I've been avoiding this part for a few days because writing about it is going to expose my inability to comprehend any writing that refuses to insert a paragraph break at least once per page. Reading three or four pages that are also just one paragraph must be how Bilbo felt wandering through Mirkwood without any food and beset by giant spiders. I can only relate to things through references to The Hobbit. "Being fat in junior high was like discovering you were the joke dwarf who always fell in the river or couldn't be pulled up a rope or fell into a self-induced coma when there wasn't enough food and too many miles to hike by throwing yourself into a 'magic' river!" I mean, seriously, nobody believes Bombur was actually unconscious for days, right? He probably woke up after an hour or so and realized he was being carried and was all, "Oh, um, snore! I'm snoring still!"
The never ending paragraphs of the last nine pages of this section begin with Roger and Jessica passing by a church around Christmas. A bunch of soldiers are singing religious songs so that Pynchon can discuss a bunch of stuff like colonialism and more colonialism and, I don't know, religion? Toothpaste maybe? Is this when he goes off on toothpaste?!
Roger sees Jessica's reaction to the people going in for service and he surprises her by stopping and suggesting they go inside. It surprises Jessica because Roger has been such a cynic about religion and the paranormal and Christmas. But he explains to her as they walk inside, "To hear the music." Yeah, buddy. Sure. More like "Because I fucking love you and I saw the way the entire scene caught in your throat and threatened to overwhelm you with nostalgia and memory."
After that, it's all, well, Pynchon stuff. We begin with noticing only one face in the choir is black: a Jamaican corporal from Kingston. And since we (we being the narrator and the reader, discovering these things together, I suppose) have noticed him, we might as well take a quick peak at his life back on the island, right?! And from there, we can, through a passing description of the different coins he has gathered by singing on the streets, get a glimpse of how the Empire works. This island native brought to England to fight Britain's war only to wind up in an Anglican church singing songs in German. All this to sort of drive a certain point home in a bit of writing that I loved the first time I read this and I loved the second time I read this and I loved yet again in whatever numbered time this reading is:
"With the high voice of the black man riding above the others, no head falsetto here but complete, out of the honest breast, a baritone voice brought over years of woodshedding up to this range . . . he was bringing brown girls to sashay among these nervous Protestants, down the ancient paths the music had set, Big and Little Anita, Stiletto May, Plongette who loves it between her tits and will do it that way for free—not to mention the Latin, the German? in an English church? These are not heresies so much as imperial outcomes, necessary as the black man's presence, from acts of minor surrealism—which, taken in the mass, are an act of suicide, but which in its pathology, in its dreamless version of the real, the Empire commits by the thousands every day, completely unaware of what it's doing. . . ."
I love the image of the Empire committing suicide by its very nature. The idea that Britain thinks it's making the world in its own image but what it's actually doing is bringing the world to itself, incorporating the world into it, and changing itself forever. In a sense, immolating itself with diversity.
Next, we listen to the choir and must realize this is the War's evensong. Come! It is time to float, omnisciently, over the island and see what the War is doing, how it's acting, how it's transforming reality! First, let us begin with toothpaste and toothpaste containers and how they're transformed, perhaps transsubstantiated!, into weapons and vehicles of the War! And how those toothpaste tubes, how they do their duty as toothpaste tubes before doing their duty as war machines! Through one mundane item, Pynchon tracks how it connects those on the homefront with those on the battlefront. He explains the cycle so that he may shine a light on the way the War obfuscates this connection in its need to keep a stark divider between homefront and battlefront. He says of the Allied war effort, "it wants a machine of many separate parts, not oneness, but a complexity. . . . Yet who can presume to say what the War wants, so vast and aloof is it . . . so absentee."
Is Pynchon preparing the reader for the vast conspiracy to be speculated upon later? The need to hide the connections because the Corporate connections show a War that has no sides at all, really. Just a bunch of German and American and British Corporations that all have a hand in the tills of the War, and all seemingly work together in vast and mysterious ways to build the rockets which they fire not upon the enemy but, seemingly, upon themselves. The parts must be kept separate and obfuscated so that nobody knows, until it's too late, that they're all working for the same cause. Even when they fight against it, they're working for it, as Pirate finds out later.
Speaking of which, the whole Counterforce situation that arises later reminds me of the documentary Planet of the Humans which takes a deep dive into green energy and where the money comes to support it and how the definition of "green energy" gets distorted to the point that it no longer legally means what people think it means. And thus the people fighting for what they believe is green energy turns into a bunch of people fighting on the same side as fossil fuel backers and producers. Watching that documentary really helped me get a grasp on what was happening in the Counterforce section of the book.
