DROSS INTO DRESSAGE / HOST INTO HOSTAGE


This morning at 4:52 PM.
Your sweat has cooled.
Your breath too, soon as you wake.
And that sensation of waking from dream, from the sadness of that dream, and to not know why but still carry it with you.
I'm thinking about the end to Chapter VI as Nick failed to say something he couldn't remember.
Or how an unfamiliar yet recognizable expression would pass briefly over Gatsby's face when confronted with the crimes he committed to reach the splendour he had now.
Splendour he had longed for since he was young, so dissatisfied with his drab and working-class past. A dissatisfaction I'm principally against... though ultimately is a reflex I'm familiar with.
That being a prideful, desperate indignation.
That you don't deserve this, that you're above not just the poverty of your conditions but the ashen banality of them.
And the idea that you could and will rise above them, past the shore and the valley, past each and any archetypical ghetto, and luxuriate.
In a large house with an assorted partner. Slipping into the faint skins of work managing assets through the telephone wire, though it's your butlers who juice the 200 oranges and clean the clean pool.
Breakfast or lunch at 7:14, one of the two. It's the first thing you ate today.
You're clean of all liquids and epidermal layers. In another room you husband is throwing around clothes, same as your girlfriend.
There's a new party tonight. Animal-hard and careening in or out of your house, possessing it for a little while.
You're not ready.
But you won't know for 25 years.
Your benefactor's portrait calls to you from beyond the hard varnish, saying:
This is the life.

And specifically its inclusion into the novel, which struck me as odd and poetical at time, being so striking compared to the clear, even insistent, events and motivations elsewhere.
But I've come to realize that the contrast's the point, that these moments are a form of consolidation.
This project is not a formal work. I exchange the active voice instead for an exploration, to find the theme rather than argue for it.
These motions tracing the rim of the crater. Taking an Umbrian pace.
My struggle with the novel was not just with its language but the composition of its parts —partially out of a personal foreignness —but what had clarified it to me was the core pattern of all its conflicts.
And if I were to gesture to a theme, taken up in a vague and conversational tone, it would have to be at that pattern than an active phrase.
That patter of the seen against the unseen.
Fitzgerald, through the character of Nick, the half-believable, half-neutral confidant that he is, acts as a foil to that cloying exterior.
Called upon to cut through the marriage and the party, to realize, multiple times, the unsaid but present influences behind the story's soapy plot.
To trace those throughlines past the surface into its wet but dry-coloured underside
of repression.
which involves itself in the story in a circulatory relationship with desire.
Much of the text focuses overtly on desire, really, in its
debaucheries, parties maintained chiefly by Gatsby... though perhaps more accurately by his house, his disparate elements. reputation, his
Notably, however, this extends to the other characters as well.
If not in grand displays of hedonism than in even the small, intimate gatherings, where still they come to their heady limit. All direct sentiment is saved in direct conversations saved in rare, momentary sidebars, when one character doesn't have to front for another,
as seen in Jordan's reveal of Tom's infidelity (pg. 20, ch. I), or Daisy's admittance to her disillusionment nd cynicism (pg. 22, ch. I), for immediate examples. Also seen aptly in Nick's proclamation that he "wanted no more riotous excursions with privileged glimpses into the human heart" (pg. 8 ch. I)
acting as relief against the exuberant, tiresome facades of the Jazz Age's splendour, show increasingly as shallow among the throngsome descriptions of performance and relation,
as seen in Nick's disconcertion upon visiting a Gatsby party for the first time (pg. 43-44, ch. III), though of course Chapter VI's reported "quality of oppressiveness" (pg. 100, ch. VI) and the distaste the parties had caused Daisy (pg. 105, ch. VI) to the point in being shut down (pg. 109, ch. VII) is perhaps more exemplary.
though perhaps more relieving are the rarer exits into reflection, moments when Nick leaves the intense lives of his friends to a relaxed if slightly more melancholy affect,
as seen in the ends to Chapter I, II, V, and VI.
These moments always struck me as out of place.
As if brought up from that same unseen place.
And similarly was resolved soon as I understood that was the point.
The novel's structure is inlaid with these varyingly sized gatherings, not just for the relevance to plot but acts as demonstrative microcosms of that patter-pattern, in the issue of desire, earlier reinforced:
Those performances,
of bright, young things entrancing groups in brief conversations like a copper-coloured flare,
and those relations,
with the suited collegiates in amused, demeaning interest comparable to Tom and his demeanour.
and the glamorous but fundamentally insecure domains such desires come to manifest.
This, even in the progressive movements of the 1920's, is a mating ritual. Spoken-unspoken desires for people, or other people. For popularity, ecstasy, even love.
But it won't satisfy.
Participation here feels desperate, too accelerated. It's less a means to an end but instead to stave off the loneliness of not going, of not dancing. Instead to avoid those strange, melancholy moments of exit and absence in which everything that approaches you is subconscious and subversive.
To flirt a little. To be the prettiest thing in the room, the other rooms preoccupied with their prettiest thing. To engage with the temporary, to marry too early.
All this without any genuine connection.
This disconnect being especially apparent with Gatsby. Partially true is the ingratitude and superficiality of his guests, but despite the accusatory tone of the final chapter it is Gatsby himself who failed to make any true relationship with anybody. Parties, no matter how popular, couldn't make up for that.
This, referring to Gatsby's near-empty funeral, Owl-eyes observing , "[the guests] used to go there by the hundreds" (pg. 166, ch. IX).

