stockyards / vomitoria

[mikebailey]

Mark Kohut mentioned:

>Yes, despite learning that glass has no odor from the list, that linking of
>'the vomitoria beneath them" to the stockyards is right on, IMHO.

I had some responses to the passages in Venice, which is one of my
favorite parts, on first reading anyway...(partial list of high points
so far: the messageiferous pearls, the Midwestern girls,
Cyprian's cloistering, just about everything in Venice,
every passage with Merle, Dally in New York -
lots more)

first that I have no direct experience of molten glass,
but that reading about its odor (which only Miles, I think,
could perceive) I was imagining one - it's pretty sure that
there would be some silicon molecules shaken loose by the
heat, (plus the odor of whatever was burning to create it, and
whatever impurities were in the sand, though these wouldn't
be what was indicated, most likely) but they wouldn't
affect most noses, I'm guessing
(probably not my fleshly one, but my imaginative one, sure)

2nd - speaking of the vomitoria, as exits from the gathering
places where all roads have led to, suggests a furtherance of
the Chicago metaphor: in old Europe, the destinations are
temporary and do have exits for the gathered people (ite, Missa est)
(unlike the stockyards in Chicago, and by extension, perhaps the
Fair itself, where the World's dreams of itself were gathered
in never to emerge in the same form)

Third, maybe my favorite bit in Venice is the glassmakers, who
in their confinement experienced greater freedom...
this is an old favorite theme of mine from any number of high
school essays: freedom in confinemnt - freedom to express one's
soul, or talent, through the bondage to a task, a job, a love...
in physical terms, "degrees of freedom" indicates spatial dimensions
or directions in which motion is possible - yet, something like
a ball bearing is able to function best when it has next to
NO degrees of freedom - the "freedom" to wobble or take off in
different directions isn't, maybe, what the soul always needs the most...