At least I think it did! I still need to re-read it!
The paragraph decides not to end and begin a new paragraph when it begins discussing a mental patient at The White Visitation who believes he is World War II because I guess it's still discussing the same thing? What is the War? Is it possibly a vast conspiracy? Is it possibly a never ending cycle between civilian life and war casualties? Is it an insane man in a mental hospital on the cliffs overlooking the North Sea?
Pynchon allows some speculation on the mental patient: is he actually the War? Or just the person chosen to die for the War so it will live on? And what if it does live on? Where and when will it return? What terrible gifts will it bring the future generations? Will they embrace the gifts? Or will they just fart.
That was actually a pretty literal synopsis!
Oh! Oh! A new paragraph! My, that was a long one. Two pages! No way this next one can be...oh. Oh shit. Five pages?! Come on, Pynchon! You're doing my head in!
Luckily, this five pages of paragraph aren't some abstruse philosophical or conspiracy minded musing on the War. I mean, it might be! But at least on the surface, it's a description of Christmas in London near the end of the War but while the threat of the rockets still exist. We get a description of wedding dresses from weddings that never came to be. Descriptions of prisoners of war back from Indo-China staring half-starved and gawking at the women braving the possibility of rockets to find some Christmas gifts for their children. A description of Italian postal carriers who grope those women shoppers with their "dead hands." The GIs back from the front who just want their normal lives back, who want to maybe learn to identify and get to know those children. And those children! We get descriptions of the toys they were given last year, toys made from recycled Spam tins, which they take in stride having played with actual Spam tins the months and seasons before. Yet now, this year, as the War is nearing an end, the toys are once more back to normal.
Then there's a bit about the older people and how they watch as the clocks run faster due to the War's burden on the energy grid. It's a complicated bit that I'm going to need to re-read after giving my brain a short break from this incessant paragraph. See you immediately after this paragraph ends in your timeline but after a good long break in mine!
It would be cool if I knew some of the themes I should be concentrating on so that I could understand some of these passages in the context of those themes. But I feel like the theme in Gravity's Rainbow is everything and all of these sections are just Pynchon writing, "Hey, here's another weird thing I was thinking about. You should think about it too. So, you know how old people are like 'My time is short and it just feels like time keeps going faster every year?' Well, did you also know that due to the electrical load on the grids in Britain during the War, electric clocks actually did speed up? Wouldn't that have been a huge mind fuck! Being elderly during that time! Woo boy! Crazy, right? Also, remember that time people lost a week due to the change from the Julian calendar to the Gregorian calendar? What if somebody actually lived through that week? What would that have been like? I wonder who was alive during that so I can use that in another book. Let me see...oh! Mason and Dixon! Perfect! From the start, those characters set up the idea of boundaries! I can jizz that kind of shit out without even having breakfast!"
So after the old people you get a scene of a foggy London street which is compared to a lone beach so—hey! why not?!—let's get a long description of the beaches and the barbed wire and the abandoned cruise ships too! And since we've moved on now, lets' move on up to the foggy downs beyond the cliffs overlooking those beaches! I mean, the reader is probably lost now anyway! What better way to imagine that sense of being lost in the writing by moving the reader all over a geographic landscape at the same time?! Eventually we'll get back to the church scene, right? And then the reader can think, "Well, I made it back to the part of this scene I remember. I suppose all that other stuff didn't really matter. What did it have to do with plot, anyway? Plot is all there is! Plot, plot, plot!"
When the narrator does welcome all back to the church, it's described as a refuge for all those tired of, exhausted by, the routine of the War.