dramas, in a push-pull cascade between various characters, variegated in subtle and inflamed ways, as said characters collude and collide with each other.
Obviously, the array of marriages and affairs is a prime example of this. But underpinning those and the other, non-sexual interactions is of that dry-wet underside of repression.
Repression follows and enacts that pattern-patter between the visible and not in how it's what's interfaced with desire. Aspects of wealth, gender, and idealism are borne out of history both personal and societal all influence the characters' supposed sincerity for one another.
In that dimension of wealth,
which, really, is particularly significant in the text —the dimension of wealth nearly entirely defines the relationships and motivation of all the characters, sexual or otherwise, and goes on to endow some of the core messaging of the novel. In that dimension of wealth,
all jealousy and dynamic is inflamed, metastasizing the bloody wetness of the underside being so fractious. It overlaps with the other dimensions out of its pure, untenable gravity.
Because it's not just the money that comes with wealth. It's also luxury, power, status and ease.
The main love triangle of the story between Tom, Daisy, and Gatsby relates back to this as well.
Gatsby's love for Daisy was due in part to a fetishization of her, her wealth and the almost magical quality that she had bequeathed to it and it to her. He saw her as a symbol of a social" stratum" (pg. 142, ch. VIII) he was not a part of...
and while as much of his love for her can be genuine and pure, he wanted her in part to confirm that strata for himself. In this way was he a wife to her, at least in regards to the time, seeking economic vitality from his partner rather than the other way around.
And more abrasive, more indicative of the fruit of his feeling, is his unkindness reducing her to an object, declaring his love while devaluing her opinion and autonomy, as seen in Chapter VII as he speaks over Daisy (pg. 124-127, ch. VII). He sees her instead as her green light, a kind of bright and harvestable future for himself, the vision which he had cultivated for himself when young. (pg. 171, ch. ix)

