Re: GR translation: some collar of love’s nettles now at him

[Mike Jing]

And also, what is "at engage"?

On Thu, Dec 15, 2011 at 8:10 AM, Mike Jing
<gravitys.rainbow.cn at gmail.com> wrote:
> P36.36-P37.7   He will be scrupulous about never telling her. But
> there are times when it’s agony not to go to her feet, knowing she
> won’t leave Clive, crying you ‘re my last chance . . . if it can’t be
> you then there’s no more time. . . . Doesn’t he wish, against all
> hope, that he could let the poor, Western-man’s timetable go. . . but
> how does a man. . . where does he even begin, at age 33. . . . “But
> that’s just it” she’d have laughed, not so much annoyed (she would
> have laughed) as tickled by the unreality of the problem—herself too
> lost at the manic edge of him, always at engage, so taking, cleaving
> her (for more than when jerking off into an Army flannel in the
> Persian Gulf was some collar of love’s nettles now at him, at his
> cock), too unappeasable for her not to give in to the insanity of, but
> too insane really even to think of as any betrayal of Clive. . . .
>
> (for more than when jerking off into an Army flannel in the Persian
> Gulf was some collar of love’s nettles now at him, at his cock)
>
> I am having trouble parsing this part in the parentheses.  What is
> this all about?