Re; All the world's a stage and men but slaves

[Terrance]

http://ww2.netnitco.net/users/legend01/worm.htm

Chorus
Whisht! lads, haad yor gobs, An' aa'll tell ye aall an aaful story,
Whisht! lads, haad yor gobs, An' Aa'll tel ye 'boot the worm.


http://www.artmagick.com/paintings/painting3387.aspx

http://www.artmagick.com/paintings/painting2696.aspx


Just wanted to revisit the worm so that I could get a better read of it
and how it might be or might not be compared with the Dixon/Driver
confrontation. 

Thank you all. 


All the world's a stage and men but slaves fretting and strutting their
hour upon it......

Slavery, a book about 700-odd pages about slavery. 

In the episodes that might have been, we find Dixon and Mason caught in
prisons that only death or invisibility may free them from. Or perhaps
P, as he has in other novels, will set them free. Will relinquish his
mastery over his subjects. 

Their are no statues of Dixon or Mason on the American Museum Of Natural
History. Standing there are Boone, Lewis, Clark, Audobon, Teddy
Roosevelt.  These guys have been by and large invisible and dead. I
guess there is a physics thing going on, the invisible, like stars in a
Chinese astro-system or the duck or the creature devouring the West.  If
it is, as in other novels, ironically anachronistic, perhaps it is some
modern theory.   

As to Dixon and Mason, well, few books tell much about them, more will
be written about these guys now for sure. 


But what they did, took on a life of its own after they did it and it is
no wonder that the people that have divided, and been divided, connected
and disconnected,  been employed, and destroyed, married and divorced, ,
freed & enslaved by what the line came to mean would rather not have
these two resurrected. So, P, like Stencil, with Wicks and his other
tricks, so sensitive to history, resurrects these men with care. he
"develops a nacreous mass of inference, makes use of poetic license,
forcible dislocation of personality into a past he can't remember and
has no right in, save the right of imaginative anxiety or historical
care. 

Not to mention the responsibility of embellishment,  impersonation and
dream. 

Dixon and Mason, in the episodes that may have been, continue to be
caught in the love triangle. Mason loves Dixon and his dead wife.
Dixon's love of whatever maid he may make is frustrated by Mason's
homoerotic gloom. The two can't even agree on how to split the metal
they would receive if the had discovered a new planet. They can't quite
communicate. Who is it that does not want to continue their adventures
and work together on yet another project? And why? They seem to be
imprisoned just as they are when they first meet or even before they
meet  for the first time. They are both men. Both English men. Have much
in common and much not. At times they are like so many odd couples. They
play on the stage, each hitting his lines just as the other has finished
his. At other times, Mason doesn't seem to have any idea how he should
act. Dixon provides a few cues and they act out the scene. Sometimes
they take the part of the other man, Dixon going as Mason and sometimes
other characters take them for the other, the mad Duchy with the rifle
shooting at Dixon,  or take them as charioteers to play--their doubles. 

But they are caught in history, enslaved to it. 

Dixon's tale of the worm is an oral tale. It is his version of an old
fable. 
The tale is a fable and so is M&D. It is P's version and just as Dixon
freed Christ in his fable, P has freed Dixon and Mason with his.