GR translation: coffee mess

[alice wellintown]

I agree with Paul, the coffee mess is in the White Visitation, and
specifically, the place where the Psi Section freaks meet to eat,
drink coffeee, and talk about the job and the workers. In the excerpt
provided the coffee mess is a paranoid flash in the imagination of the
character, Roger, whose paranoid and rambling thoughts, driven by his
exhaustion, his obsessions, his isolation but also his lack of
privacy...while still in the latrine, flash to the office and at the
coffee mess he sees, ironically, after he consciously decides not to
use the mirror to see what the men are up to over his shoulder....then
his mind skips to Controlling-Agency and the paranoid Roger would be
he and he Roger. Roger is losing his mind. Now that's a glance at an
office mess of another kind. All these men, what a mess. The
preposition makes me question this reading, however, because if the
coffeee mess is a place to congrate, talk shop, gossip, and scheme,
one wold glance in or into the mess and not at it. So a pun? An
ambiguity? Deliberate? The passage is, in poetic terms, compressed,
and compression is one of the chief causes of ambiguity, the kind that
I.A. Richards applauds as resourcefullness of language or what Empson
may have called plurisignation(?). Young Tom seems dipped in LSD here
or in James Joyce perhaos.


> P127.2-10   . . . oh yes a most superb possibility has found seedbed
> in his brain, and here it is. What if they are all, all these Psi
> Section freaks here, ganged up on him in secret? O.K.? Yes: suppose
> they can see into your mind! a-and how about—what if it’s hypnotism?
> Eh? Jesus: then a whole number of other occult things such as: astral
> projection, brain control (nothing occult about that), secret curses
> for impotence, boils, madness, yaaahhh—potions! (as he straightens at
> last and back in his mind’s eyes to his office now glances, very
> gingerly, at the coffee mess, oh God . . . ), ...
>
> What is "the coffee mess"?  Specifically, what is the meaning of
> "mess" here?  Does he make coffee in his office using the water boiled
> in the Erlenmeyer flask mentioned earlier?  Does he make a mess of it?
>  Or is it something else?