On Thu, 16 Jul 1998 [log in to unmask] wrote:
>
> On the march. Simmer down your almost last arrivals
> rendered like lard, leaf from stem reversion. Will she
> finger the flute, cold and wet, breathing on through it
> but making no fit sound. What makes a small fad mark
> on the paper, as a reminder. Not like last time parch
> and drain a zodiac, undaunted here: take the folded
> cloth in both hands, put it square on, notice a ring
> just touching against the horizon and emptied out flat.
>
> (RED D GYPSUM, p.11)
>
> As if to confirm that Prynne is a visitor from the immediate future
> (estimates vary from between three and twelve months ahead), the
> above stanza proves the most trenchant commentary upon the ISA of the
> Orange Order and its encampment above the Garvaghy Road.
> "Simmer...lard": the Walks down Maryhill Road in Glasgow which have
> woken me at 8 a.m. every Saturday morning for the last two months
> are composed, like those of the poem, of breathless, red-faced,
> ginger-haired, overweight, sweating lard-asses already knackered by
> the first fifty yards from the Lodge up the road. Ignoring the
> feminine pronoun (because we can), the gasping, stumbling
> unfit Loyalists are unable to produce a "fit sound" from their flutes
> ("flutes" also being a reference to rained-on suits...the feminine
> pronoun, reintroduced, produces an entirely other sense to the
> sentence and stanza)). And you can fill in the rest yourself. Last
> two and a half lines are, I think, references to Masonic ritual.
> Perhaps Ric Caddel, Grand Master of the North of England Basil
> Bunting Loyal Lodge no.343, could unpack them for us?
>
Hm tres interresant. But you know when the person in authority, a
headgrandmaster, say, tells the general assembly a "she" has done
something from which the general assembly may draw a lesson, (such as, a
she "blowing on a flute and making no fit sound") how immediately all the
"shes" to whom the implied situation might genderdly pertain, feel it is
related to them and they have let the school orchestra doing "The Magic
Flute" down, whilst the "he's" breathe a sigh of apostrophic relief,
alleviation, as it were, never mind if the instant parable was the orange
order marches, really, that kind of situation, with indeed these weird
ritual instructions ("take a folded...") suggesting a closed order, how
this, as a situation, would make the shes go colaratura, queen of the
night, and perhaps say, they would, she don't get the cabbal, nor strip
the branch to its order, nor render that fad mark, C, for gods sake,
"flat".
Karlien
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