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Lutero Chaloux

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Jun 28, 2024, 2:30:39 PM6/28/24
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An echo of the beginning of Chapter X and further confirmation of the earlier words [216]: "if I ever start to drink mescal again, I'm afraid, yes, that would be the end." This time, there is no afterthought or qualification of "mescal poquito" or "mescalito": in fact, in an earlier draft [UBC 28-12, 1] the Consul had demanded: "Mescal ... si, mescal doble, por buen favor, seorita. Si, mescal grande." The word, in Chapters X and XII, was added to the 1940 text in the 1941 revision [UBC 27-3, 1 & 27-5, 1], linking the two resonantly. The chapter thereafter began not with a stagger to the Farolito, but in Parin itself.

In both poems, and in the novel, the image of time running out is immediately reinforced by that of "subterranean collapse" as the foundations of the deep seem about to open. Compare, too, Frances Cornford, 'The Watch':

I waked on my hot hard bed.
Upon a pillow lay my head.
Beneath the pillow I could hear
My little watch was ticking clear.
I thought the throbbing of it went
Like my continued discontent.
I thought it said in every tick:
I am so sick, so sick, so sick.
O death, come quick, come quick, come quick,
Come quick, come quick, come quick, come quick.

When a man was intoxicated with the native Mexican drink of pulque, a liquor made from the juice of the Argave Americana [sic], he was believed to be under the influence of a god or spirit. The commonest form under which the drink-god was worshipped was the rabbit, that animal being considered to be utterly devoid of sense. This particular divinity was known as Ome-tochtli. The scale of debauchery which it was desired to reach was indicated by the number of rabbits worshipped, the highest number, four hundred [see #3.6(f)], representing the most extreme degree of intoxication.

Spence elsewhere comments [M & M of M, 84] that a rabbit in the house was regarded among the Aztecs as a sign of bad luck, a portent borne out in the year of One-Rabbit in the cycle preceding the coming of the Spaniards, when there were ominous lights in the sky and other harbingers of disaster. To Clemens ten Holder [CL 2, 381 (23 April 1951)] Lowry commented: "it must be Peter Rabbit". It could equally be Alice in Wonderland.

Corn with kernels of various colours, such as the purple and black here. The rabbit, nibbling at the "stops", is likened to someone playing a mouth organ. To Clemens ten Holder [23 April 1951; CL 2, 381], Lowry sees it as playing a harmonica: "I almost felt Hieronymus Bosch putting a claw of approbation out of his grave when I wrote that."

Sp. agua, "water" and ardiente, "burning"; brandy or liquor generally, but in Mexican usage with the specific sense of a liquor distilled from cane sugar by adding a fermented wine or fruit stock to a liquid sugar base. Morelos, particularly in the last years of the Porfiriato, was the leading Mexican producer of aguardientes. The bulbous jars containing the aguardientes are not unlike Jacques's cuneiform stone idols [199].

Sp. "Hotel Bella Vista Grand Ball for the benefit of the Red Cross. The best radio stars in action. Don't miss it." As earlier [45], the advertisement obliquely comments on the Consul's inability to render the dying Indian first aid.

Deathday in Mexico. Day of the greatest fun and merriment. The day when Mexico provokes death and makes fun of it – death is but a step to another cycle of life – why then fear it! Hat stores display skulls wearing top and straw hats. Candy takes the shape of skulls in sugar and coffins of confectionery. Parties go to the cemetery, taking food to the dead. Parties play and sing on the graves. And the food of the dead is eaten by the living.

I told him that I had several times, when in Italy, seen the experiment of placing a scorpion within a circle of burning coals; that it ran round and round in extreme pain; and finding no way to escape, retired to the centre, and like a true Stoick philosopher, darted its sting into its head, and thus at once freed itself from its woes .... Johnson would not admit the fact.

Beatrice: But I remember
Two miles on this side of the fort, the road
Crosses a deep ravine; 'tis rough and narrow,
And winds with short turns down the precipice;
And in its depth there is a mighty rock,
Which has, from unimaginable years,
Sustained itself with terror and with toil
Over a gulf, and with the agony
With which it clings seems slowly coming down;
Even as a wretched soul hour after hour,
Clings to the mass of life; yet clinging, leans;
And leaning, makes more dark the dread abyss
In which it fears to fall; beneath this crag
Huge as despair, as if in weariness,
The melancholy mountain yawns ... below,
You hear but see not an impetuous torrent
Ranging among the caverns, and a bridge
Crosses the chasm; and high above there grow,
With intersecting trunks, from crag to crag,
Cedars, and yews, and pines; whose tangled hair
Is matted in one solid roof of shade
By the dark ivy's twine. At noonday here
'Tis twilight, and at sunset blackest night.

