This is Malcolm Lowry again, his experimental novel, Ultramarine (1933).
I’m tired today and it is hard to read. My eyes jump all over the place. I cannot attach to the rhythms of sentences, but here is a sentence that imitates its subject so perfectly I feel restored by it, gladdened, refreshed and also entertained. Here is a train swaying across a set of train tracks; a train made up of several compartments represented here by parsed words and phrases, four units, four carriages.
An electric train
friendly
swayed past
blue lightnings in its wake.
Lowry is an experimental writer, by which we mean - (I think) - he believes writing can recreate its subject, can lean into other forms, other media. Can produce the effect of something real and actual: lived, felt, visceral. A sentence about a train can imitate the sound and movement of a train, and also the structure of a train. And it is the structure we respond to, the syntax, the order of words; the fact that the adjective, ‘friendly’, follows after the noun-phrase, an ‘electric train’, which we might think is less than friendly because it carries ‘blue lightning’. Blue lightning[s] sounds alarming, and although the image might remind us of the sea — and in the context of a novel set at sea almost certainly does — in the context of modernity may seem less than friendly. Alienating, aggressive even. Reading, after all, is also an historic experience; we read in and through the time of the novel. At least we must if we are to be fully sympathetic readers.
But here the lightning is plural, several, suggesting a populace, a group, a smaller subset, which might be friendly. Lightning is not singular and frightening — it is not lightning that strikes — but lightning reduced to something smaller. Perhaps a set of electrical sparks that jump and dance up from the train tracks: a set of blue fireflies. We might call such sparks ‘blue lightnings.’ Once we begin to call something other than it is we start to make it our own. We are less frightened.
‘Swayed’ is also familiar: a body sways, a tree sways, organic life sways, and the train is swaying. Bodies when they touch and hold sway, together, in unison. Friendly, swaying past, the train leaves blue lightnings in its wake. We can also read backwards and attach ‘swayed past’ to the word before it — ‘friendly’ — and so turn friendly into an adverb. These blue lightnings are electric but they do not bring harm — they are friendly — and they sway past in a friendly manner. And so the image becomes ours, we adopt it, and so join the train.