MDDM Ch. 10 The Bull's Eye

[jbor]

paul.mackin at verizon.net wrote:

> The guy's fascinated by light spectrums, red shifting, doppler effects,
> wants to ascribe meanings. Does he mean we are all moving away from each
> other. Not at near the speed of light or anything but nevertheless
> diverging.
> 
> Did someone say those things mounted in ship bulkheads (of yore) to provide
> light to the interior are called bull's eyes? Heavy glass objects tapering
> in flat edges to a point, conically prismatic?  Got one here somewhere but
> never knew what they were called.

I got the definition from _Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase and Fable_. I'd be
interested to hear what it's like: convex or concave? one way or two way or
no way vision? I got the impression it's a thick glass lens of some type
which lets light in but which you can't see clearly through. It's set in the
deck apparently, not like a porthole window.

I agree with Terrance that it's an atmospheric effect which is described, "a
strange dark cloud with a red center" (87), but I haven't been able to find
any data to say that this cloud over Table Mountain is known as a "Bull's
Eye". When it is first mentioned it is Mason who refers to it by this name,
and the name is put in inverted commas, then Austra takes it up at 91. I
guess a bull's eye is red, both on a bull and on a dart board target, which
might be enough to explain it. But the way that Austra uses it on p. 91, and
the way that it is used again on p. 99, it refers to an act of looking at
the Cape society through a different perspective, as if through a wider or
more objective lens, which is why the sense of "Bull's Eye" as the glass
disc on a ship's deck, using a maritime metaphor for the different societies
above and below deck, and how these view one another, to relate to the
society at the Cape, holds some appeal.

Again, I think there's a juxtaposition. Mason and Dixon and the Vroom girls
are looking out at the galaxy through their telescope lenses and "Spy-Glass"
(99.4), but there is a sense of "Africa", as an allegorical figure, or else
some celestial, "objective" observer, looking *in* at the goings-on at the
Cape. And it is Austra and the "Droster Republick" (91.29) who are aligned
to this vantage by the text.

I agree that Austra is teasing the Vroom sisters, but it is gentle, and
there is a real sense of sodality between them, which is why Austra holds
her tongue at the bottom of p. 90 I think. The girls regard her like a
sister, and she, comfortably and naturally, feels and acts like one: "Jet
and Els ... lie together upon one Astronomer's Couch,-- as, promptly, do
Austra and Greet, upon the other. (92.6)

best