SLPAD - 120 - “Low-Lands” - 31

[Michael Bailey]

Pig shook his head. “Wait a minute,” he said. “I thought you were gonna
tell a sea story.” By this time they had killed the gallon. Bolingbroke
produced a jug of homemade Chianti from under his bed. “I would have,”
Flange said, “only I couldn’t think of any offhand.” But the real reason he
knew and could not say was that if you are Dennis Flange and if the sea’s
tides are the same that not only wash along your veins but also billow
through your fantasies then it is all right to listen to but not to tell
stories about that sea, because you and the truth of a true lie were thrown
sometime way back into a curious contiguity and as long as you are passive
you can remain aware of the truth’s extent but the minute you became active
you are somehow, if not violating a convention outright, at least screwing
up the perspective of things, much as anyone observing subatomic particles
changes the works, data and odds, by the act of observing. So he had told
the other instead, at random. Or apparently so. He wondered what Geronimo
would say.


Almost addressing the reader with “if you are Dennis Flange” (not as
directly as “Reader, she bit him,” though)

Still, all the “yous” there - I scent an attempt to pull a reader into a
closer identification with Flange, mingled with a portrayal of increasing
inebriation.

There’s an element of class standing which isn’t mentioned: Flange as a
married officer would have had, in general, a different array of
experiences (writing his wife every week, daydreaming, taking
responsibility for the “radio shack”) that might not fit tidily into the
category of “sea stories.”

His store of suitably ruffianly experiences would (one imagines) all
overlap with Pig’s anyway, for obvious reasons: Pig would’ve been the
instigator, reaching out to sailors of all ranks to exploit signs of
corruptibility in anyone…and the puzzled, passive nature of Flange's
constant musing on abstruse metaphors, and equally constant self-doubt,
wouldn’t leave him much starch for resisting bad ideas, nor much motivation
for pursuing adventures of his own invention.

So I imagine he’d have to stick with stories like, “hey Pig, remember the
time you got me to (etcetera)”

But that’s not what he thinks, by a long shot - he’s got a “drunk logic”
explanation - which he doesn’t share, but brushes aside with “…couldn’t
think of any offhand,” and then sits there expanding and expounding on the
metaphor to himself.

But they don’t challenge him on this.

If you are Dennis Flange - and he is, although as Sartre (quoted by Pig in
_V._) suggested, he may only be “impersonating an identity” -

“…you and the truth of a true lie were thrown sometime way back into a
curious contiguity and as long as you are passive you can remain aware of
the truth’s extent but the minute you became active you are somehow, if not
violating a convention outright, at least screwing up the perspective of
things, much as anyone observing subatomic particles changes the works,
data and odds, by the act of observing. So he had told the other instead,
at random. Or apparently so. He wondered what Geronimo would say.”


In my experience, this is more like a heavy reefer thought process, than
wine - I guess because before I would ever get that far into wine I’d be
throwing up - but these guys have a staggeringly high tolerance.