Back to AtD: The Tower is Everywhere, p. 903--904

[Mark Kohut]

"It was a tall building, taller than any in London, taller than St. Paul's", etc. .."massively blocking 
the sky"..... 
All villages' spires, towers are almost always the tallest, noticed Eliade (or he got from Frazer 
or someone)... 
But in this one some" 'undiscussed product' goes from the upper levels to hidden cargo docks below" 
....."not exactly a fluid but hydrodynamic in nature"............. 

What are some meanings? The oil that greases the war machine? [But that IS a fluid]....metaphor for  
oil, steel, gunpowder all in one?  

Clearly--yes---an anti-religious Tower? Is it a Tower of Death?...an image of the Crystal Palace?  
Second para on 904 seems to allude to that...... 
And this whole second paragraph sez, fictionally, what Barbara T. seemed to say in The Guns 
of August (in some sense)...it was all known, all able to be seen.....yet War happened..... 
  

One thing I think TRP has been doing in this whole section---itself called Against the Day---is to 
explore some of our--humankind's--darkest attributes and source them as close to 'inherent' as 
he can, or if they are...and explore some ways they might have been 'handled' before the modern 
age....[that Olde Europe stuff]...... 

Couple that with what someone---T(ough) S(hit) Eliot?-- said about every writer needing to come 
to terms with evil, human evil, violence and death, 
and, with the new depth psychology [of Freud, Jung]--about which the hydraulic metaphor re the psyche 
was a strong, early metaphor--- 

could this be an metaphor for mankind's psychic death-wishing impulses?...The 'undiscussed products'? 
What Europe was in the grip of?