pg. 44: the bird. This image is diametrically opposite to that of the phoenix, I think, involving water as opposed to a phoenix's fire, and death as opposed to resurrection. Because of the roiling water of the Jacuzzi, there is an illusion that the bird is still alive, a kind of life-in-death. The dead bird still makes flying motions, propelled by forces around it to keep it going under the water, disappearing and reappearing in a kind of endless circle, a sham of flight. This recalls the notion of the "recursive loop" (p. 34). It is the most bleak image in the book so far for me. Especially with the idea of the vulnerability of a small, delicate bird like a wren, and its small, delicate heart giving out and/or it's drowning. The fact that this is happening in Phoenix is not what first suggested this interpretation actually; I suppose that could support it as well though.
In this environment, a wren, an appealing animal--one could even say beautiful animal--dies, but roaches and rats,"loathsome high-altitude critters of all kinds," (p. 44) and malevolent "spiny or meaty" plants all thrive. The tough ones. The ugly ones. Orin has the toughness of a professional jock but I think that inside he is more like the vulnerable wren.
Orin wakes some days with "--the soul's certainty that the day will have to be not traversed but sort of climbed, vertically" (p. 46), and that he falls down at the end of it all only to have to do the same thing all over again the next day and the next, like the myth of Sisyphus: the ceaseless rolling of a rock to the top of a mountain and having it fall back of it's own weight, repeating the process endlessly. This is a spot-on description of mental depression, the day-in, day-out struggle of it, and another kind of recursive loop, and in its own way is a "desiccated circle" (p. 46) as well. He doesn't go forward-"traverse"-he just goes over and over the same ground.
Curiously, Orin is said to have had an "unhappy youth," despite coming from a privileged background. (The town he comes from, Weston, is in real life one of the wealthiest in Massachusetts, if that means anything.) He went to a private school, and comes from a brilliant, rather accomplished, interesting family from what we know so far. Freud could have a field day with the dreams that he has of wearing his mother's head as an "overtight" helmet, with the idea of the violence of amputation and what that implies. And although he is in the NFL, a life a lot of people dream about, he is anxious--often wakes up soaked in sweat, in a fetal position--and in some emotional pain, and doesn't seem to be that fulfilled by his career. The environment he lives in is described in negative terms that make it seem like a kind of hell, from roaches in the trees to spinning schizophrenics. The sun is, in fact, so hot that it is "like a sneaky keyhole view of hell" (p. 43). And everything is ugly, even his last subject was only "sallowly pretty".
He also can't connect with the women that he sleeps with and refers to each of them with the cold, clinical term, "the Subject. He, like Erdedy, changes his phone number to keep ex-partners from calling him, although Erdedy's reasons are not quite the same.
I'll be interested to see if there an explicit explanation for his personality in further discussion of his childhood, and whether it was any different than Hal's or Mario's.
I see that he doesn't seem to use any drugs or alcohol to escape, at least not yet, although there is quite enough to want to escape from.
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