GR translation: fashioned of brown twilight

[Joe Allonby]

I like this image. Think of barn swallows or chimney swifts coming out at
dusk to feed on flying insects. Rapid, darting flight with quick,
unpredictable direction changes. In the dying light, they seem to be part
of the air itself. They are hard to follow with the eyes.

The souls in question, I believe, are like barn swallows. In the tumult of
the Zone, they are as displaced as the living and may not even know their
own status. They dart about haphazardly as they rise.


On Sun, Jun 4, 2017 at 6:51 AM, Mike Jing <gravitys.rainbow.cn at gmail.com>
wrote:

> V303.24-41, P308.11-29   . . . it was always easy, in open and lonely
> places, to be visited by Panic wilderness fear, but these are the
> urban fantods here, that come to get you when you are lost or isolate
> inside the way time is passing, when there is no more History, no
> time-traveling capsule to find your way back to, only the lateness and
> the absence that fill a great railway shed after the capital has been
> evacuated, and the goat-god’s city cousins wait for you at the edges
> of the light, playing the tunes they always played, but more audible
> now, because everything else has gone away or fallen silent . . .
> barn-swallow souls, fashioned of brown twilight, rise toward the white
> ceilings . . . they are unique to the Zone, they answer to the new
> Uncertainty. Ghosts used to be either likenesses of the dead or
> wraiths of the living. But here in the Zone categories have been
> blurred badly. The status of the name you miss, love, and search for
> now has grown ambiguous and remote, but this is even more than the
> bureaucracy of mass absence—some still live, some have died, but many,
> many have forgotten which they are. Their likenesses will not serve.
> Down here are only wrappings left in the light, in the dark: images of
> the Uncertainty. . . .
>
> What does "fashioned of" mean here? And are these souls of
> barn-swallows, or just barn-swallow-like?
> -
> Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?listpynchon-l
>
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