From: Rich Puchalsky Subject: Re: The Bridge: spoil-o-thon Date: Wednesday, May 02, 2001 12:30 PM Ninth post Metamorpheus: Two (part 1 of 2 posts) The dream this time has the narrator standing on a moor, near a canal. As a train approaches he sees that he's standing btween the train tracks. No matter which way he runs the tracks move so that he's still between them. At the last minute he jumps in the canal, the train vanishes, and he finds he can breathe. He settles to the moss-covered floor of the canal and finds that there are train tracks that the moss has grown over; the tracks fill the whole tunnel. Finally, he hears the train start to approach again. This dream is about escape -- back to the womb or birth canal, symbolically, just as the narrator has created a dream world in which seemingly nothing can really hurt him. Yet he can't escape; the knowledge of the crash (i.e. mortality) pursues him even there. When he wakes, he wonders if he should take down Arrol's picture; he's disturbed by the dream and her picture did involve a man being pursued by a train. He takes a warm bath and falls asleep, suddenly waking up feeling cold, terrified, "that I was trapped in some constricting tunnel: the bath a tunnel-canal [...]" This is a reenactment of birth trauma; first he's in a warm bath, then he's stuck in a canal. He's worried that waking from The Bridge into his damaged body will be just as traumatic as being born. And it would be like being reborn into the world in a certain sense. Here is where Orr actually speculates that The Bridge may run all the way around the world and meet itself, a closed loop; I had incorrectly mentioned that for the last chapter. Orr sets out to find the Third City Library again. On the way he sees that they are attaching additional barrage ballons to the trawlers that anchor them. He finds the great round window that marks the corridor that the elevator to it used to be in. Dr. Joyce's patient who never stops window-washing is washing it from outside. Orr looks outside and sees that a trawler has been attacted to three ballons and is not floating up through the air towards them. Orr breaks a pane of glass and warns the window-washer just in time; the guy ducks as the trawler comes smashing through then window, then continues to float upwards. The window-washer goes by to cleaning after bandaging his glass cuts; Orr gives up on looking for the library again. I should point out that this scene has a lot of sexual imagery in the description and word choice. Orr comes to the familiar corridor; it's damp, the carpet squelches with each footfall, and it has a huge round window at the end of it -- i.e. he's in the birth canal. The window-washer is "Dr. Joyce's patient who refuses to leave the cradle." The trawler floats towards The Bridge, "rising as it nears". Orr breaks the glass with the knob on the tip of his stick, then the trawler crunches into the center of the great round window, making a terrible groaning, screaming sound as the structure shakes. The "barnacles and fragments of the shattered panes fall together onto the carpet, beating at the broad leaves of the nearby pot-plants like some hard, fierce rain. Then, incredibly, it is gone." I'm not sure what to make of this, frankly. Orr is definitely also "Dr. Joyce's patient who refuses to leave the cradle", i.e. refuses to wake up from his dream. Now a giant metaphorical penis is breaking in -- similar to the train in the canal, now that I think of it. Is Orr worried that the existence of sex in his dream is going to inevitably destroy it? Or is this supposed to be some strange varient of birth anxiety, or of the narrator's anxiety about the aggresive aspects of sex? If someone else wants to read this scene, and give their own opinon, that would be useful. I think that Banks tends to write male characters who are worried about sex in certain way (for instance, Zakalwe in Use of Weapons can't help but think of each sex act, no matter how loving, as an attack.)