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

[Joseph Tracy]

cleaving her (as opposed to Cliving her )= having sexual intercourse  
> (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),
=( because his sexual appetite was aroused now by the memory ( scent, closeness?)of her genitals with a more itchy and urgent intensity than the memory of the  fuzzy flannel he used to jerk  himself off with in the Persian Gulf)
When you lay out the phrase like this it gets more Pavlovian
The device seems pretty common in Pynchon where sexual fantasy is contrasted with sexual experience and one person's experience is contrasted with the partner's experience
On Dec 15, 2011, at 8:10 AM, Mike Jing 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?