Previous - 104. Goethe in Derbyshire
Just weird
Sometimes it seems like I only read the paper (SF Chron online) so I can make snarky comments. Last night a headline caught my eye about two people being hit by a train in Oakland. I pay attention to anything involving transit and especially trains. Also, the stupid things people do around train tracks are a constant source of wonder and amusement.What raised my ire in this headline was that it gave the location of this accident as "near the estuary." Could you be more vague? Reading what little they had in the initial story (it had just happened), they eventually got it down to Embarcadero and Clay Street. As soon as I read the words "train" and "accident" and "Oakland" my first thought was Jack London Square, because both freight and passenger trains run down the middle of a surface street which forms the land border of Jack London Square. It's what I like best about the place.
So now, reading the story last night, I'm thinking, if "Jack London Square" is too long for the headline they could have said "Yoshi's" -- a very well known Jazz club that was my first thought when they narrowed it down to Clay Street. I then posted my snarky comment.
As the evening progressed more information came out. It turns out that the two people hit by the train were members of the band Tower of Power who had been crossing Embarcadero against all the warning lights and barriers to get to Yoshi's where their set was about to start. They crossed behind a freight train only to find themselves in front of a passenger train.
To continue with the theme of what a dick I can be, my first thought on learning that the band was involved was to recall, from my time sorting trash back stage at all the concerts we work, how musicians seem to think rules don't apply to them. The little people can sort their trash or pay attention to railroad warning lights. Tell that to Mr. AMTRAK diesel locomotive.
Powell street
I'm pretty sure I've talked about the way the cable cars out on Powell street have mechanical over-ride switches -- down in the slot -- that turn the lights green for them as they approach an intersection, and then switch it back to red as they leave the intersection. For the past year the City has done a good job of keeping the switches functioning, but this week, after all our storms, I noticed one of the switches (that turns the lights back to green for Bush Street after the cable car leaves the intersection) wasn't working. I was going to report it to the City, but when I came home that day there was a crew inspecting the slot. I mentioned the situation to one of the crew members who showed no indication he knew what I was talking about. I figured they would still notice the problem when they got to that part of the block. Apparently not. It's three days later and the lights are still off -- stranding traffic heading downtown on Bush whenever a cable car passes heading north. It will be interesting to see how long it takes before someone else figures out what the problem is.Absalom
p259 "... It was something about a bill of lading, some way he persuaded Mr. Coldfield to use his credit: one of those things that when they work you were smart and when they don't you change your name and move to Texas... Because Mr Coldfield never did believe it would work, so when he saw that it was going to work, had worked, the least thing he could do was to refuse to take his share of the profits; that when he saw that it had worked it was his conscience he hated, not Supten -- his conscience and the land, the country which had created his conscience and then offered the opportunity to have made all that money to the conscience which it had created... he would not be present on that day when the South would realize that it was now paying the price for having erected its economic edifice not on the rock of stern morality but on the shifting sands of opportunism and moral brigandage....And now we're back in Derbyshire and Cressbrook Mill. Good, moral people investing their money on, there, industrial schemes, and, here, the slave based economy of the South. Striving for wealth. Creating a middle class (bourgeoisie) based on trade and commerce and exploitation. Not wanting to think about the price Mephisto always demands in the end.
p269 "...Only Father said that [the "boy-symbol"] wasn't it now, that when he came to Grandfather's office that day after the thirty years, and not trying to excuse now anymore than he had tried in the bottom that night when they ran the architect, but now he was old and knew it... telling Grandfather that the boy-symbol at the door wasn't it because the boy-symbol was just the figment of the amazed and desperate child; that now he would take that boy in where he would never again need to stand on the outside of a white door and knock at it: and not at all for mere shelter but so that that boy, that whatever nameless stranger, could shut that door himself forever behind him on all that he had ever known, and look ahead the still undivulged light rays in which his descendants who might not even hear him (the boy's) name, waited to be born forever without even having to know that they had once been riven forever free from brutehood just as his own (Sutpen's) children were --"
"Don't say it's just me that sounds like your old man..."
...Yes. Maybe we are both Father. Maybe nothing ever happens once and is finished. Maybe happen is never once but like ripples maybe on water after the pebble sinks, the ripples moving on, spreading, the pool attached by a narrow umbilical water-cord to the next pool which the first pool feeds, has fed, did feed, let this second pool contain a different temperature of water, a different molecularity of having seen, felt, remembered, reflect in a different tone the infinite unchanging sky, it doesn't matter: that pebble's watery echo whose fall it did not even see moves across its surface too at the original ripple-space, to the old ineradicable rhythm thinking Yes, we are both Father. Or maybe Father and I are both Shreve, maybe it took Father and me both to Make Shreve or Shreve and me both to make Father or maybe Thomas Sutpen to make all of us.
Just following an intuition (or random association here), but I can't help sliding from this pebble in a pool metaphor to my recent interest in standing waves as either a visual metaphor for Quantum states or as pointing to an alternative way of understanding quantum uncertainty. Quentin, his father and grandfather as states of a waveform. Existing -- or possibly existing -- in not-quite time in the medium of the South. Anyway...
p262 "Yes, the two children... [Judith and Henry, he just alluded to Clytie but ignores her now] And Grandfather said there was no conscience about that, [his repudiation of his first wife and child] that Sutpen sat in the office that afternoon after thirty years and told him how his conscience had bothered him somewhat at first but that he had argued calmly and logically with his conscience until it was settled, just as he must have argued with his conscience about his and Mr Coldfield's bill of lading... how he granted that by certain lights there was injustice in what he did but that he had obviated that as much as lay in his power by being aboveboard in the matter... and Grandfather not saying 'Wait wait' now because it was that innocence again, that innocence which believed that the ingredients of morality were like the ingredients of a pie... and once you had measured them and balanced them and mixed them and put them into the oven it was all finished and nothing but pie... could come out..."
And here we get into the question of his first wife's unsuitability without ever actually saying what that unsuitability was. And of Sutpen's inability to understand how she might not have been quite satisfied with the settlement they "agreed" to.
