V2nd, C3

[Ian Livingston]

Picking up where I left off yesterday: as the train leaves the station
we learn the relation between the sun's arc and that of the train's
route to Cairo. The two arcs meet in the temporal dimension at Cairo.
And the spy v. spy story arc also veers into the action, as Waldetar
passes Lepsius in his blue lenses (cartoon German spy, yes?)
conferring with his Arab cohort just as death passes by outside.

This positioning of Eleusis confused me, as I had thought it was a
Greek city near Athens. I wanted to stop there, but my professor, the
renowned Nano Marinatou (still young and very attractive at the time)
said the sites there were degraded and unrevealing. Now I look and
see: http://scriptorium.lib.duke.edu/papyrus/texts/place-names.html
and I find in the course of the search this little addendum to Graves,
if you will: http://www.rosicrucian.org/publications/digest/digest1_2010/table_of_contents.html

The mention of Demeter should be enough to tie life and death
together, here, her daughter, Persephone being married to Hades, and
all. The nature of the Eleusinian mysteries, etc.

Am I alone in seeing these as restatements of the V. motif?

Then we have Lake Mareotis, which smacks of CoL49 and the whole
bone-charcoal business, and also calls to mind somehow Hendrix's "1983
A Merman I Should Turn to Be" from Electric Ladyland.

The mention of evaporating salt also seems curious, like the yellow
rain clouds in section I. Are these or are they not allusions to
alchemy, I wonder? I expect no resolution, just entertaining the
question. Surely they are just what they are.... scenes,
conjurings....

A significant amount of print is given to developing Waldetar's
relationship with Nita. Interesting. The important role of tenderness
and fancy in the subjectivity those who reside in the land as opposed
to the cold objectivity of the intruders from the West. (Of course,
Waldetar, too, is a Westerner, but he has ostensibly positioned
himself to stay here.)

And we're back to B-S and Porpentine entertaining entertaining
Mildred. B-S reveals that he is a cyborg, with a switch on his arm. My
question, Why does Mildred cry "Papa"? Where is Sir Alistair? In the
adjoining compartment with his older daughter and Goodfellow, I
suppose? To Porpentine's complaint, B-S responds, "...someday,
Porpentine, I, or another, will catch you off guard. Loving, hating,
even showing some absent-minded sympathy. I'll watch you. The moment
you forget yourself enough to to admit another's humanity, see him as
a person and not a symbol--then perhaps--"
"What is humanity?"
"You ask the obvious, ha,ha. Humanity is something to destroy."

After the ensuing rumble at the back of the train, we enter Waldetar's
thoughts again as he pieces together what he knows of the scene,
watching Cairo approach between the "twin wastes of the Libyan and
Arabian deserts." He understands that they are, well, English and
German terrorists, and that they have no sympathy, even for children.
His thought of his own children is a thought of the future.

I am left thinking less of Formosa and more of the mid-East in the
middle of the 20th C. as the Jews repopulated Palestine, ousting the
natives again, because they had sided with the bad guys--again.
Instability became the way of things. Death was imminent in every
life. The West had entered the scene and now hoped(?) to use the new
state of Israel to help keep the desert people divided and the price
of oil production low. Playing both sides as war followed war into
war. It recalls me to that state of mind I felt after reading Bury My
Heart at Wounded Knee when I was a footloose teenager, and suddenly
becoming aware that it was one of my forbears who negotiated the deal
with the French that led the American cavalry to the slaughter of
innocents there.... Such shame for my people, for the government that
"represents" me....

-- 
"liber enim librum aperit."