SLPAD - 102 - "Low-Lands" - 15

[Michael Bailey]

The next page (48 in the Book edition) lets us in on his fascination with
the sea:
- it's his only respite other than Diaz from "relentless rationality" of
home and spouse*

* oddball Flange sees it that way - aren't the disturbing elements of his
gestalt more the irrational, surreal ones than the rational ones?

 - he was the only sailor (comms officer) enjoying the hourglass-shaped
destroyer  patrols near Korea

- he "dragged" Cindy to that home by the sea

(Musical divagation: https://youtu.be/0j6d7VeYvdQ?si=HYeFTgkKyG3fXxTN )

- he traces this fascination to the fact that he "had read or heard
somewhere in his pre-adolescence that the sea was a woman, and the metaphor
had enslaved him and largely determined what he became from that moment."

At this, Geronimo buckles down, momentarily forgoing non-standard analysis
in order to tie Dennis's narrative in to his - parodic, but not completely
devoid of substance - version of Freudian theory -

Quoth Dr Diaz:
"...as life forms had grown more complicated, sea water had begun to serve
the function of blood until eventually corpuscles and a lot of other junk
were added to produce the red stuff we know today; since this was true, the
sea was quite literally in our blood, and more important, the sea—rather
than, as is popularly held, the earth—is the true mother image for us all."