GR p.4 "with blue shadows to seal its passage"

[Joseph Tracy]

On Sep 7, 2013, at 9:53 PM, Jonathan Post wrote:

> I'm attempting a very close rereading of GR and have already come upon a puzzling knot that has stumped me: in the long sentence at the top of p. 4, I'm not sure how to interpret "...maturing rust, developing through those emptying days brilliant and deep, especially at dawn, with blue shadows to seal its passage, to try to bring events to Absolute Zero ..." 
> 
> --What is "developing"? the various smells or the rust?
> --What does the "its" in "it's passage" refer to? the dawn? the development of the rust? 
> --And so, what are the "blue shadows"?
> 
> -J
> 
one readers reasonably unguided and unguarded interpretation
The sentence is describing, within the dream of Pirate Prentice, the movement of evacuees on a train moving from central London into a hinterland on the edge of the city that is working on a metaphoric level as hell,  death, the underworld. ( "It is a judgement from which there is no appeal".  As a reader I am never sure if these are real live evacuees or ghosts. Perhaps both.  
In that light(dark?)the passengers are not described as being disentangled from but knotted into this place... a place that is moving backward and forward  in time( back toward days of coal and naptha fuels, forward in the growth of rust, ) toward an "absolute zero". The growth has smells associated with the historic past and  is described as" coral-like and mysteriously vital". The place is also increasingly grim and hellish.

My sense is that he is describing death, using the metaphor of entropy, but not implying finality, an end,  He is describing death more as a recycling of life, a knotting into something timeless ,a space between dream and wakefulness. 

In that context, to try to answer your questions with my own reading, the knotting into timelessness and its quality of vital growth are what  is "developing through those emptying days',  and despite the overall image of arriving in hell or purgatory, it is not a final arrival but a place of still waiting,  and the narrative passage culminates  in Light "percolating in which awakens Prentice from his dream.  In my reading it is not just the maturing rust that is developing but this space between life and death  that is more a knotting into than an disentanglement from. The blue shadows are sealing the passage of the train and passengers, the passage of time, the passage of life and perhaps even the passage of death.