SLPAD - 115 - “Low-Lands” - 27

[Michael Bailey]

Later inverted or otherwise morphed into “hollow earth” notions in _V._ and
_AtD_, perhaps, and whether or not there is socioeconomic commentary
intended…

Flange’s rather detailed fantasia, taking in his sense of gradual,
inevitable, and boring change, his complaisance therewith except for a
certain unease concerning a prospect of his own unwanted prominence in the
end-game, and spinning off a pseudo-map minimalizing all features except
boundary lines, whose rendezvous points determine “lunes”, moon-like shapes
on the shrunken globe he envisions - though “lunes” also has an obsolete
meaning of “fits of madness “
https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/lune
(Wiktionary has quotes from Shakespeare in “The Merry Wives of Windsor” and
“The Winter’s Tale”, and also by somebody called “Thomas Snarlyle” in 1851
to describe a phenomenon he called “Bloomerism”)

The main point of the extended metaphor seems to be that it delineates a
sea-land boundary, on the sea side of which he strongly opts to be, and it
does so in a way that places the desired location not in a literal sea, but
instead builds a conceptual sea amidst which his attainment of a whimsical
semblance of sea level places him - quite convenient, and a lot easier than
actually taking his physical self out on the briny deep.

There’s an element of drunk logic here - what Robert Anton Wilson fictively
attributed to James Joyce as “amusing and instructive altered states of
consciousness.”

(In the same passage of the Wilson novel, _Masks of the Illuminati_, an
imagined colloquy between James Joyce and Albert Einstein, in Switzerland,
Einstein refers to “disgusting and shameful altered states of
consciousness” - although James Joyce urges another beer on him: “Ein
Stein, Einstein!”)


Rocco goes “bouncing and snarling [like Thomas Snarlyle?] away into the
gathering darkness.”

Bolingbroke leads them on for mattresses:

“He led them up a slope, around a tall tower of bank run”

What is bank run?

I mean, “a run on a bank” - economic panic…

Is the junkyard a metaphor for history (like old whatsisname, Art in the
Age dude)?

And the tower of “bank run” a reference to the Great Depression (later
invoked in _V._ by Benny Profane’s genesis in a Hoovertown)?

Or maybe just some of the junk that was carelessly piled has run (slid)
down the slope - we know there’s a slope, maybe it’s here called a “bank” -
forming a tower.

Or ??? Clarification (or further muddying) welcome