V-2nd - Conclusion - questions

[Michael Bailey]

Stencil's state of mind:
510 - "It must be shock, fine: even Stencil could feel shock.  Ten
million dead....Ten million dead.  Gas. Passchendaele.  Let that be
now a large figure, now a chemical formula, now an historical account.
 But dear lor, not the Nameless Horror, the sudden prodigy sprung on a
world unaware.  We all saw it.  There was no innovation, no special
breach of nature, or suspension of familiar principles.  If it came as
any surprise to the public then their own blindness is the Great
Tragedy, hardly the war itself."  and then...
"En route to Valletta...all the way across a Mediterranean whose
teeming history and full depth he could not feel, nor try, nor afford
to try to feel [because I do not hope...], old Stencil had had it out
with himself.  Mehemet had helped."

so, contrary to the classical spy story, and more along the lines of
Graham Greene, or the most soulful of Le Carre, that spy who came in
from the cold...old Stencil is somewhat hardened but the fact that he
remarks on the fact that he's hardened indicates that he still has
feelings.

Mehemet helps him think.  The term "brown study" comes to mind...

The deeper point I missed last night, let me approach thus:
I was saying, old Mehemet is pointing to the sailor painting the
sinking ship, and likens the sinking ship to the "ship of state",
making him a right-anarchist (a left-anarchist would have a committee
running the boat and - one hopes - there wouldn't be kicking as a
motivational tool...)

but, his statement, "both the world and we, M. Stencil, began to die
from the moment of birth," leads me to believe his statement is
larger.
Something about how an individual effort is limited by the curved
(Riemannian) space of his finite lifetime and changing
circumstances....

anyway, Stencil's watching and sees that human tendencies haven't
changed, that the forces which produced the War to End All Wars still
vector towards war, and although he is not depressed enough by that to
quit his job, he can listen and nod in agreement with many of
Mehemet's points.


Mara...well, hmmm...not sure what to say about her.  This story might
be important, and I find the only thing I want to say is the Sultan is
an abomination, with his harem, his jealousy.
Grandmaster La Vallette is no saint either, "blocking the creek
between Senglea and St. Angelo with an iron chain and poisoning the
springs in the Marsa plain with hemp and arsenic."

The detached head of the Sultan, and the troubadour (the Auberge of
Aragon, Catalonia and Navarre being the - ah what were those guys
called - anyway, SL preface, troubadours, the artistic heretics that
were slaughtered) inspired by love for Mara wrote about the head
(the hymn "O Sacred Head" always has held an inspired sort of
creepiness for me; and once when my niece Amy was little she hid under
the dining room table and I poked my head under the tablecloth to look
away and she yelled, "Go away, Head!" - anyway, the idea of a head
traveling by itself is kind of nifty)


so the idea that there is some kind of tutelary spirit named Mara who
is present in and around Malta -

this notion immediately follows the gloomy ruminations about the
sinking ship (whether ship-of-state or ship-of-life, I wouldn't
venture to say)

yet Mehemet cautions Stencil to "Beware of Mara....Guardian spirit of
Xaghriet Mewwija." -- personally I tend to try to find activities that
she would approve of...and I'm not so sure that Stencil would meet
with her complete disapproval.

Unlike Foppl, he represents a much less objectionable face of
colonialism, doesn't he?

for Mehemet, the Sultan's position is the reasonable ambition of every
man - he doesn't seem to consider that anyone wouldn't pursue that
sort of achievement for any reason other than being incapable of doing
so - does he?

Or is his telling of the tale cognizant of the fact that, although
there is a part of every man that would pursue conquest, seraglio,
supremacy, still there are other powers to consider, such as Mara?

(and in fact, Mara herself is subject to "Whoever or whatever sees to
such things [who] condemned her to haunt the inhhabited plain.")

Is he seeing that Stencil as an agent of imperial power is going to be
perceived by Mara as the same type of interloper as the Sultan or La
Vallette?

Is this warning a foreshadowing of Stencil's eventual fate?