ATDDTA (6) 166-170 b

[mikebailey at speakeasy.net]

bekah wrote

> 
> *******************
> 168.8 "In Africa he had known saintly lieutenants who were fated to 
> die young, fugitives from all across the wreck of the Eastern 
> Question, traders in flesh and firearms indifferent to the nature of 
> the goods they handled, who would emerge from the green other world 
> after months, their cargo vanished not only from possession but from 
> memory as well

boy does that describe some adventures one might have had...
not wishing to specify...but,
"cargo vanished not only from possession but from memory as well"
stumbling red-eyed morning after; hitchhiking fruitlessly under an
overpass in the cold rain; the moment the brown acid hits and you
hear the loudspeaker "don't take the brown acid"...

>> 
> *******************
> 168:14 "Fleetwood wanted to be like them...He prayed to become one 
> of them. [...] Nothing 'took.'"

when I got vaccinated as a kid, the phrase for a successful
vaccination was "it took" - ie, you get a little circle on your arm if
it "took"

> 
> 168:23 -> "There is a story that he had shot a coolie, but the 
> other story was that it was a Kaffir he had caught stealing a 
> diamond, and that he had given the Kaffir a choice,to be shot or to 
> step into a mine shaft half a mile deep. 

in Vineland, it is the unionists who throw company spies into
mine shafts deep as hell itself

> *******************
> 
> 170: 1 Fleetwood gives the Kaffir a choice and the Kaffir chose 
> to fall into the pit "a relatively humane long descent into the 
> abyss through the blue ground, the side-tunnels whistling by faster 
> and faster - rather pleasant. Fleetwood imagined for as one fell, it 
> would grow warmer, wouldn't it - perhaps even...
> 
> ** "... like being taken back into a dark womb."
>

the part that I liked is (169): "Fleetwood understood too late tht he could have made the Kaffir do anything but somehow had come up with nothing better than this" - same kind of situation as Blicero faces, he's got unlimited
power and all he can think of to do is re-enact fairy tales 

> 
> But in fact, as Fleetwood was informed in these lucid dreams close to 
> dawn, all the gold in the Transvaal could not buy the remission of a 
> single minute of whatever waited for him. He laughed angrily. 
> "Purgatory? A higher law? Kaffir next of kin chasing me across the 
> world? Be serious."
> 
> Alden Vormance was going north to get a meteorite.
> 
> 
> I think that Fleetwood stayed in the house and died.


then the Vormance expedition could be like a Tibetan book of the
Dead type of thing...all those Bardos (including, if we believe
Robert Anton Wilson, the Brigitte Bardo...)