From: Rich Puchalsky Subject: Re: The Bridge: spoil-o-thon Date: Thursday, April 26, 2001 12:40 PM Third post Metaphormosis: Two This chapter starts with Orr making up a dream for his therapist; the dream is similar to the first, with the narrator being one of the crew of a sinking ship; they board the ship they are fighting just as that crew boards their ship, the two crews and ships seperate, both sinking. In the scene where Orr gets up from bed, we hear about his fairly palatial apartment and clothes, and he combs his "hair (a pleasantly intense black, and just curly enough to give it body)". Clearly this is his wish fulfillment; from the end of the last chapter we've already seen that the narrator's real body has graying and balding hair. Reality intrudes once again. This time, after he turns on his TV and sees the person on the hospital bed, aircraft fly by outside and leave smoke signals. The signals are "grouped in three-by-three grids, carefully spaced" -- in other words, this is a reference to Marian, the Culture's language, which we know from Excession is written on a three-by-three dot grid. But within the story they function symbolically as a signal from outside trying to break through. It's noteable that in later passages the people of the Bridge express distrust of the aircraft, they are scandalous, something not approved of in advance. They might well be suspicious of the aircraft, because if the smoke signal message every gets through, the narrator's fantasy (the Bridge itself) will cease to exist... At any rate, the trilogy of signals is completed when Orr picks up his phone to call about the TV being broken and the phone just transmits slow, not quite perfectly regular beeps -- the beeps of the machine tracking the narrator's heartbeat as he lies in a coma on his hospital bed. Orr has breakfast with his friend, the engineer Mr. Brooke. If the narrator has cast Dr. Joyce the therapist in the part of the person within the dream trying to wake the narrator up, Mr. Brooke is the corresponding figure trying to help him maintain the fantasy -- as symbolized by his job maintaining the bridge supports. Brooke always seems ill-lit, "even in direct sunlight he always seems to be standing in shade", so he's something of a devil figure. Brooke tells him that there's plenty within the Bridge to interest him and that he should give up his investigations of what's outside it, the same investigations that Dr. Joyce told him he was giving up too easily. Brooke suffers from insomnia, which makes him diametrically opposed to Joyce the dream analyst. Just after this, Orr goes to his appointment with Dr. Joyce, but the therapist's office has been relocated. Clearly Orr is nervous about talking to him and this is an avoidance mechanism. Orr's chest aches where the circular bruise used to be (actually, where it still is, it's just that as he loses confidence in the dream of the Bridge he feels his real pains more). Dr. Joyce thinks the first two dreams tell nothing. He uses two drawings of the girders of the Bridge as psychological tests, asking Orr to indicate which direction of force the structures are indicating at certain points. I admit that I don't understand the significance of this scene at all. Orr takes an elevator and sees that one of the floors is labelled as having the Third City Library, the one that supposedly explains the Bridge. He goes there in high excitement, but when he gets there, there has just been a disaster, firemen are running around and everything has either been burned or demolished. In other words, the narrator is not yet ready to admit what is going on to himself, so he has to take the Library back away at the last minute. But this seems a bit suspicious, even to Orr, so the integrity of the illusion is damaged. Orr finds a diagram in his pocket, supposedly a map of the way to Dr. Joyce's new office. It's a hexagon with an L-shaped line in the middle with an O and an H at each end of the line, the O next to the hexagon. It's clearly significant to the narrator, and he almost loses the Bridge illusion into formless mist. He feels himself seem to tip, which is something I've actually had happen to me. When I've realized with a shock that I'm dreaming, and I wake up, sometimes there is a readjustment of the feeling of gravity as I move from a perception of myself as standing, within the dream, to the true perception that I'm lying on my back in bed. What does the diagram mean? A previous scene within the chapter referred to part of the Bridge as hexagonal. The lift that Orr took to reach the Third City Library is L-shaped, and he comments on this more than once. The elevator attendant said that it "doesn't look much like a library from this angle", and when Orr felt himself seem to tip, he felt like he was back in that elevator, "completing another unscheduled and dangerous lift-shaft maneuver", i.e. waking back to conciousness. The H could mean Here and O mean Outside. But the hexagon with an H, an O, and another line also looks very much like a molecular diagram, with the hexagon being the carbon ring. Anyone have any ideas on that? Something about alcohol, possibly? I don't remember enough chemistry to see what it is without looking it up. We don't know yet in the story whether the narrator crashed his car because he was drunk, although he does indicate in the introduction that he thinks the crash is his fault. Orr throws the diagram away after hearing his phone beep again. The narrator's been giving himself lots of messages, but it's clearly not working, because he's not yet ready or healed enough.