GR translation: with blue shadows to seal its passage

[Michael Bailey]

oh, nicely done!  I have all kinds of pulsations of grammatical
inquiry with that passage and this lines up several faces of the
Rubik's Cube.

using that as a lever, how about the different smells being the
subject of "developing" -- ie the different smells are what is
developing (now, I am not going to connect that up to the conspiracy
reading, which I only posted as a personal penance - not going to say
something like the Hamlet smelling of a rat or the stench of mendacity
emanating from something one of my sister's instructors in a property
insurance training course memorably called "unsurpled political power"
- no, I am going to take the high road...)



On Wed, Dec 7, 2011 at 10:28 PM, Mark Kohut <markekohut at yahoo.com> wrote:
> 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
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> 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