SLPAD - 112 - “Low-Lands” - 24

[Michael Bailey]

Technical passage:


for Flange that immense clouded-glass plain was a kind of low-land which
almost demanded a single human figure striding across it for completeness;
any arrival at sea level was like finding a minimum and dimensionless
point, a unique crossing of parallel and meridian, an assurance of perfect,
passionless uniformity; just as in the spiraling descent of Rocco’s truck
he had felt that this spot at which they finally came to rest was the dead
center, the single point which implied an entire low country.


Several propositions in rapid succession

a) a painterly thought (not a miraculous water-walking one) that the
landscape mirage would only look complete with a lone person striding
across it

b) a (imho deliberately misleading) semicolon linkage to another odd
linkage - the notion of sea level being what a few years later might be
described as an “interface” between land and sea, and the likening of that
interface to the meeting of a parallel and a meridian (lines of latitude
and longitude)

(A valid comparison in that each is a “minimum and dimensionless point”* -
like the way George Jung (the character Johnny Depp portrayed in the movie
“Blow”) described in court his crossing the Mexico/US border with
marijuana: “I carried some plants over an imaginary line”)

(The judge, like Flange, had a higher regard for the imaginary geometry)

The meeting of land and sea would be the intersection of two 3-dimensional
areas, and this would be a 2-d plane - whereas the meeting of parallel and
meridian would be the intersection of two lines and thus a 1-d point.

He refines the notion in the next clause to specify the low point of the
dump (towards which they are spiraling in the truck) as “the dead center,
the single point which implied an entire low country”


* although that next little bit is interesting, right after “minimum and
dimensionless point” where he goes on to derive “an assurance of perfect,
passionless uniformity” - as if implying an interface between himself
(amongst the many bewildering impressions and emotions of life) and the
passionless and unaltering world of measurement?

Which is kind of funny because (imho) that shit is also pretty complex &
bewildering (ymmv)