IJ study archive

Orin's Phoenix morning — "So now his own eye-mucus is…"

quote

So now his own eye-mucus is secure, in the Desert Southwest; but the bad dreams have gotten worse since the trade to this blasted area Himself himself had fled, long ago, as an unhappy youngster.

Context

The hinge sentence of the scene's dream-material: Orin fled New Orleans's waking horrors (the eye-mucus-feeding roaches, the sliding graveyard) only for the dreams to worsen in the desert his father escaped as a boy — geographic flight as dream-aggravation. "Himself himself" is as the raw has it, the family nickname colliding with the pronoun.

In anthology