GR P1 S1: "The Evacuation still proceeds..."

[jporter]

Make that: "ruinous secret cities of [the] poor"

On Oct 24, 2005, at 11:06 PM, jporter wrote:

> Yes, I think so, but more. There is the double meaning for
> "Evacuation", as there must always be, given the guaranteed
> mortality of any one. All roads lead to heaven. And yes, this
> "visitation" or channeling is definitely during Pirate's off-time-
> the agony of the death camps is precisely what They would
> prefer that Pirate use his abilities to keep busy bureaucrats
> from troubling about. There's a war to run, after all. Unless his
> assignment this time is to experience the horror for some
> functionary who stumbled upon the secret reports of the death
> camps, by this time flooding out of the Zone, so as not to be
> troubled by a guilty conscience for allocating resources towards
> capturing Nazi scientists, rather than attempting to liberate the
> camps straight off.
>
> The poor soul that Pirate is channeling feels guilty. His
> evacuation passes through "ruinous secret cities of the
> poor, places whose 'names he has never heard...' " There
> is a sense that he has lived a different life, that he was one
> of those "VIP faces remembered behind bulletproof windows
> speeding through the city..." or, their chauffeur ("half-silvered
> images in a view finder"). Close, but no cigar?
>
> Guilty and deserving of this fate, nonetheless, is the sense
> I'm picking up, and it tends to universalize this evacuation,
> or personalize it, if you like, w/r/t Pirate's subconscious.
>
> jody
>
>
> On Oct 24, 2005, at 6:14 PM, jbor at bigpond.com wrote:
>
>> ... pp. 3-7, coupla weeks
>>
>> Pirate's dream of the Evacuation which opens the novel is not just 
>> any normal dream, and it's not just about the evacuations from London 
>> which were happening in 1944, though that provides the pretext. 
>> Pirate's "talent" for getting into the thoughts and fantasies of 
>> others means that he has "seen" what's going on in the Nazi death 
>> camps too, and has empathised with the prisoners on the transports. 
>> While he has been able to manage his telepathic skill over the years, 
>> it is in dream, where his conscious mind and psychological defence 
>> mechanisms are in abeyance, that the true horror of the Nazi 'Final 
>> Solution' is dredged up from within his subconscious, manifesting in 
>> imagery and dialogue. Pirate's surreal dreamscape which opens the 
>> novel is triggered by the evacuations which were going on in London 
>> at the time, because these are a reminder to him, or to his 
>> conscience, of the "evacuations" which have been going on in Germany 
>> since the late 1930s.
>>
>> best
>>
>