GR translation: with blue shadows to seal its passage

[Mark Kohut]

In Which coal tar (mostly) and all that is naptha
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naphtha
 
are compared to coral...{life}.......
 
the whole anti-life growth is developing....it is winter and
the days are getting shorter...i.e. emptying
 
and it is the stuff---like benzene and oxidation by rust
 [remember the 'blue' pigmentation from wet dogs earlier?] 
that is developing brilliant and blue.......
 
If the horrid gunk could seal off the passageway, then it would
get cold.....a cold tending toward entropic death...Absolute Zero
Absolute zero - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

From: Paul Mackin <mackin.paul at verizon.net>
To: Mike Jing <gravitys.rainbow.cn at gmail.com>; pynchon-l at waste.org 
Sent: Wednesday, December 7, 2011 5:19 PM
Subject: Re: GR translation: with blue shadows to seal its passage

On 12/7/2011 2:18 AM, Mike Jing wrote:
> I am going over Part 1 again from the beginning, making changes.  So
> here are questions I was afraid to ask earlier.
>
> P4.1-10  —they go in under archways, secret entrances of rotted
> concrete that only looked like loops of an underpass . . . certain
> trestles of blackened wood have moved slowly by overhead, and the
> smells begun of coal from days far to the past, smells of naphtha
> winters, of Sundays when no traffic came through, of the coral-like
> and mysteriously vital growth, around the blind curves
> and out the lonely spurs, a sour smell of rolling-stock absence, of
> maturing rust, developing through those emptying days brilliant and
> deep, especially at dawn, with blue shadows to seal its passage, to
> try to bring events to Absolute Zero . . .
>
> What is this "coral-like and mysteriously vital growth"?
>
> What is "developing through those emptying days brilliant and deep"?
> Is it the rust?  Why are the days "emptying", and yet "brilliant and
> deep"?
>
> "with blue shadows to seal its passage"  Whose passage?  And what is
> trying to "bring events to Absolute Zero"?
>
I get the impression the infrastructure used to transport the poor 
preterite souls about the city is  long abandoned, on its last legs, in 
a state of final decay, as near to death (0 absolute) as the poor souls 
themselves, trotted out from disuse for this special wartime purpose.

The vital growth is parasitic, what you find on the hull of a ship long 
in the water.

Emptying days are passing days.

"It" is the process of decay, abandonment, being passed over, damnation.

An addition to Michael's contribution.

P








Absolute zero is the theoretical temperature at which entropy reaches its minimum value. The laws of thermodynamics state that absolute zero cannot be reached using ...
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Absolute_zero - Cached