"You Can't Run a War on Gusts of Emotion."

[Smoke Teff]

Yeah no idea if the line is a reference I'm missing, but I hear the
sizzling flesh thing.

I read the line in light of the narration: "staring directly at no one but
Pirate now, no more pretense."

The "derelict" who talks to Pirate is "the one you are afraid of ever
meeting."

When we encounter people who seem somehow marginal to the world we occupy,
and when we are sort of at least subconsciously onto the fact that our own
world is constructed, artificial, meaningless, but when we have maybe done
a little work to bury that awareness--those marginal people sometimes seem
to see through our defense mechanisms, our repressions, the facades of
meaning and understanding we've constructed.

I think of the great scene in *Revolutionary Road *(movie or book, I think)
as an example, the one where the couple meets the realtor's son, who has
been in a psychiatric hospital. I remember the husband, trying to make
conversation but also on an updraft of good-feeling in his marriage, says
something off-hand about their world being hopeless and empty. The son sees
through the cool cynicism and kind of one-ups the husband. Google has the
movie line as: "Plenty of people are onto the emptiness, but it takes real
guts to see the hopelessness."

It definitely seems to be a moment like that, where the tramp sees through
to Pirate's soul, to his subconscious, including all its darkest corners.
It's prophetic.

And, in my experience, the sinister ambiguity of that line--*your sound
will be the sizzling night*--yeah, it really, really does seem to be one
irreducibly true way of capturing the feeling of utter despair, which
usually does come in the middle of the night, and does seem to involve the
body, its wants (the bum is speaking in response to Pirate looking at the
young girls). In those moments it feels like what's sizzling is both the
night and you, which sounds like unity, except you're not capable of seeing
it.

Pirate has a lot of problems with unity.

On Thu, Mar 24, 2016 at 1:53 PM, Smoke Teff <smoketeff at gmail.com> wrote:

> Lot of nights in *BtZ *that could be described as sizzling. Fires in
> night skies. Slothrop's Hotel Fire (29).
>
> pp. 41-42: "They have drawn near a glow over the rooftops[...] Heat beats
> at their faces, eye-searing yellow when the streams shoot into the fire. A
> ladder hooked to the edge of the roof sways in the violent drafts. Up top,
> against the sky, figures in slickers brace, wave arms, move together to
> pass orders[...] Once Roger and Jessica might have stopped. But they're
> both alumni of the Battle of Britain, both have been drafted into the early
> black mornings and the crying for mercy, the dumb inertia of cobbles and
> beams, the profound shortage of mercy in those days...."
>
> The sensitive flame at Snoxall's, which is on my mind when I hear about
> Gusts of Emotion.
>
> On Thu, Mar 24, 2016 at 9:41 AM, ish mailian <ishmailian at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> Could be referencing burning flesh, I guess, but since sizzling night
>> is what the tramp says, not sizzling meat or flesh, metaphorically he
>> seems to be describing a sound, a sound that is Yours drear reader and
>> Pirate's and whomever the pederastic fantasy actually belongs to,
>> and given the naughty sexual context, and mention of the Genital Brain
>> above it, I read it as a very very hot night with sizzling orgasmic
>> sound. Unless of course the film is silent and it's all theatre.
>>
>> There are any number of characters who might dream of little girls
>> bent over a fountain.
>>
>> Aqualung isn't one of them.
>> -
>> Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l
>>
>
>
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