MDDM Ch. 30 Dolly

[Terrance]

Paul Mackin wrote:
> 
> Well, Wicks is telling the story WITH CHILDREN PRESENT. Maybe it's like American
> movies in the period before, say, the mid 60s when because of the Hayes Office
> sex could only be implied, kept off stage as you say, or not even that--our being
> asked to believe, for example, that Montgomery Cliff and Frank Sinatra would be
> willing to spend their hard earned soldier's pay in "From Here to Eternity" to
> DANCE with that nice Donna Reed and the other girls. But to answer your question
> I defintely got the impression Dixon was having sex whenever possible. 

Right, I thought about that, but I'm not sure this explanation is
supportable. 

America has not always tolerated violence and not sex, but I get the
point. 



Anyway, Wicks does tell the Twins and all the others the violent tale
aboard the Seahorse and there is quite a bit of sexual suggestiveness
(it being a P novel after alll, sex and violence, sex and death, sex as
pornography, sex as masturbation, sex as slavery, sex with young boys )
in those chapters. I guess we can assume that all this suggested sex
simply flies right over the heads of our twin boys, but they seem, from
the start, rather precocious youngsters. They do, after all, request a
tale with French woman in it. Anyway, if Wicks is trying to tell tales
that exclude sex, he not doing it. We could say that he is deliberately
keeping Dixon's sex life off stage but that's another matter I think. At
the Cape, we have young ladies who are sexually aggressive, the sit on
Mason's lap,  we have Mason walking around with a hard-on, we have a
naked slave girl pimped by the  white woman of the house, the mother
also comes on to Charles. 
Charles is not interested, at least his mind is not. He seems (and we
should remember that these are young guys, about my age in fact), to
have castrated himself but only in the mind--again the parallels with
Ahab--an unconscious duality. 

There are lots of doubles. The Twins--P&P, but our boys D&M have lives
of their own. What a condition, to be double. A secret sharer and a
mirror (Conrad)  What is the problem with this kind of duality? I think
Hanky and
Panky were interchangeable in V. Philosophically speaking,  are we
talking earth and sky? Or would that be theological? Well, we are
getting Indians and the boy book ends are off to bed. Psychology, it is
as
if Mason has separated, to a certain extent, his mind and body. Will he
ever get a living person in bed with him long enough to shut up and 
fuck? Oh dear, I wrote fuck. Remember back when we discussed Mason's 
belief about the two  antagonistic forces at play in the world? What HIM
(God or Devil)? Mason also believes the separation of the physical and
the spiritual.

We have several mentions of a wedding, but the wedding involved two
grooms--Dixon and Mason. How will our twins, who obviously identify with
Dixon and Mason, react if the ampersand begins to vanish? 

I suspect there are other reasons we have not seen our boys having sex.