Previous - 105. Tower of Power
Absalom
p269 ...though nobody ever did know if Bon ever knew Sutpen was his father or not, whether he was trying to revenge his mother or not at first and only later fell in love, only later succumbed to the current of retribution and fatality which Miss Rosa said Sutpen had started and had doomed all his blood to, black and white both... the next Christmas came and Henry and Bon came to Sutpen's Hundred again and now Sutpen saw there was no help for it, that Judith was in love with Bon and whether Bon wanted revenge or was just caught and sunk and doomed too, it was all the same....I am so ashamed. Here's a lesson I thought I had learned from reading Parade's End and yet I had forgotten it until now. The lesson was to really pay attention to horses when they are described in any detail in books set before the automobile became the dominant means of transport. The horse Sutpen rides into this novel on is described as roan. Here is the definition for "roan horse:" "Roan is a horse coat color pattern characterized by an even mixture of colored and white hairs on the body, while the head and "points"—lower legs, mane and tail—are mostly solid-colored. Horses with roan coats have white hairs evenly intermingled throughout any other color."
In the section of the book I'm reading now, when Sutpen returns to Jefferson -- with the headstones --during the war we are repeatedly told Sutpen is riding a black stallion. (An odd choice for a war horse, I believe.)
p277 ... [Quentin] Am I going to have to have to hear it all again he thought I am going to have to hear it all over again I am already hearing it all over again I am listening to it all over again I shall have to never listen to anything else but this again forever so apparently not only a man never outlives his father but not even his friends and acquaintances do....
I can't tell if that "to have to have" is a typo or not.
And so we come to the retelling of Sutpen's second reverse in the battle between men and women. When Rosa reacts as anyone else would have known she would. While I don't really follow how Charles Bon was played into his part in this tragedy -- or how he himself could have known how to position himself, the situation with Rosa is simple enough. But what is the significance of Sutpen's relationship with women generally? I don't see that gender played any part in the story of either Race or Class in the South, aside from the usual desire on the part of women to support what ever side they happen to fall into. I'm clearly missing something here.
p286 Sutpen's black stallion and the mare produce a male foal, a horse "...the spit and image of his daddy when I rode him North in '61...." And Milly, Wash's granddaughter, I presume, gave birth to what? "horse or mare?" Shreve suggests a son, which makes no sense.
p290 ...[Wash Jones, according to Quentin's father] 'Brave! Better if narra one of them had ever rid back in '65' thinking Better if his kind an mine too had never drawn the breath of life on this earth. Better that all who remain of us be blasted from the face of it than that another Wash Jones should see his whole life shredded from him and shrivel away like a dried shuck thrown onto the fire... And Wash slaughters his own granddaughter and great granddaughter -- well at least that it was a mare makes more sense, if that's the word I want here. And so it does come down to the boy-symbol after all.
Rare books
Two of the oddest -- and also most interesting -- works in my library are a self-published account of the beginning of the Pacific War in the Philippines -- by a U.S. Army doctor who had moved to Manila Bay a bit before the Japanese invasion, given to me by a friend whose family had been neighbors of the man after the war. (He survived the Bataan Death March and all the years of captivity.) And a multi-volume history of the American Civil War first published in 1911 that some friends gave me for Christmas one year. (The Photographic History of the Civil War the Blue and Gray Press) One of the more curious features of this latter work is the section on war horses of famous generals. Really, it's about famous horses because it seems that people during and after the war were interested in these horses. They would have had their own Twitter accounts.Chapter 11, "Famous Chargers", includes photos and bios of many of the horses. Grant, for example had at least three mounts at the end of the war including the most famous "Cincinnati." Even Lee had other horses in addition to "Traveler." It appears that most of these mounts were geldings though at least one of Grant's was indeed a stallion.
Here's a passage about General Meade's horse, "Baldy," that is worth quoting,
...He was wounded twice at the first battle of Bull Run, before he came into General Meade's possession. Left on the field for dead at Antietam, he was later discovered quietly grazing, with a deep wound in his neck. Again, at Gettysburg, a bullet lodged between his ribs and rendered him unable to carry his owner again until after Appomattox. "Baldy" was a bright bay horse, with white face and feet. This bullet-scarred veteran followed General Meade's hearse to his last resting-place in 1872, and survived him by a decade....
Entropy
I'm having a problem understanding the concept of entropy. But I've come up with a metaphor that I think might work for me. Still not sure. My idea is to apply entropy to military science.A classical army -- in theory -- was directed by a commander and everyone did what that commander directed. But as the size of armies increased it was necessary to divide the total force into divisions, each with a sub-commander following the overall direction of the commander. As this process continued, it became more and more complex with lower level leaders (centurions, for example) in place to keep each component of the force in order.
As armies grew to much larger size in the Modern period, armies were divided into corps which were in affect armies in their own right, but following the direction of the army commander through the work of the chief of staff. This level of complexity increased yet again during the Great War when nations fielded army groups instead of individual armies.
Then, in response to the stalemate on the Western Front (resulting from the maturation of industrialized warfare with machine guns and advanced artillery and explosives) new infantry tactics evolved requiring a more complex command structure at the lowest levels, with captains, lieutenants, and even sargents playing a crucial role in directing field movements.
Today, the increasing role of elite (or special) forces approaches the point where each individual soldier plays a role in the direction of the force. (This trend is magnified by a technological trend to connect individual fighting vehicles, aircraft, and even individual soldiers into a distributed communications network where they all share data and where decisions may either be made by any individual or, alternatively, by staff or even political officials far away but linked into the same network.)
To summarize, military decision processes have gotten more and more complex and it's hard to see how they will ever get simpler. So ever increasing levels of entropy.
Here's something from Wiki that makes me feel a little better,
This implies that there is a function of state which is conserved over a complete cycle of the Carnot cycle. Clausius called this state function entropy. One can see that entropy was discovered through mathematics rather than through laboratory results. It is a mathematical construct and has no easy physical analogy. This makes the concept somewhat obscure or abstract, akin to how the concept of energy arose.
If, on the other hand, you think of a military force -- call it an army -- in the same way you think of a heat engine, the military potential of the army should drop as it is warn down over time by casualties and illness and simply the friction of use. This would seem, intuitively, to be true, but is not an invariable law. I've written before how the "military potential" of Caesar's legions or "Stonewall" Jackson's corp tended to increase even as their numbers and condition dropped. Instead of being expended, they turned into a more experienced, more cohesive force that larger, less experienced units could not resist.
And it occurs to me that, in this respect, a military unit is a bit like a steel sword blade. It's almost as if the energy -- in the form of heat and hammer blows -- that goes into the creation of the blade is conserved. The more "work" that goes into either forming the blade or training the unit, the greater potential each has. I suppose education works the same way, at least in theory. Though, interestingly, the potential of physicists, if you judge by their Nobel worthy production, does seem to drop over time -- as in a heat engine -- rather than increasing as with a military unit or a sword. At least in this metaphorical sense, entropy can either increase or decrease (in violation of the 2nd law of thermodynamics) depending on the circumstances.
I should be adding really confusing notes to Wiki science entries. It would be like an entirely new form of trolling.
No comments:
Post a Comment