“Rain”
Book 1, chapter 24; Book 2, chapter 25
Characters
1.24 Protagonist (unnamed man apparently dream), guy possibly named “Mickey”, and a shadowy crowd.
2.25 none exactly, but topic of the meditation is Fathers
General Subject/ Plot
1.24: [Maybe…] Religiousness [catholics/ prisoners of love] is contrasted with art [charlie parker].
2.25: a meditation on how completely the bond between child and father is dissolved through time, after so much has been experienced.
Motifs
1.24 Three Deuces, Wings/ Charms, Shoes, Rockefeller Center, Prisoners of Love, black and silver evening dress, Charlie Parker, elevator, rain,
2.25 rain, Charms, Tarzan, Saturdays, Jesus, wakes, cigarettes, alcohol
Notes
Serial film. I’d been thinking of the chapters of A Strange Commonplace as vignettes, but perhaps serials would be more appropriate:
Each chapter was screened at the same theater for one week, and ended with a cliffhanger, in which the hero and heroine found themselves in a perilous situation with little apparent chance of escape.
Daredevils of the red circle. The first “Rain” through its dreaminess seems most evoke the first “In Dreams” but from its allusions (to Charlie Parker, Charms lollipops, The Three Deuces, etc) most to the second brothers. Other familiar items: Rockefeller Center, Prisoner of Love, rain, shoes, lost shoes… There’s something surprising about this chapter’s direct mention of Catholicism, which I think we’re intended to associate with the saintliness of the wife, an idea which is expressed with sarcasm in other chapter. (There’s a mosque in the first “Movies” — the “Born Again” chapters — and the frequent repetitions of “Jesus” as an exclamaition or oath –are other references to religion.) 165 W 46th is by Times Square and St. Mary the Virgin church.
2nd rain: ruined shoes in the rain again, saturdays are the days when the divorce fathers have custody over their sons, and it seems always to be raining. The fathers take the sons to the movies, but would really rather be somewhere else (drinking, with their new girlfriends) and the children sense this. And what do the father’s want, but to be as children themselves when all that was demanded of them was that they be themselves. Perhaps this is actually the source of the “curious sadness” in the second “Saturday Afternoon”:
(…) after all this, the doomed, the hated Saturdays, again and again, the fathers remembered, in a dazzle of candor, the specific moments when the last tenuous links between them and their restless and distracted children began to dissolve, disintegrate, remembered their children in the act of fading away from them, fading into their actual lives: to which the fathers had no access, of which the fathers knew nothing at all and never would.
.i`` * ^ / . . . . . ` `~ 