BEg2 chapter 10 a reconvergence of what the day scattered

[Thomas Eckhardt]

Am 22.12.2021 um 08:18 schrieb Michael Bailey:

“What might only be a simple point on the workday cycle, a reconvergence
of what the day scattered as Sappho said someplace back in some college
course, Maxine forgets,

“becomes

“a million pedestrian dramas, each one charged with mystery, more
intense than high-barometer daylight can ever allow. Everything changes.”

Something about lower barometric pressure changing everyone’s mood and
appearance?


The important change is in the quality of light, I believe. What is
suggested here is a mild collective epiphany. Compare:

"One mild and ordinary work-morning in Chicago, Lew happened to find
himself on a public conveyance, head and eyes inclined nowhere in
particular, when he entered, all too briefly, a condition he had no
memory of having sought, which he later came to think of as grace.

(…)

Lew found himself surrounded by a luminosity new to him, not even
observed in dreams, nor easily attributable to the smoke-inflected sun
beginning to light Chicago.

He understood that things were exactly what they were. It seemed more
than he could bear." (AtD, 42)

I have argued before that understanding that things are exactly what
they are (Aquinas' and Joyce's "quidditas" or quiddity) means that one
is having an epiphany. In the case of characters like Lew Basnight or
Pirate Prentice this state of mind is linked to a supernatural gift
which can be instrumentalized by the powers that be -  as is certainly
the case with Lew's affinity to the invisible which gets him a job at a
detective agency that does "Pinkerton work".

In BE, the change in everything affects everyone, not only Maxine, and
it is really only the shadow of a true epiphany. Still, the imagery
connects the two scenes.

I note as well that Maxine has received an important message from a
perhaps "otherworldly messenger". There are definitely intimations of
the invisible here.


As for the political/parapolitical background, I note that John Perkins'
"Confessions of an Economic Hit Man" provides the background to some of
Windust's activities as a "neoliberal terrorist", that Windust's
expertise in "interrogation enhancement" and "noncompliant
subject-relocation" foreshadows "enhanced interrogation" and
"extraordinary rendition", the euphemisms that would soon be used by the
Bush administration, and that all this emphasises what I believe to be a
central and ever more chillingly present idea in BE: The continuation of
the Cold War under different circumstances.

For torture in Latin and South America, besides the School of the
Americas (now the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security
Cooperation), see also Dan Mitrione and Michael Townley. On the latter,
read Roberto Bolanos (with a tilde) "By Night in Chile". For background
to Bolanos novel, this seems to be solid:

https://www.mcclatchydc.com/news/nation-world/world/article24494053.html

(Interestingly, but definitely NP, Dan Mitrione was a friend of Jim Jones.)

I also liked: "How right-wing, Maxine wonders, does a person have to be
to think of the 'New York Times' as a left-wing newspaper?"

This critique of the "Newspaper of Record" will come up again
immediately after the attacks of September 11.