From: Rich Puchalsky Subject: Re: The Bridge: spoil-o-thon Date: Monday, April 30, 2001 1:36 PM Eighth post Metamorpheus: One This one starts with Orr not sure if he remembers his dream last night -- other than that he knows it's all a dream, isn't everything? The Bridge has changed; there are now barrage balloons tethered along to keep the planes from flying by. Orr gets a message from Arrol inviting him to a date, maybe the barrage balloons (i.e. his increased resistance to messages from reality) are due to him looking forward to his date within The Bridge. Orr sends a letter to Dr. Joyce rejecting hypnosis, further signalling his wish to preserve The Bridge. But there's resistance to him cutting off all messages as well, or maybe he just can't. Repairmen arrive to fix his TV and phone, but they can't get in because his door mysteriously jams shut. By the time another repairman gets it open, the first two have left. His TV and phone are stubbornly going to continue to transmit his hospital view. By the way, the phone is fairly obvious -- he just hears the beeps -- but it wasn't clear, when I thought about it, how he was getting the TV picture, since he can't really see himself. Then I thought that he must have a mirror hanging in his room and his eyes slightly open. The view in the mirror becomes the picture in the TV. On the way to the date, Orr sees that the balloons are only on the down-river side of the Bridge, not the up-river side. He's the only one astounded by the up-river view; everyone else goggles at the down-river one. I have no idea what the significance is of the balloons being missing from the up-river side. Orr meets Arrol for their date; she is painting a picture using railway equipment as her subject. She chooses an engine hoist; this recalls a scene from Triassic where the narrator describes seeing a locomotive engine being tested as a young child, and how this feeling of power impressed him that anything was possible with "work and sense and matter" -- in other words, his early, defining religious experience. She paints the railway yard as a jungle, one engine has become a monstrous lizard and is chasing a terrified man -- it's the reverse of his early experience. He doesn't like it until she gives the painting to him. In addition, she gives his handkerchief back, cleaned and newly monogrammed with an O. They discuss the Bridge a little more; it has farming sections and universities, in other words it's completely self-sufficient. Orr had originally thought that to get food the Brdige residents must trade with the land somehow, now he's starting to think that it could be a big closed circle in the ocean whose curvature is too small to see. She leaves, and he's fascinated by a glimpse he gets of her leg in fishnet stockings. He even indulges in a bit of symbolic word-play/analysis of the type I'm doing here, "Fishnet, indeed; I am netted again." Orr drinks with Brooke again, Brooke supports Orr's decision against hypnosis. Then the planes show up again; they easily avoid the balloons and leave more signals. This time they are flying towards the Kingdom. I suppose that's because the narrator's increasing interest in his dream makes it less likely that he will wake up. And at the end of the chapter, Orr talks to a journalist and the journalist tells him that the messages are in Braille, but that it's nonsense even when you decipher it. Orr is "dumbfounded". Why Braille? Braille is the most appropriate language for the signals because it is completely tactile. The signals are coming from the narrator's body, which he can only feel -- he can't examine it in any other way -- thus a tactile signal. That symbolism aside, it isn't really Braille. On pg. 31 of my edition, the text clearly states that the signals are in "three-by-three grids, carefully spaced." Braille is in 2 x 3 grids. As I pointed out before, Marain, the language of the Culture, is in 3 x 3 grids (from a scene in _Excession_). So the reason the authorities in the Bridge think the Braille message is nonsense is because they are reading it in the wrong language. Of course, you don't need to think of Marain to have this element work within the story. It makes perfect sense as nonsense Braille, both in terms of plot and symbolically. I'd guess that Banks left the 3 x 3 grid part in as an in-joke, perhaps for his friends that he had been showing his Culture material to.