This section begins with some insults for "Awful Offspring" from Ned Nosepicker's Book of 50,000 Insults. Judging by the quality of the three insults excerpted, I'm glad this isn't a real book that exists. Because the insults aren't that great unless you've already read Gravity's Rainbow and, even then, they're terrible. They rely on the person recognizing the name and career of Dr. Laszlo Jamf. So even if the book were real and Dr. Laszlo Jamf were real, the person who's kid you were trying to insult when you tried out the line, "When Jamf conditioned him, he threw away the stimulus," would probably stare incomprehensively at you while trying to decide if whatever the fuck you were saying was worth an assault charge.
For first time readers wondering what the fuck that Dr. Jamf insult shit was, they won't have long to wait. Unless they gave up on the book right after reading that introduction and then I guess they have to wait as long as it takes for them to try finishing Gravity's Rainbow yet again. I suppose for most people who aren't stubbornly intelligent people like me, that amount of time is determined by some sort of calculation of an infinite set approaching zero.
Look, I'm not Pynchon! I don't understand higher maths and Pavlovian theory and history! I'm just a vulgar jerk on the Internet "pretending" to be stupid so that people think I'm smart!
Pointsman approaches Pudding with his plan to experiment on Tyrone Slothrop. Pudding is resistant to the plan. But that's before Pointsman says, "I know a woman who is willing to piss and shit in your mouth. Now will you fund it?" And Pudding is all, "Take my money!"
Pointsman alludes to Tyrone Slothrop's earliest years as an infant and how he was experimented on by Lazslo Jamf. Apparently it's common knowledge evidenced by how Ned Nosepicker used it in his insults in a book that, I'm assuming since there are 50,000 insults, wasn't meant for a niche market. Lazslo experiment was thus:
"Unconditioned stimulus = stroking penis with antiseptic cotton swab.
Unconditioned response = hardon.
Conditioned stimulus = x.
Conditioned response = hardon whenever x is present, stroking is no longer necessary, all you need is x."
While the experiment was widely circulated, the knowledge of stimulus x was never revealed. I've read Gravity's Rainbow but that doesn't mean I'm positive that it's ever truly revealed. Although it's almost certainly the smell of Jamf's experimental plastic Imipolex G.
It's in this section where the reader discovers the reason for calling Chapter One "Beyond the Zero." It's about deconditioning subjects when the doctors are through with the experiment. If x causes Baby Slothrop to get a hardon, one must decondition Baby Slothrop to not get a hardon from x before ending the experiment and releasing him back into non-experimental civilian life. But the deconditioning does not end as soon as Baby Slothrop does not get a hardon at the presence of x. That's the zero point: no evidenced physical response to the stimulus. But Baby Slothrop is still reacting to the stimulus, just up to but not quite reaching the point where he gets a hardon. The deconditioning must take into account all of the conditioning prior to the evidenced hardon. This is going beyond the zero.
Now how does the concept of beyond the zero work thematically with Gravity's Rainbow? Let me pause to think about it.
Perhaps—now give me room to speculate here—the conditioning is living in a war under the threat of rocket attacks and everything else that goes with it. That would make the zero the end of the war. Which would presuppose that just because the war ended and the rockets stopped falling, people have not been deconditioned past the zero. They've simply lost the stimulus to which they had been responding. More than that, what if we're supposing the main metaphor of the stimulus is the rocket itself to which nobody could react anyway because it strikes before a person knew it was coming? So the stimulus is simply constant fear and paranoia of death. When the war ends, the fear and paranoia do not simply go away because there is no method to go beyond the zero to remove the conditional response. Saying the war is over and everybody is now safe and the world will return to normal is taking the patient to the zero. But not beyond. A generation must now grow up full of fear and paranoia with no idea why because there's no actual stimulus. They've just been saddled with the conditioned response that was never taken beyond the zero because there was no cathartic expression for the end of the war. One day, it was just over. Now imagine the next generation growing up under the guidance of all of these people who have not been taken beyond the zero of their conditioned response of fear and paranoia. Perhaps the postmodern experience of the world through the eyes of this and their subsequent generations is the abreaction, the release and expression of all of this fear and paranoia. It then makes sense why the atomic bomb is one of the most blatant symbols of the postmodern era.
