Automata - scene 4

[Day 2]

Bottle awoke with a stuffy nose, and a general desire to not do anything. Though he longed for nothing so much as to go back to blissful sleep, he nevertheless conquered the invisible force that pinned him to the bed, and as they say, put on pants. Onward, he goes. 

[Voice of Bottle]

Millions, according to the conceptual timeline, is the first song. We have to try to understand it, but you're not gonna like how much grammatical analysis it's gonna take. Oh well. 

Millions of something flying overhead. Birds, UFOs, cans of peaches, Professor Xavier's room with all the psychic weblinks to people's brains, people watching The Truman Show, owls, spy satellites, i don't know. Way too many to count, is the point. He wants to be back up there with them, but they are flying away without him. Whatever they are, he feels like they have abandoned him and he's scared, possibly cold. That might seem like barely a fragment of an idea, but it is a coherent framework for the project as a whole. Is that "the frame"? No idea, but now that possibility is in our brains. "Wooden frame" could also just simply be a house, but I'm getting ahead of myself. 

Whenever you're confronting something this obtuse, a good strategy is to find all the places a word or idea pops up, and compare them. We'll start doing that in a bit. At the moment, i want to try to parse the truly bizarre fragment that is "fog dancing slavery." What the hell does that mean? Noun-participle-noun, think of some others: airplane flying poodle, muck raking journalist, shit eating grin. In those examples the noun-participle pair act as an adjective for the object. If you turn it back around that would mean there's fog and slavery is dancing in it. Weird, but not completely incomprehensible. 

Maybe it's a similie, the fog is like dancing slavery. There's some corroboration for that in the alternate ending "like snakes circling." Possibly the whole structure is that the concept of slavery is dancing through the fog like snakes circling their prey. I'm good with that, it gives us a mental image of what the situation feels like for the narrator/protagonist. Now i think we can zoom back out and try to grapple with the large scale themes. 

[Aside]

As Bottle reemerged from his orational stupor, it slowly dawned on him that not all of his minions had fully crossed over into similar wakeful exuberance. Skip, for example, was still snoring and twitching his arms in a manner much like a rabbit scampering through a field. Sandra, though ostensibly awake, appeared to be staring off into space, lost in some intangibly slow thought process. The Compiler was nowhere to be seen. 

Having fully digested the lack of happenings around him, Bottle simply shrugged and wandered off, mumbling "meh, i'll just come back later, i guess."

Part 5