And Daisy's attraction to the two comes from that conflict, of love and wealth and desire for either or both. While as much as her love for Gatsby could be genuine and continuous, her failure of —in a way —keeping faithful to him comes from her increasing anxiety for stability and practicality (pg. 144, ch. VIII), something which quite literally could have been afforded for by Gatsby at the time, instead seeking a paternal affect and a wealthy background; all this she had found...
and found to be depressing. It's an unhappy marriage, hastily made from a place of vulnerability with the mild narcissist and cheater that Tom is. It too is another failure of genuine connection obfuscated by a picturesque exterior, and so is another example of the seen and unseen, the marriage and the affair peeled from under its gauzy surface.
And only sometimes does that affair could work to make a genuine connection, but in this case is another temporary pleasure built out of dissatisfaction and loneliness.
This on Tom's end, and especially the former quality of dissatisfaction, but equally true for Daisy.
Because more interesting to me is her complicity in it.
I'm thinking about her visage through "the pantry window" as she "and Tom [sat] opposite each other at the kitchen table," Nick remarking specifically that "[t]hey weren't happy, and neither of them had touched the [food] — and yet they weren't unhappy either. There was an unmistakable air of natural intimacy about the picture, and anybody would have said that they were conspiring together." (pg. 138 ch. VII)
Maybe, like the novel insists, there was a time in which Daisy and Gatsby could've been together. But she and Tom find a similarity in one another that, beyond the abuse and neglect she suffers, will always keep her to him.
Because he is someone she can fall back to. His wealthy background sensible keep in comparison to the raucous company of Gatsby makes the decision easier for her, even if what happened wasn't really a decision.
Yes, it's true that her situation is capture in an aspic of tragedy, similar to Myrtle and in a way that levies some sympathy. Her descriptions in the novel, warped as they might be, are the most positive of all the characters, at least until the final chapter.
But while the hit was accidental the run was not. The vague position in which she killed poor Myrtle (poor in a double-entendre) and the vague position in having Gatsby take the fall (though this again might have some forgiveness) confirms the mechanically passive ways in which she causes harm.
Indeed, despite his bias, it's as Nick states in his scathing review in Chapter IX, "[t]hey were careless people, Tom and Daisy — they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money and their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together" (pg. 170 ch. IX).

But there's a considerable front regarding the remainder two: Myrtle and George Wilson (though primarily Myrtle).
Myrtle's desire for Tom comes from a rejection of her husband George, the reason for which she traces back to his poverty, and to another extent, his inability to provide as a husband, Myrtle seeks a greater, more deserving place away from the Valley of the Ashes. The desire is so pronounced, with the difference between such and the fashionable East Egg more extensively pronounced, is that it practically drives Myrtle insane.
This would best be engendered by Myrtle' sighting of Jordan Baker whom she confuses for Daisy, and how her eyes were "wide with jealous terror" (pg. 119, ch. VII), and later on after being, frankly, imprisoned by her husband — which definitely had an influence on her mental state though presently it's beside the point —"she rushed out into the dark, waving her hands and shouting" (pg. 130, ch. VII), running "out to speak to [Gatsby, whom she confuses for Tom]" (pg. 151, ch. VIII)…
But instead, I think about when Nick once driving by "had a glimpse of Mrs. Wilson straining at the garage pump with panting vitality" (pg. 66, ch. IV).
Note distinctly her framing as 'Mrs. Wilson' as opposed to 'Myrtle' —as she does the labour of her and her husband's poverty she as well is relegated back to him. Despite her negative portrayal, or indeed despite her negative character, a thorough analysis into her character reveals the stunning, recursive tragedy she finds herself in.
And note also how this quote like others in the novel acknowledge, if glancingly, work itself.
Something not done, not visibly at least, by the wealthy main characters and their cavorting retinue, spending their time in the glassy daylight with glassier skin, cavorting in bacchanalia despite their conservative distaste.
For they have ease. Permitted, produced, and they don't even know it.

In that dimension of gender,
which is supplemented by the others, so intimate with the processes of relationships but practically invisible if the reader's unfamiliar —the dimension of gender may be unintentional on Fitzgerald's part but nonetheless, at the very least, contains revelations. In that dimension of gender,
relationships are organized by both order and role.
Order, who goes with who —though I have to clarify I won't faff around too long on the text's arguably gay undertones...
but will still applaud for its compatibility with the themes, that patter-pattern of the upfront and the repression, emphasis on repression. While I don't personally believe it to be true, because of said compatibility, it increases the novel's complexity, and more indicatively point out the mating ritual and the dissatisfying front-face which the novel's relationships are constrained by,
To note, the gay undertone is a popular interpretation based upon Nick's idolization of Gatsby and certain dynamics held between some of the male characters... but again is not something I would argue for.

