MDDM Chapter 44 Notes & Musings

[Terrance]

jbor wrote:
> 
> John wrote:
> >
> > Well, we’re 440 pages into 773 page book, and the party is only just now
> > setting out on the Line.
> 
> I agree that the chapter is consciously marking the/a beginning of "the
> story": a birth, or rebirth, figured in that "haze of green Resurrection" at
> the top of p. 441 too. 


A Birth? Who is giving birth to whom?  A rebirth? Does that mean there
was a death? 
Spring is in the air. 

Whenever the surveyors separate, they run into thickets, bogs, bad
Dreams,-- united, they pursue a ride through the air, they are linked to
the stars, to that inhuman precision, and are deferr'd to because of it,
tho' also fear'd and resented...

So, maybe they should stick together. It seems that when Mason and Dixon
split up the tale does too. 



So is the RC telling the tale here? I mean, call it a deliberate
postmodernist disruption or whatever, but P has nearly broken the reader
contract. He has torn his tale from the history of New York and stuffed
it under a gothic girls black dress,  forged a fouled copy of Mason's
journal, mixed dreams with desires and memories and melted time across
the arms  of the resurrected clock in shades of magenta.  What might
have been said off stage and might even be scribbled in the margins of
the missing folio if only we can locate it is only half of what might
possibly have been if it was even talked about. 

 The line is, at long last, a line in this play. Not much more than a
line (actually there is more than one line for the line or lines and
Dixon and Mason receive some news about the possibility of one of these
lines being inserted into the play). 

"The Role of the Audience in Shakespeare's Richard II," Shakespeare
Quarterly (Autumn,
     l985),262-81 (lead article).  Phyllis Rackin 


Now we are supposed to just forget about what all happened to the book
in the last couple-few chapters. Is that it? It was all a bad dream,
shared and mixed with pages torn from histories and ghastly gothics and
romance and Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are all right Ma, they're only
bleeding and arguing again? 




"The labour of rising from the ground, said the artist, will be great,
as we see it in the heavier domestick fowls; but, as we mount higher,
the earth's attraction, and the body's gravity, will be gradually
diminished, till we shall arrive at a region where the man will float in
the air without any tendency to fall: no care will then be necessary,
but to move forwards, which the gentlest impulse will effect. You, Sir,
whose curiosity is so extensive, will easily conceive with what pleasure
a philosopher, furnished with wings, and hovering in the sky, would see
the earth, and all it's inhabitants, rolling beneath him, and presenting
to him successively, by it's diurnal motion, all the countries within
the same parallel. How must it amuse the pendent spectator to see the
moving scene of land and ocean, cities and desarts! To survey with equal
security the marts of trade, and the fields of battle; mountains
infested by barbarians, and fruitful regions gladdened by plenty, and
lulled by peace! How easily shall we then trace the Nile through all his
passage; pass over to distant regions, and examine the face of nature
from one extremity of the earth to the other!"

"If men were all virtuous, returned the artist, I should with great
alacrity teach them all to fly. But what would be the security of the
good, if the bad could at pleasure invade them from the sky? Against an
army sailing through the cloud neither walls, nor mountains, nor seas,
could afford any security. A flight of northern savages might hover in
the wind, and light at once with irresistible violence upon the capital
of a fruitful region that was rolling under them. Even this valley, the
retreat of princes, the abode of happiness, might be violated by the
sudden descent of some of the naked nations that swarm on the coast of
the southern sea."

O Sugarman done fly
O Sugarman done gone...
Mr. Smith had seen the rose petals, heard the music, and leaped on into
the air. 

Mr. Smith's blue silk wings must have left their mark, because when the
little boy discovered, at four, the same thing  Mr. Smith had learned
earlier--that only bird and airplanes could fly--he lost all interest in
himself. To have to live without that single gift saddened him and left
his imagination so bereft that he appeared dull....

Blackbird winging in Winston Churchill Square
Take these drunken lies and pee
All your cries
They be only waiting for this moment to be free