you mean by "these emotive terms" I am bandying
> about?
>
> Banishment? That's the term of the text 665.

Right, so it is. Sorry. It might be interesting to consider the significance
of the inverted commas around that word "liberation" in the text, however.

But I take your point: "Dora was home, and they are homesick." Possibly they
were better treated there than they had been previously.

And, look ahead to the passage elaborating on *why* the 175s have chosen a
"phantom SS command" structure based on what "they inferred to be the rocket
structure next door at the Mittelwerke", and why they worship Blicero as a
god:

    ... The A4, in its way, was also concealed behind an uncrossable wall
    that separated real pain and terror from summoned deliverer. Weissmann/
    Blicero's presence crossed the wall, warping, shivering into the fetid
    bunkrooms, with the same reach toward another shape as words trying to
    make their way through dreams. What the 175s heard from their real SS
    guards there was enough elevate Blicero on the spot -- they, his own
    brother-elite, *didn't know* what this man was up to. When prisoners
    came in earshot, the guards stopped whispering. But their fear kept
    echoing: fear not of Weissmann personally, but of the time itself, a
    time so desperate that *he* could now move through the Mittelwerke as
    if he owned it, a time which was granting him a power different from
    that of Auschwitz or Buchenwald, a power they couldn't have borne
    themselves. . . .   (666)

The Holocaust is *explicitly* referenced here -- the significance of
"Auschwitz or Buchenwald" in contrast to Dora couldn't be made more overt --
and the point is also clearly made that "the time" was bestowing on Blicero
"a power" which was quite "different". The "fear" of Weissmann is the SS
guards', not the 175s. Weissmann is much more of a maverick -- a loose
cannon -- than an "evil Nazi" at this point.

And, what about that other glimpse of Weissmann at this time, there at the
end of Pokler's story: that handwritten note on the final furlough form
(432.16), and the act of personal kindness beyond any notion or call of
"duty" which *it* discloses.