Role, in some archetypal and economic sense.
The subject contains some subtlety, which means it contains some difficulty to explicate. But there are some prefigures.
Myrtle's derision of George as not being able to provide comes not just from an admonishment of his poverty but of his masculinity as well. Reflecting that, Daisy's desire for Tom is not only for his economic safety but the masculine archetype he fulfills given that. This especially strengthened by his physical description, one of the few in the novel.
Tom is an especially applicable figure, engendering masculinity in its occurrent, negative extreme, often also styled around bigotry both misogynist and racist (pg. 18, ch. I). He sates the archetype in his body, hulking and cruel (pg. 17, ch. I); his demeanour, generally arrogant (pg. 12, ch. I); his history, in a roundabout way, having been a jock who peaked in college to now where "everything savours of anti-climax" (pg. 11, ch. I); and extends itself with or in his socioeconomic status.
All these critical descriptors (and critical in a double-entendre) is how Fitzgerald condemns this character, and the people who occupy that negative extreme that Tom represents. But that's only one fragment in the wash.
Most denotative is Jordan's character, she who bears the Roaring 20's most famous stereotype: the flapper. In contrast to much of the cast, but in slight likeness to the women of said cast, Jordan is complex. At least, when it comes to what she represents, how she acts and what she's done.
Flappers taking upon and taken upon the financial emancipation the war had afforded them meant there was new leverage in being equal to men. Like flappers, Jordan, in her historically masculine name no less, loosen from feminine markers of fashion and conduct. Jordan smokes, drinks, flirts; things considered subversive in the 1920's, and to a lesser extent now.
But while her self-sufficiency and proud discernment is admirable from a feminist perspective, and carries some mild support by Fitzgerald, her character is complex for how she as well represents the negatives of the era. Once again in the pattern-patter of the upside and the underside.
The prideful discernment she envelops herself in, which preserves her "wan, charming, discontented smile" (pg. 16, ch. I), often branded with contempt, is a defence mechanism. Nick aptly describes this as her "instinctively avoid[ing] clever, shrewd men, and now [he] saw that this was because she felt safer on a plane where any divergence from a code would be thought impossible. She was incurably dishonest. She wasn't able to endure being at a disadvantage and, given this unwillingness, I suppose she had begun dealing in subterfuges when she was very young in order to keep that cool, insolent smile turned to the world and yet satisfy the demands of her hard, jaunty body" (pg. 58, ch. III). It's another bright façade sheltering insecurity.
Also notable is, like Tom, the fact she comes from wealth, from old money, Tom stating that her family is "about a thousand years old" (pg. 23, ch. I) from the same place he comes from, confirming the distal judgement that renders her self and speech as ironic. She, like Daisy, also avoids the consequences of her actions, stating "it takes two to make an accident" (pg. 59, ch. III), shucking off accountability in accordance to the rest of her dishonesty.
But ultimately, Jordan is more nuanced than she is hypocritical. In the fricative individualism of her character, partially of an increasing feminism but also of a larger, uniquely American cultural development, Jordan is more than a nostalgia-poisoned cautionary tale. She in some aspects represents the American Dream itself...
And in other aspects, the Dream's rotting absence.

And each of these, in intersection with gender and desire and its respective failures of form —repression, but also subversion, exhibition, each in its way a negative expression —prefigure the seemingly basic rulings that exist subconsciously but can't help to come manifest.
They in each case study come to poison the expectations and outcomes of the characters' relationships. They saddle each other with gender, with its uniformity alongside its amorphous renewal, in each case study to negative effect.
The underside upturned to a suddenly pink skin, or spackled with something iridescent.
A multicolour which in this light looks like bruises.

