MDDM Ch. 77

[Terrance]

> 
> 749-50 Mason's surreal dream of "the City" of Standing Stones, and the
> personification of Death, remind me a little of the opening of GR

Yes, and for some reason, could be only that it is a "night-time City"
(749.9) there might be an allusion to Joyce here too. Maybe not. Our
boys seem rather worn out, sick, limping, jaundiced, bile-stained eyes,
the gout and all...could be a night city of T.S. Eliot too...and the
language...all this coal and iron, as in the opening of GR reminds me of
Mumford's dark cities...GR is a bit  Dickensian too I guess... a bit of
Blake's London perhaps...Kafka...and some Agency remote not in Time but
from **caring** at all what happened to the poor fugitives who now
scurried among them, seeking their brute impenetrability for
cover...**invisible** now...without any need for living Witness must be
the Preterit and YOU old fellow...down in the underworld where  Yeats,
from Dickens' Bleak House goes to that mound of refuse or the sweepings
of a street, Old kettles, old bottles, and a broken can, Old iron, old
bones, old rags, that raving slut Who keeps the till. And Now that my
ladder's gone, I must lie down where all the ladders start, In the foul
rag-and-bone shop of the heart...and all that rubbish tip dustbin
history stuff (can't remember what essay, but the rubbish tip of history
or some such is included in one of the critical books on M&D) had
reminded others of Circe, of Night town from James Joyce's Ulysses. From
Dickens to Yeats and Joyce to Pynchon, n ot bad company I guess...the
rag and bone shop of the heart. 

"On a step a gnome totting among a rubbish tip crouches to shoulder a
sack of rags and bones." Circe (Night town) 

And yet, "meeting robbers, ghosts, giants, old men, young men, wives,
widows,
brothers-in-love," and Death whistling down the wind, we meet
ourselves....god remote....but  "doubtless all in all in all of us." And
Pynchon, giving life to these
rags and bones, these voice of dream and wake or something else...making
their way...where god is only paring his fingernails and has got a care
in the world.