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RARA-AVIS: Pearls before gulls.
I've stayed out of the delightful pearl exchange, but now that duggan says
(rightly) that we gotta move on, I can't resist one more meditation on the
ending of "Red Wind." He throws the pearls, one by one, at floating
seagulls. So...
"Casting pearls before swine," except they are glass beads and the
creatures are gulls. Granted gulls may be close, dumb winged greediness
that they are. And they swoop down as if...
he were really "casting bread on the waters" (well bits of bread), the
bread of life for these birds. But wait,...
in Renaissance English drama, the word "gull" denoted a natural victim,
someone "gullible" enough to be fooled. And if you want to get
someone--like a cop who's a fraud himself, a copper nickel--what you do is
"gull" him. Ok, then...
just as Lola was gulled by Stan Phillips about the pearls,
just as Lola gulled her husband (though not really) about the pearls being
fakes,
just as Marlowe gulled Lola about her pearls by giving her fakes of the fakes,
so Marlowe gulls gulls with pearl fakes faking (bread). [Say it five times
fast.]
Been fun,
Bill Hagen
<billha@ionet.net>
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