In that dimension of idealism,
which is really the concentration of desire, and so is found everything the characters want from each other —the dimension of idealism is appreciable considering the once-again theme of the seen and unseen, idealism being of the seen.
Or at least trying to be. Once again, a cloying and glamorous exterior unable to follow up on its promise, not once you breach the surface level into its interior.
This is present in the other dimensions, where an ideal form of wealth and an ideal possession of gender comes to shape and encumber the characters' desire.
And nowhere is it more present than in the character of Gatsby, whom Nick heralds as a paragon of idealism.
Saying, "there was something gorgeous about him, some heightened sensitivity to the promises of life … it was an extraordinary gift for hope, a romantic readiness such as I have never found in any other person..." (pg. 2. ch. I).
But as true in his quality as that may be, amongst Nick's distortions in spite of his supposedly honest character, it can't be said that it's a virtuous quality at all.
Indeed, it is what killed him. His desire for an idealized wealth, his desire for an idealized woman, or more rather and idealized Daisy with her horizon-far green light.
His wealth which he half lucked into and half broken the law for, and afforded the grand parties which failed him in commitment and connection, his wealth which still left him dissatisfied.
Even as I'm thinking about when Gatsby, after a tour with Nick and Daisy of his big house, threw casually his imported clothes, his beautiful shirts (pg. 89, ch. V). I'm thinking about when he has the pool closed after the summer for its lack of use after the summer (pg. 146, ch. VIII). I'm thinking about every action of not just excess but its waste.
His woman, or he had desperately hoped so, and despite the resurgence of their affair never was his at all, his commitment to Daisy being what killed him in its roundabout way as he took the fall for Myrtle's murder.
That's the green light; not just the "green breast of the new world" (pg. 171, ch. IX) and its unattainability, its far off and far-gone window of potential of the American Dream never mind the colonialist implications, but also his idealism of and devotion to that achievement.
Every night watching it burn across the blue-black bay. As he rankles against the bounds of his money, his power, his gift for hope.

of preconditions, and from there, the past.
On preconditions,
I had a poor childhood. An immigrant and slightly terrifying one, in no ingratitude to the privilege I did have, mind you, but nonetheless a poor one.
And continuously has that environment shaped the way I live today, affecting my opinion on the novel and its characters. Its characters with their exorbitant lifestyles and ungracious squabbles, the abrasive measure of which they didn't deserve the ease that they slather themselves in.
Things borne out of their own preconditions, their childhood environments and inheritance. Many of them come from wealthy backgrounds, such as Tom, Daisy, and Jordan... but many of them don't.
And this impacts their lifestyles. Said wealthy and historically wealthy characters have each been written in a kind of emotionally remote, superiority-laden viewership of the people around them as a result of their childhoods —evidenced elsewhere —which defines their irreconciliation, their snubbing of what they see as markers of poverty. Of course, while no direct interaction of classism is present, similar to the underside influences of gender, their desperation to extend their status of "old money" is present in their desires of and for each other, said earlier in that underside of repression.
I mention my own precondition because I'll admit it causes me bias. And I mention my bias because I have to consider Nick to hold the same.
He describes his family as well-to-do (a middle class far more plausible in the 1920's than now) as the legacy of a hardware store, and he himself carries "an unaffected scorn" for rich's "abortive sorrows and shortwinded elations" (pg. 8, ch. I). These are people that he couldn't help to judge, against all his ministrations and his virtue-signaling... except for Gatsby.
What's the difference? The source of his money. He, unlike Tom, Gatsby, Daisy, had a poor, dismaying childhood he spent all his time trying to vault over. And while the source of his money is not at all principled (pg. 127-128, ch. VII) like Gatsby would later be portrayed to be (pg. 164, ch. IX), he did in comparison at least build himself from the ground up, finding relation and parallel to Nick.
I mention my immigration as a influential aspect of my identity for the divergences which I had to muddle through when young, the kind of paradoxical conclusions it had forced upon me. Not just in the plainly negative outcomes but just the contention of straddling the border, of heeding into a place without knowing you've entered.
And in faint, sidereal traces does Fitzgerald affix a geographic importance to the story, writing "that this has been a story of the West, after all — Tom and Gatsby, Daisy and Jordan and [Nick], were all Westerners, and perhaps [they] possessed some deficiency in common which made us subtly unadaptable to Eastern Life" (pg. 167, ch. IX).
The applause multiculturalism and diversity receive in Canada, while admirable and substantiated in parts, is more a glittery fixture on that idealist exterior, an optics-based satiation. Though not with too much complaint I can't say the accession was easy.
And of course, Canada isn't the States... but there's some reproduction. Gatsby in an aspect represents the American Dream, being that self-made "by the bootstraps" magnate, something Nick can't make a singular statement on but does fall in love with. (In reference to Jordan, to some arguable homoerotic undertones, to the idea itself.. "fall in love" in a triple entendre.)
Notably as, despite the glowing reviews made in the first and last chapters, Nick did not spend the novel approving of him like a votary might to his idol, mentioning his gladness at "the only compliment [he] ever gave him" (pg. 147, ch. VIII).
And this dissonance, among the many other dissonances of the text, and so falls in line with that pattern-patter, is marked for what it means to the American Dream.
His representation is inimical to desperation, crime, and an ultimate failure. Despite his praise, Gatsby is not a clean character.
Elsewhere, in other arguments and in the novel, it's obvious that the American Dream is unattainable, is a little light misted in the horizon, and so is it fitting that after Gatsby's death does Nick idolize him.
Because I have difficulty. My caustic living in the underside of a national optic has taught me of that dissonance, and so glaring is it shown here. Because, like Gatsby,
the American Dream is dead.

