SLPAD - 111 - "Low-Lands" - 23

[Michael Bailey]

"Special illumination or a mood conducive to metaphor" - outer light or
inner light


...curious illusion that the ocean, despite its movement, has a certain
solidity; it becomes a gray or glaucous desert, a waste land which
stretches away to the horizon, and all you would have to do would be to
step over the lifelines to walk away over its surface; if you carried a
tent and enough provisions you could journey from city to city that way.

Desert, waste land (Eliot, CoL49)
Gray, or (much more evocatively) glaucous

- glaucous is gray-green or also covered with a powdery coating like grapes

https://www.theawl.com/2017/12/glaucous-the-greeny-blue-of-epic-poetry-and-succulents/

"In the Hellenistic period, glaukos became a little more defined, as the
Greek language evolved to include more color terms (including prasinos,
which was used from the third to second centuries BCE to describe “all the
pronounced shades of green, especially the dark greens,” writes
Pastoureau). As Greek slowly morphed into Latin, glaukos became glaucous,
and as the spelling changed, the meaning narrowed. Glaucous came to
describe a blue-ish gray-ish green-ish hue, murky and light enough to feel
like a neutral tone. In the fifteenth century, the word glauk entered the
Middle English vocabulary, meaning blue-gray.
As the centuries wore on, glaucous fell out of use, only to be revived by
the Romantics, who loved all things Hellenistic. In “Prometheus Unbound,”
Percy Bysshe Shelley writes of the “glaucous caverns of old Ocean / Within
dim bowers of green and purple moss” where Ione and Panthea embrace with
“soft and milky arms” and “dark, moist hair.” (It’s kind of a damp and sexy
moment.) Years later, Sylvia Plath would employ the anachronistic term in
“Whitsun” to describe the “weed-mustachioed sea” and its “glaucous silks, /
Bowing and tucking like an old-school oriental.” Leaving aside the casual
racism, Plath uses the word like Shelley did before her—to evoke a surface
quality of glimmering motion, green and salty and somehow alive."



"step over the lifelines" - https://www.dictionary.com/browse/lifeline

noun

   1.

   a line thrown or fired aboard a vessel for hauling in a hawser for a
   breeches buoy
   2.

   any rope or line attached to a vessel or trailed from it for the safety
   of passengers, crew, swimmers, etc




So he's been trying to sell the womb/home idea to Cindy, and to himself,
while his inner thoughts are turning to the sea (some of it probably trying
to recapture his youth, some of it probably more complex than that)

His current companions apparently are conversationally undemanding enough
that this chain of association continues uninterrupted.


Geronimo Diaz, focused on the Messianic implications of walking on water -
for a Freudian he does seem to have a lot of religious baggage - gives the
well-meant advice not to try it, but like much of his therapy that's
"besides the point." Dennis doesn't need Diaz to tell him that; he's
working on a metaphor, not having a psychotic break.