One has to make an assumption that Jaime uses physical symbols that reflect Maggie’s romantic psyche. Foul-smelling water is a symbol of death (from Pelleas and Melisande), and also of romantic revival.
Maggie consistently holds onto things – her memories, faith in fickle human nature – and this is sometimes used against her by an uncaring world.
When her attachment to Vivian goes astray, she rebounds to the province of Izzy.
There is a fun scene depicting these pseudo moderns who care only for coffee
(CC Beck quote HB31)
Her dreams are a mix of real (the crucifix) and not real, the darkness at the heart of Maggie. Viewing the story through this symbolic prism, the fabulous elements are Maggie's psychic attachments to a physical world of darkness.
From that darkness springs regeneration, so it is a psychic strength that the modern order does not posses. It's living in the world of physical processes that can decay and that are real.
Jaime also makes quite a case of Maggie attempting to distance herself from her roots, without much success. She is town, they are country; she is north, they are south; she is "white", they are Mex.
The racial, fascist undertone is handled adroitly, in a way the mainstream media never do! For a start, is not Silicon Valley the white land where everyone is safe and drinks coffee all the time on safari-colored sofas? Once the Anglo-culture develops the cult of order to such a level, what is there to do other than drink coffee?
This is the world we're really in, since all the leading heads belong to the same-Anglo culture of the head. As I think was said elsewhere, once society is "ordered", how can one order order? It's what the Speaker says at the opening of debates, just a figure of speech.
Once one has pure order the only way to go is to have disorder. Meaning the power of dreams and the physical underworld of decay and regrowth, foul-smelling waters.
If one looks at people like Mark Carney - or even Trump - they are pure heads living in a world of pure money. Numerical/Anglo. Numbers or technology and the monetary system are two sides of one coin.
All the solutions they proffer - whether Biden or Trump - encapsulate the same monetary problem. The problem is neither physical nor psyche - simply number.
Instead of a flesh-&-blood reality (that lives and dies) Trump resembles a façade spouting numbers and supping drugs, a nightmare born of hi-tech and low-psychology. His seeming antipathy to the Californian Valleys is just a bad joke, as it is the same logical junk of the compulsive ego; a convincing nothingness in terms of the physical realism and dreams of the psyche (universe).
The lyrical universe of Jaime can seem sad (somewhat like Ghostworld) when one is living in an uncaring world. But in fact it's the realism that touches one in a world full of pseuds. This is also caught in an exchange with Hopey.