The Cenci (1819) is a poetic tragedy by Shelley about Count Francesco Cenci, who after a life of wickedness and debauchery conceives an implacable hatred, in the form of an incestuous passion, against his daughter Beatrice. To end her miseries, Beatrice plots with her stepmother and brother to murder the tyrant. The passage referred to by the Consul comes at the moment of plotting the count's death. Though the plot is successful, suspicions are aroused, and the three conspirators are executed.

Jan Gabrial cites a letter from Malcolm [Inside the Volcano, 177; 29 Dec. 1938] who is feeling "disassembled", controlled by an invisible player and part of the dream of a restless sleeper. He cites La Vida es sueo: "Que toda la vida es sueno y los suenos sueno son" ["that all life is a dream, and dreams are a dream"]. To Albert Erskine [UBC 2-6], Lowry wrote: "See Shelley's plagiarism of Calderon in The Cenci, his justification of same, Calderon himself, and The Cenci itself: I have used here, if I recall, bits of all 4."

Sp. "The Parting"; the picture of the great rock torn apart by superlapidary forces [see #54.6], seen then by Yvonne and now by the Consul as symbolic of the impossibility of their reunion. The "spinning flywheel", already in motion that morning, has brought nearer the implacable machinery to crush the Consul.

Tartarus is the lower region of Hades, bound by a triple wall and surrounded by the waters of Phlegethon, to which the rebel Titans were consigned [see #131.1]. It was the home of Typhoeus, a monster with a hundred heads and fearful eyes and voices (Lowry is quoting Webster), conquered by Zeus and buried under Mount Etna, where he breathes out smoke and flames. Typhoeus is usually identified with another monster, Typhon, strictly his son. Lowry had noted this detail [UBC 31-8], and determined to work it in somewhere ("Top of 19 possible place for Typhoeus" [UBC 13-13]. Mount Etna is one entrance to Tartarus. As Asals notes [Making, 296], only in the late revisions did the book's title enter its text.

Mercurochrome is a crystalline dye, used in solution as an antiseptic for cuts and grazes and remarkable for its brilliant redness. The sky evokes the agony of Faustus, who sees Christ's blood stream in the firmament; the agony of Christ's passion; and the unbandaging of great giants in agony [see #35.6]. There is a conscious echoing, both here and at the end of the paragraph, of the end of Lord Jim: "The sky over Patusan was blood-red, immense, streaming like an open vein. An enormous sun had nested crimson amongst the tree-tops, and the forest below had a black and forbidding face." Jim's death resembles the Consul's in many ways: it takes place at sunset; both are shot by thugs and with a pistol; and both deaths are almost self-willed acts of contrition for past failures.

An ominous suggestion of the Cyclops, who wrought destruction among the men of Odysseus. Although there is no conscious attempt to sustain parallels with the Odyssey, allusions such as this, of dungeons like pig-pens [340], and men transformed into animals [341], show that Homer's poem has affinities with the Consul's nightmare world.

The barracks clock still points to six on page 347, which leads Markson [184] to suggest parallels with the Mad Hatter's Tea Party in Alice in Wonderland. More to the point is a reminder of Doctor Faustus, as Faustus realises that time is running out: "Now hast thou but one bare hour to live, / And then thou must be damned perpetually." Even more ominous is the suggestion of Rimbaud's 'Un Saison en Enfer':

Like the public scribe [53], the corporal is obscurely an embodiment of Thoth, scribe of the gods; the Consul will feel "oddly reassured" when the soldier is still there [341], but the implication is that a final "reckoning" is being made before the sudden change of worlds.

See also "These animals that follow us about in dreams", that come out at night and are swallowed by the dawn, as in his poem 'Xochitepec'. That poem, curiously, is pencilled on the verso of a draft of Margerie Lowry's thriller, The Shapes that Creep, which begins: "They could see at once that the man was very dead" [Scherf, 'Issues in Editing', 38]. See also Charles Fort, The Book of the Damned [3]: "A procession of the damned."

The City is of Night, but not of Sleep;
There sweet sleep is not for the weary brain;
The pitiless hours like years and ages creep,
A night seems termless hell. This dreadful strain
Of thought and consciousness which never ceases,
Or which some moments' stupor but increases,
This, worse than woe, makes wretches there insane.

The dreadful strains of demonic orchestras, the snatches of fearful sleep, imaginary parties arriving and the dark's spinets are all evoked in the Consul's letter [35], likewise composed in the Farolito of the mind.

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