GR translation: gathering in their minutes whining

[Michael Bailey]

Mike Jing wrote:
------------------------------

V133.34-40, P136.7-12   In the night, the deepest concrete wells of
night, whose locations are classified spin faster, and so, responding,
the
clock-hands next to all the old, sleepless eyes—gathering in their minutes
whining, pitching higher toward the vertigo of a siren. It is the Night’s
Mad Carnival. There is merriment under the shadows of the minute-hands.
Hysteria in the pale faces between the numerals.

What is "minutes whining" exactly?



- “ dynamos… spin faster, and so, responding, the clock hands [also
spin faster - a classy elision of the implied verb repetition] next to
the old sleepless eyes - gathering in their minutes whining, pitching
higher toward the vertigo of a siren.”

* verb elision here, classy move imho


Big personification here - amid a very generous “Christmas” rhizome -
about time speeding up!

The basis: grafting a wartime phenomenon of electric clocks speeding
up onto the age-old expectancy of Christmas…

Looking forward to something nice for a change, the “old faces” (of
people prematurely aged by war’s rigors) look at the clock faces and -
poetic license - see time actually speeding up a bit towards
Christmas.

Poetically, (if we’re granting the poetic license, and by gosh, let’s
do so) the minute hands go faster and faster until they begin to whine
from air resistance.

(Cp another “speeding up” trope much later in the book, “Remember The
Password In The Zone This Week Is FASTER—THAN, THE-SPEEDOFLIGHT
Speeding Up Your Voice Exponentially—Linear Exceptions Made Only In
Case of Upper Respiratory Complaints…” (pg 853 in the Nook edition)

 - the device in this early “wartime Christmas” section is elaborate,
but the later, “meditations on the Rocket State aroused by a
daguerreotype” passage is also quite wow!

- one of the ideas this passage arouses is how war speeds everything
up way past the comfort zone (hence “whining”) -

And whining also alludes to the sounds of bullets, and planes in a
nose dive, and dogs subjected to cruel experiments…


But anyhoo, I think it’s the clock hands that are whining as they
gather in their minutes -


You could play with that and speculate that the minutes themselves are
also whining, as the clock hands gather them in -

Which does accord with the liberal use of personification in the
passage. Paving the way for Byron the Bulb?