M&D Ch 20

[Joseph Tracy]

I was going to add some thoughts about Mason’s emotional distance from his children, one thought being how common this must have been in a seafaring culture with foreign wars. Another how this may be one of the inherent shadows  of empire. But the core thread of my thought is broken. Curious what others think about how P draws attention to this. 

My reaction to the emotional tone is similar to Smoke’s.
> On Jan 31, 2018, at 5:22 PM, Smoke Teff <smoketeff at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> A really complicated emotional chapter. Mason's inability to engage
> with the love of his own children--one instinctively leaning away from
> him, the other, in his innocence, somehow holding onto his memory of
> his father the more.
> 
> The unattractive love on offer from the spinster-to-hopefully-not-be Miss Quall.
> 
> The difficult, occasionally brutal love of his own father.
> 
> The insult to Mason's love for his chosen father (plus the uncertain
> implications of Mason's and Bradley's final dealings/correspondence)
> 
> Mason is one experience wiser as to the forces of enslavement in the
> world. And now resistent to the idea of his children's future being
> sold to his father on seven-year contracts. (The notion that destiny
> is slavery, and Mason's special sensitivity to his children's
> futureness; like in the chapter's first sentence: "[...]Doc has come
> running, as he has done each time, at the sound of the Horse, his own
> Motion far ahead of his earthly feet")
> 
> On Wed, Jan 31, 2018 at 4:15 PM, Smoke Teff <smoketeff at gmail.com> wrote:
>> Maybe Mason yearning for what he left behind below the equator, even
>> amid the winds...
>> 
>> “across the Lines and the Parade, all being reduced to Geometry and
>> optical Illusion” (106)
>> 
>> Deliverance from the flesh, from also the burden of a consciousness
>> turned to face itself.
>> 
>> On Wed, Jan 31, 2018 at 2:32 PM, Joseph Tracy <brook7 at sover.net> wrote:
>>> Ch 20
>>> Mason has come home to find Bradley’s family doesn’t want him around as  the family processes Bradley’s death, despite their close friendship. He tells his own  family he is being considered for work in America. Most oppose the idea. M’s father has plans to put Mason’s 2 sons to work milling or baking.
>>>  The memory of bread making with his father and Mason’s divergent interest in the stars is moving and an odd mix of  the senior’s domineering emotional blackmail and fatherly love,   all mediated by a contemplation on bread-making which touches on science, the cycle of life and death, class, christianity, and the likeness of bread/dough to flesh, all of which which enters Mason’s dreams.
>>>   There is  a passage about the holes  in bread and the spaces inside the spaces, leading to the conclusion that the whole is mostly space. But bread, like his family is full of human drama, farmed in soil light and air , cut down with steel sickles, ground to powder, wetted and oiled and yeasted, moist, hot, sticky, crusty, chewy and finally excremental. Mason seems to long for spaces and boundaries more geometric, less entangled with flesh,  points luminous and measurable in their relationships. -
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