On the past,
the novel seems to have contradictory evaluations.
In one hand, much of the problematic aspects involved with the characters' desires seem to be their pure inapproachability of being in the past.
Tom's history, his precondition, of peaking when young, contorts the rest of his life as constantly dissatisfying, exacerbating his actions as chases fleeting pleasures in assumed replication of that window of the time, cheating heavily (pg. 75, ch. IV) without any sign of enjoyment (pg. 39, ch. II), unaware of the dissonance that recourses within him in this.
But Tom suffers no character arc that may indict him to change his conditions, to review his past and change his future, and himself; instead, he and Daisy return to the same faltering but tenable dynamic where he'll eventually cheat again, a symptom of his dissatisfaction.
Gatsby's window was his time with Daisy, mesmerized by not just "her warm human magic" (pg. 104, ch. VI) but also the glistening of her wealth and social "stratum" (pg. 142, ch. VIII), and it upends his life as he chases after her and her status's possession of him to possess himself.
But Gatsby, out of character flaw regarding his idealism, gets himself killed after a prolonged dissatisfaction wasting his money trying to attract her to him, because he couldn't move on from that chance opportunity, that perfect image of bright porch and a fashionable squeak (pg. 142, ch. VIII).
Not coincidentally are these two men pitted against each other in their individual pursuits to the past,
but while one "gets the girl" and the other dies, they both lose.
And so in these characters does Fitzgerald condemn the futile action of seeking the past. Note also Tom's traditional worldviews, which in less obvious ways are continuously ridiculed and undermined, whether by Daisy's light attitude upon such (pg. 24, ch. I) or the various inclusions of Black people as upstanding and casual (pg. 133, ch. VII).
Indeed, the period's social movements are an undeniable argument for progress, which in ways Fitzgerald stands for. But he does not simplify it into just that.

