MDDM Ch 75 A screaming comes...(was mutton)

[Bandwraith at aol.com]

and *blelatedly"

Happy Passover. For neither the year nor anything 
else is new. But Sheepfuckers beware. And by all and 
any means, chums, come quickly. The next one may
be just for you.

The last time a p-narrator took us below decks to nasally
ecounter the dead, Slothrop required a little motivational
support from a disembodied martial artist to make it down
the echelons, to the engine room. In his youth he may have
frolicked with his pals in the basements of decaying western
Berkshire mansions, but that was then. And while Mason 
needs no such encouragement to find his adult sheep, neither 
was Bianca quite the spring lamb she made herself out to be.

Dead, none-the-less, and just as redolent. 

I would submit that from a metaphysical pov, both scenes
in both novels are all about intentionality and it's relationship
to the laws of nature, i.e., to those boundary conditions which
both supervene and interdict the living and the inanimate, 
without special regard for either condition. I think it is better
done in M&D, but that's just my preference. I find the
disembodied voice that encourages Slothrop to be a weaker
trope than Mason's carefully built up character traits, which
lead him to the sheep locker. The revelation of Mason's thoughts
in re-telling to Dixon- it may all be just a tale, after all, told
by a melancholic to his mate- is a much more effective
and mature construction, imo, as opposed to the rather hokey 
disembodied voice, which could be anyone- a character, the author, 
even god, in combination with a narrator enjoying a privileged pov, 
all for our readerly benefit.

The frictionless sheep locker demonstrates Newton's (second?)
law of motion: a body at rest or in motion tends to stay that way,
unless acted upon by some outside force- also known as the law of
inertia. In this scene, the sheep are at rest, the ship is in motion
and Mason- being a body capable of intentionality- is both at rest
and in motion, depending on the sum of the circumstances, and, his 
own vector of desire, at any given moment.

More later.

regards