Pointsman wants to experiment on Tyrone while everybody else at The White Visitation simply espouses theories on his ability to protect where a rocket will hit by fucking somebody in the spot a few days before the rocket lands. Most of the theories, of course, rely on their fields of expertise as explanation.
Pointsman is the most boggled because the hardon/rocket relationship shows all the signs of a Pavlovian stimulus/response but in reverse. The reaction takes place days before the stimulus. But the two cannot be denied because Slothrop's map of sexual conquests matches up exactly with Roger Mexico's Poisson distribution map of rocket strikes. The two are somehow linked. The problem is discovering how. Oh, Pointsman is also frustrated by the idea that women are allowing Slothrop to have sex with him. Why him?! That must be part of it, right?! Or else—Mexico's statistics and Poisson distribution being in effect everywhere—wouldn't Pointsman be getting laid at least occasionally as well?!
Oh, I should put a quote I like in here now. Something to do with Poisson distribution, probably.
"But if it's in the air, right here, right now, then the rockets follow from it, 100% of the time. No exceptions. When we find it, we'll have shown again the stone determinacy of everything, of every soul. There will be precious little room for any hope at all. You can see how important a discovery like that would be."
I mean, is Pointsman fucking depressing or what?! "Hey guys! Wanna see my Nobel Prize for eradicating the concept of free will?! It's right over here in my study which you're fated to walk into now!"
The section ends with Pointsman and Mexico having a conversation on the coast (I mean, mostly ends. It actually ends on four more descriptive paragraphs but this is the main part). On my first read (I mean second read (possibly third read)), I got the general gist of it: Pointsman, for some reason, wants Mexico's approval and support for the coming Tyrone Slothrop experiment. But there's more to it and that's what I've got to chew over on yet another read through right now.
Jessica has put in Mexico's mind the half of the sexual encounter that isn't Slothrop: the women. What about the women? The rockets are raining down where Slothrop has his sexual encounter which probably means on the women's apartments or homes. Could there be an aspect of misogyny here? Consciously, unconsciously, or completely at random, these women are being hurt. And all the men interested in Slothrop's hardons haven't given them a second thought.
Pointsman seeks a purely mechanical and physiological explanation for Slothrop's rocket hardons predictions. How can there not be cause and effect when the pattern is obvious: hardon then rocket. Every time. But Mexico is open to other possibilities. Perhaps cause and effect, perhaps the linear way of looking at things, of reading experiments and explaining history . . . perhaps that's obsolete. Maybe there's a new way of looking at things, he suggests. Pointsman doesn't buy it but he is open to some new insight. But only based on the evidence. And so, a new experiment using what they have: ". . . reversal of rocket sounds to go on . . . clinical history of sexual conditioning, perhaps to auditory stimuli, and what appears to be a reversal of cause-and-effect."
The hardest part of the section will probably turn out to be the most important. But it's a section I can't fully get a grasp on because it discusses more Pavlovian theory. It's about Pavlov's beliefs on obsession and paranoid delusion, exactly the things Slothrop deals with in Chapter Two. Pointsman's plan is to manipulate Slothrop through the various stages of paranoia and obsession so they can determine, without his bias and through only secret observation, why he does the things he does. And maybe that can answer why the rockets fall where they do (although Pointsman admits that he's not really interested in the rocket problem and only brings it up in the hopes of getting Roger's support).
I should probably figure out this ultraparadoxical stuff before moving on but it hurts my brain. I'm just going to stick it in my brain surrounded by an inhibited area of my brain and let it percolate until I'm so obsessed with it that I'll definitely understand it but also I'll probably realize the ultraparadoxical phase is just a big conspiracy to get me to forget to eat and sleep properly.
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