In the other, much of the moral degradation involved with the characters' actions seem to be symptomatic of the then present era, the Roaring 20's.
The extravagance and shallowness, the raffish and tepid values which courses through the circuit which enables carelessness, dishonesty... The Great Gatsby is a period piece of the time it was made in, a "tragedy" of manners, if you will.
Not just of the decadent and/or pretentious attitudes of the characters, metastasized or at least visualized by the era's economic prosperity, but the unbridled, ultimately suspicious optimism that defined the decade. The trouble of the future, the weight of it, is in its uncertainty.
I'm thinking about Nick's thirtieth birthday, tumultuous and definitive as it was, and his idea of the future as "portentous menacing road" (pg. 129, ch. VII), virulent with capacity, capacity for —
In his proclamation on the foul dust of the American Dream, corroborated elsewhere in this work, Fitzgerald inquires into the moral standards and their betraying undersides, the night lives of the same people so exclamatory of virtue and rigour. This in the dimension of wealth, also explored elsewhere in this work.
I'm also thinking about the last paragraphs of the novel, with its recursive metaphor regarding the supposed New World "commensurate to [people's] capacity for wonder", regarding the "orgastic future" (pg. 171, ch. IX) only discoverable, only reachable in the past.
While Nick's commendation in this way is warped by his bias for Gatsby, and indeed the statement's logic is originally faulty, the significance of history and its overhang influence the entirety of the novel, not just in the quotation but in the motivations of the characters and the conditions in which they live in.
Through this metaphor does Fitzgerald make the past and future inextricable from each other, an intricate push-and-pull pattern, significant in the novel as one of its themes, recalling historical context when in analysis and romantic readiness with its characters. Which is to say that that original contradiction, like many other antagonisms in the novel, is part of the point.
The future-past redolent with influencing factors, subconscious flares in yesterday's colours and tomorrow's fires.
Virulent with capacity, probably for wonder but by Fitzgerald's description everything else as well.

of orbital themes, orbital touchstones.
Which is mostly my particular journey putting this together, rough-shod off my own perception of its plot and language. Because I was confused,
not just for the slightly viscous but ultimately beautiful writing, a feature probably due to its time of publishing and to Fitzgerald himself, and the boundary that that made for me in understanding the events, much less certain subtextual gestures,
which I could tell were present but had difficulty in parsing. But I was confused in how, after I worked through the language and parsed out themes, they still didn't fit in my mind properly.
And I say themes now because I've done some exploring.
Elsewhere in this work I discuss in depth the characters and their relationships to each other and how across their affairs and actions certain dualities appear.
Wealth and poverty; old money and new money; ease and effort; love in marriage and infidelity; visible grandeur and its skeletons in the closet; the past and the future circling hungry around the present; idealism and cynicism, optimism and realism; push and pull and pattern and patter as these antagonisms develop and unfold...
All this seemed too disparate, too rife, each pair on their own a weighty subject. I felt caught up in the excess of it.
But I imagine that's what Fitzgerald might've felt too, watching the blustering death throes of the American Dream and how it'd settle its carcass around him and that decade entirely.
Only to trim and caress its wreckage into a novel and a work, braided through with its upside and underside of repression, of past and precondition, of certain themes and touchstones
which point to the basic dissonance of living, the rhythm of it.
Patter-patter-pattern, the partygoers walking up your glossy cobbles into your modern house, vivacious and forgetful, and deeply sad.
A century old but indeed does the avoidance issue communicate, the cognitive dissonance displacing you from your problems and everyone else's too.
Similarly do I feel "overwhelmed by excess" just going online, bursting internally from overexposure and aggregation.
Watching the rot of that dream still rasp eerily in my sleep.
And your sleep too.
Because it's dinner at 6:16 AM, the pee-shivers and afterquakes of the party still reverberating through your house.
Those antagonisms could not exist without each others. As direct as it may be it represents the mangled extremity of seeking a future you might want to live in.
And I understand now, collecting those hot vertices,
tracing the outline of a crater.
You go to sleep in the dark, the attempted dark, of the house since the party's over.
The colourful frills and tassels tinnying beneath you. All their detail muffled beneath the black.
The sun is at a penultimate position. It calls to you from outside the glossy hardness of your house. But your blinds are closed.
Your eyes too, tight as you can.
And despite the dubious outcome of such distortion, perhaps that is why Nick fell for Gatsby so.
That even amongst the offending throng of people and their inflammatory desires, and the brilliant exteriors in which they hide their darkness in,
and despite the negative outcomes of what you may only suppose as the purest of intentions, everything more positive than it actually is, as proven elsewhere regarding Gatsby’s past and underside,
guilty as it is,
hope remains.
"Reserving judgement is a matter of infinite hope" (pg. 1, ch. I), as Nick declares.
The last thing left in the box. The little presentiment, as green and yellow as the rest of the world.
Cool against your skin just before you sleep.