SLPAD - 110 - "Low-Lands" - 22

[Michael Bailey]

Gratuitous theorizing -
If the author was briefly married and ready to settle down working at
Boeing, did he run a simulation showing him something like Flange, and opt
for writing instead?

(A quote from one of the many books reviewed in The Last Whole Earth
Catalog: "I don't want a career. I want a careen.")


The extended dump/slow elevator simile, though, is only the intro to an
even more elaborate passage:

"But something else too: here at the end of the spiral he felt haunted by
yet another correspondence, and could not place it until searching back he
came to the music and words of a song."

We get a bountiful earful about Delgado, sea songs, and a broader context
sea stories, told in various situations,  eg sitting on a depth charge on
the fantail waiting for movies to start.

There's a book with that in the title:

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2199412.Movies_on_the_Fantail_A_Sailor_s_Diary_and_Memories_from_Other_Men_of_the_USS_Barr_DE576_APD39


But Delgado preferred to sing them. The one Flange has in mind goes:

A ship I have got in the North Country

And she goes by the name of the Golden Vanity,

            O, I fear she will be taken by a Spanish Gal-la-lee,

            As she sails by the Low-lands low.



But even when he remembers the song, it's a springboard towards an
admittedly irrational association it awakens in him - the rational
association would be with the Low-Lands of Scotland - but he instead thinks
of the illusion that "anyone who looks at the ocean under a special
illumination or in a mood conducive to metaphor" would have, perceiving its
surface as a solid, walkable plain.