MDDM: Town and Country

[Terrance]

After a bunch of smaller loops, we have come full circle. We are back in
Philadelphia. 

Has it been Christmas? Why this Silent Day? Oh, the
workers have put down their saws and hammers. A political discussion. 

The smaller loops or circles (note that in M-D, Ishmael constructs
circles of Lines, even the Ship Lines)  and the larger , cock fight
rings, boxing rings,
bull's eyes, annular adventures at sea, cheese wheels, tops, heads,
wigs, hoops, histories, planets, musicians in their graves, letters,
language circuitous, legal circle jerks, conspiracy gyrations, an
infinite bureaucratic (employing a name from Dickens) Circumlocution
Office....etc. & Co....Seem to serve two functions in this novel, just
as they did in previous P novels.  The cock rings, boxing rings, the
battle at sea, the cheese,
the verbal contests, the bull's eye, like the contests of song (Wagner)
or the marriage contests, etc. in GR, all serve to relieve the
participants,
through a social catharsis, a way of dealing with discord, stress, fear,
death, by a ritual and thus a respite  from the greater circles of
conspiracy,
the circles of Hell constructed upon paradise Fallen, the circles that
are not quite circles at all, but the shortest (or none or no
distinction)  distance between life and death. 

The novel opens at Christsmastide 1786, the War
has been settled, but the nation is busy Bickering itself into
fragments, the Snow (later Dixon will ride with Mr. Snow down river into
an American dreamscape and hear the riot of American Bells-compare with
the music of the spheres, also bells at the cape) ) and the fog
on the City give it the appearance of an Island encircled upon an Ocean,
and all is quiet, the busy sounds of labor--hammers and saws have fallen
still,
bricks lie in snow covered heaps, and the birds hop about busy, the
activities of humanity all inside and sheltered, warm and cozy, but
now, as the line is about to be drawn, what has silenced the city? Is a
nation bickering after a revolution or a slaughter or an election  or
what? For the first
time Dixon and Mason hear the sounds of the birds again, the busy noises
of labor are silenced. But soon, as they move down the line, they will
among the disputes hat include  wives upon husbands, hammers upon nails,
the voices of ghosts attenuated by the conspiring of Destiny Manifesting
the West.      

At the end of Latitudes and Departures (bottom of page 252-253
  bottom), Mason, and Dixon are once again, engaged in a contentious
  discussion of Matters Religious. 

As we turn the page to America, it is the Sounds and the Silence, in
their respective congregations, which end their bitter disputation.

In the beginning of part II, "From the shore they will hear Milkmaids
  quarreling






http://xroads.virginia.edu/~CAP/WW/home.html

Kasson, John F.. Civilizing the Machine: Technology and Republican
        Values in America, 1776-1900. New York: Penguin Books, 1976. 
Marx, Leo. The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral
        Ideal. New York: Oxford UP, 1964. 

http://ucsub.colorado.edu/~honors/machine.html

The cities of London and Philadelphia in M&D  remind me that we are only
a few short years from the  terrible and Beautiful Vision of the
Romantic Blake and from Blake's urban landscapes in the Prophetic
Books--Milton, Jeruselam, AMerica--
where we are assaulted by an utterly appalling tableau of holocaust and
cacophony. As we come into port here in America, we have the same fiery,
smoky, high decibel assault compounded of howling, shrieking, wailing,
the sounds of wild animals and screaming machines, and the sounds of
slaughter and  industrial processes.