We learn explicitly -- as we perhaps only suspected last week from the Catch 22 reference -- that there isn’t any justice.  Harriers love to make it up for themselves as they go along; that way, they can be the Judge and the Jury all by themselves.  In Harry’s case, no one is interested in his guilt or innocence.  He is presented as guilty and assumed to be guilty without ever seeing the evidence against him.  But The Table of Harrier Days now offers us another view, and it would seem that Harry is taking the opportunity to set a few things straight.

The reading from Psongs this week speaks of the rum-running days of Prohibition.  From our vantage point, some seventy years removed, it seems quaint, almost homey and warm.  The secret sins of the speakeasy, the slapstick silliness of the police trying to stop people from having a drink, and the deadly but archaic fireworks of combatants equipped with Model-A Fords and tommyguns all seem innocent and charmingly American somehow.  Is this how we we will come to view the 'War on Drugs' of our own day?  Will it look as ultimately harmless seventy years from now as Prohibition does to us?  Will we view the druglords of today as nostalgically, as fondly, as we view the rum-runners of the Roaring Twenties?

But our sepia-tinted images of Prohibition are deceiving.  Psongs exposes us to full-color emotions we can recognize in any age. People really do get killed in the bootleg whiskey business.  They are killed for a variety of reasons.  And they're not the only victims. Some of the survivors lose control of their lives and become subject to the whims of powers beyond their reach (Psong.56.6).  Nicholas is a victim in this sense. Of course, in his much more contemporary conflict, Harry seems in total control of his destiny.  Is Psong.56 therefore highlighted here as a point of contrast?  Or, is there a sense in which Harry, too, is being carried along by forces beyond his control? A sense in which he must do what he is doing because he has no choice?

Harry as Dantes as The Count of Monte Cristo as You-Know-Who
If you haven’t read Alexander Dumas’ The Count of Monte Cristo, stop and do so now (CLICK HERE).  This book provides a tremendous insight into the events of this week.  As Pnot.37 reports, Dantes gets thrown in the slammer – just like Harry.  But Dantes was imprisoned unjustly – he was innocent, betrayed by  friends who envied him.  Clearly, Harry is innocent and the Table knows it.  The Table wants you to know it, too, because the rest of Dantes’ story is so similar to Harry’s as to be unavoidable.  The source of Harry’s wealth is unknown, even though his followers insist on telling us that it's derived from illegal drug trade.  But both the Count of Monte Cristo and Candide (from last week) have sources of wealth unknown to those around them.  So it seems logical that this might be true of Harry as well.

Now Harry goes about avenging himself upon his enemies – just like Dantes and just like somebody else that Dumas was pointing to with his Count.  Ring the bells:  this is the clearest evidence given that Harry’s story points to the story of Christ.  This is not a trick.  TBB is full of sirens announcing that the followers of Harry are not to be trusted.  The fact that they have given such a poor report of Harry is hardly surprising.  The job of the ICR and the Table is to show us the same facts in a completely different context and allow us to get to the true meaning of the text.

Think I’ve gone off the deep end?  Check out the ICR for Pnot.37.  Everything points to Christ.  Especially Psay.5X , which connects to Dav.15.26 to Jeff.3.1-6, “Whatever [he] said, it must have been controversial, Which anything new usually is, Because a lot of the people who heard him, Or heard about him, Thought they'd like him better if he were dead.  And so they killed him, [or sent him to Prison instead.]”

Ned.50-53 recounts the “Miracles” that occurred in just three days at the hand of Harry.  The Judge (Ned.51.3) had been told that Harry was The One (c. Ned.47.8-13) and suffers fatally for his temerity.  The friendly uncle in Atlantic City (Ned.52.4) and his six bodyguards (Ned.52.7) meet with a similar end.  And in a totally unexplained turn of events, Harry's pilot is also called to account. Hiding in their hotel rooms, the followers await their own turn in fear and dread.

Against this backdrop, we read the verse for the week from Psom.26 (or if we're on our toes, the actual verse written by Charles Algernon Swinburne):

From too much love of living,
         From hope and fear set free,
    We thank with brief thanksgiving
         Whatever gods may be
    That no man lives for ever;
    That dead men rise up never;
    That even the weariest river
         Winds somewhere safe to sea.

They are gone now, never to return.  It does create quite the mood to read all of Swinburne’s verse aloud and I would urge you to do that sometime in the very near future.

Ira.45 is unsure that the figure in the video is Harry, but Psong.56 removes all the mystery as we are reminded that "Nicholas the Senior" went to his friend’s funeral in disguise.  Here is the bag of hearts Harry placed in Marisa’s grave.  Whose hearts were they?  How many?  It turns out to be an important number, as so many numbers in TBB are . . .

Wil.75.19 identifies Harry as a cool customer, a verse whose ICR connects to Ned.54.9 , which connects to Psp.3.9 , which refers to Vonnegut's life-annihilating ICENINE:  “Nine is the number of ultimate ice, which will bind up the shattered with a strange love of still life.”  This, in turn, connects to Psayings.5Q.65, “the hand that rocks the cradle rules the world,” thence to Ed.74.3, which shows us children in mouse ears watching television.  The ICENINE verse in Pspeciastes also connects to Lies.2.13, an image of the bad apple in Eden, and to a line in T.S. Eliot's The Wasteland: "There is no water." Collectively, we experience an array of images which ask us to see Harry freezing into the static sterility of a modern world whose pursuits are tainted, empty, and increasingly passive. Is Harry a victim of this cold world? Is he a symbolic sacrifice? Is he a prime mover of some sort, a catalyst for change or, perhaps, the coup de grace? But we may never know, because he is departing in his Learjet for a distant destination. If we could just get inside that jet, we might learn something, but how would we go about doing that?

In our final reading, Wil.76 closes the book on Harry's adventures in Philadelphia.  Don’t miss the description in Ira.44 pointed at via the ICR.  It is quite a scene.  What to do now? . . . wait until next week.
 

So there.