The Read: Taking another chance

[Michael Bailey]

well, let's see:
I'm more story- and trivia-oriented...
but that does seem like a righteous pointer on the theme, eh


chance in AtD surfaces most in the Reef-Yashmeen sections,
his gambling is an attempt to ride the waves of chance, thru sharp
observation, and most probably cheating

Yashmeen arrives at a certain control over chance thru advanced math
(as does the mathematician that Kit meets up with after his ocean trip)
her control is genuine
(oddly enough she'd probably be noticed quicker and barred from a casino)
(also, doesn't it in some way seem like a demeaning of her talent?)



here in TR, chance dictates that the counterfeiter faking being a
surgeon is confronted with the non-fake appendicitis of Camilla
== so here his counterfeiting is actually too good, and its failure
would've saved him and Camilla...

but he counterfeits an epileptic fit, and here his counterfeiting
lapses in the presence of the Captain -- so his counterfeiting isn't
good enough to save him

there's something in the notion of perhaps seeking to control chance
-- and how there's not much chance of that...

the other thing that he does to try to affect chance is to cross
himself as many times as possible, all over his body ---

this is not a counterfeit plea to the divine, but it doesn't prove to
be an efficacious prayer...

the suggestion being that those other prayers on All Saints Eve,
"...the mass supplications for souls in Purgatory ... rising from the
lands now equidistant before and behind [America and Eur-Africa]..."
(p5) --- those other prayers, with more proper intentions and not girt
about with fraud may be efficacious...

while "Sinisterra" prays in vain and "manage[s] to put an end to
Camilla's suffering and to her life."


so there's a confluence of fakery and genuineness, efficaciousness and
non-efficaciousness, and it's all in an effort to surmount the
machinations of chance and replace them with the ends of desire...

what should we then do?  if "there is a road, no simple highway,
between the dawn and the dark of night" (as the Grateful Dead sing in
"Ripple") - how do we recognize it?