"Come then. Leave your war awhile, paper or iron war, petrol or flesh, come in with your love, your fear of losing, your exhaustion with it. All day it's been at you, coercing, jiving, claiming your belief in so much that isn't true. Is that who you are, that vaguely criminal face on your ID card, its soul snatched by the government camera as the guillotine shutter fell—or maybe just left behind with your heart, at the Stage Door Canteen, where they're counting the night's take, the NAAFI girls, the girls named Eileen, carefully sorting into refrigerated compartments the rubbery maroon organs with their yellow garnishes of fat—oh Linda come here feel this one, put your finger down in the ventricle here, isn't it swoony, it's still going. . . . Everybody you don't suspect is in on this, everybody but you: the chaplain, the doctor, your mother hoping to hang that Gold Star, the vapid soprano last night on the Home Service programme, let's not forget Mr. Noel Coward so stylish and cute about death and the afterlife, packing them into the Duchess for the fourth year running, the lads in Hollywood telling us how grand it all is over here, how much fun, Walt Disney causing Dumbo the elephant to clutch to that feather like how many carcasses under the snow tonight among the white-painted tanks, how many hands each frozen around a Miraculous Medal, lucky piece of worn bone, half-dollar with the grinning sun peering up under Liberty's wispy gown, clutching, dumb, when the 88 fell—what do you think, it's a children's story? There aren't any. The children are away dreaming, but the Empire has no place for dreams and it's Adults Only in here tonight, here in this refuge with the lamps burning deep, in pre-Cambrian exhalation, savory as food cooking, heavy as soot. And 60 miles up the rockets hanging the measureless instant over the black North Sea before the fall, ever faster, to orange heat, Christmas star, in helpless plunge to Earth. Lower in the sky the flying bombs are out too, roaring like the Adversary, seeking whom they may devour. It's a long walk home tonight. Listen to this mock-angel singing, let your communion be at least in listening, even if they are not spokesmen for your exact hopes, your exact, darkest terror, listen."
There's that mention of Dumbo and his magic feather again! This mention of belief in something, in anything, even if that thing cannot and will not save you. They (capital 'T') need you to believe in something greater so that you believe in the cause They need you to fight for, to keep Them in power and money. It doesn't matter what this thing is. A magic feather? A lucky bone? a Miraculous Medal? A half-dollar? A sense of patriotic fervor? Christ Himself? It's all the same. It's a magic feather that enables you to ignore your fear of flying, your fear of death, so that you can perform a trick for Them.
And back to the mass, to the evensong, sung to bring all together, to smash the boundaries of self, of our own peculiar fears and anxieties, so that we might sing away, as a group, as one, all of our own individual darknesses. So that we can share in a moment of hope for something better, for salvation.
The story slips into second person, imagining the readers themselves are there that night, long ago, to get a glimpse of their salvation, to see the miracle baby, the one who will redeem us all for our greed and lust and envy, for our bombs and our wars and our unimaginable, unending need to murder the other. This tiny baby, this possible Christ, this unimaginable frail redeemer . . . how is that our only hope for salvation? And yet . . .
"But on the way home tonight, you wish you'd picked him up, held him a bit. Just held him, very close to your heart, his cheek by the hollow of your shoulder, full of sleep. As if it were you who could, somehow, save him. For the moment not caring who you're supposed to be registered as. For the moment anyway, no longer who the Caesars say you are."
In my narcissism, this reminded me of a poem I wrote in college (look at this brave act! putting some old, humiliating piece of youthful writing on the Internet! So brave!):
The never ending paragraphs of the last nine pages of this section begin with Roger and Jessica passing by a church around Christmas. A bunch of soldiers are singing religious songs so that Pynchon can discuss a bunch of stuff like colonialism and more colonialism and, I don't know, religion? Toothpaste maybe? Is this when he goes off on toothpaste?!
Roger sees Jessica's reaction to the people going in for service and he surprises her by stopping and suggesting they go inside. It surprises Jessica because Roger has been such a cynic about religion and the paranormal and Christmas. But he explains to her as they walk inside, "To hear the music." Yeah, buddy. Sure. More like "Because I fucking love you and I saw the way the entire scene caught in your throat and threatened to overwhelm you with nostalgia and memory."
After that, it's all, well, Pynchon stuff. We begin with noticing only one face in the choir is black: a Jamaican corporal from Kingston. And since we (we being the narrator and the reader, discovering these things together, I suppose) have noticed him, we might as well take a quick peak at his life back on the island, right?! And from there, we can, through a passing description of the different coins he has gathered by singing on the streets, get a glimpse of how the Empire works. This island native brought to England to fight Britain's war only to wind up in an Anglican church singing songs in German. All this to sort of drive a certain point home in a bit of writing that I loved the first time I read this and I loved the second time I read this and I loved yet again in whatever numbered time this reading is:
"With the high voice of the black man riding above the others, no head falsetto here but complete, out of the honest breast, a baritone voice brought over years of woodshedding up to this range . . . he was bringing brown girls to sashay among these nervous Protestants, down the ancient paths the music had set, Big and Little Anita, Stiletto May, Plongette who loves it between her tits and will do it that way for free—not to mention the Latin, the German? in an English church? These are not heresies so much as imperial outcomes, necessary as the black man's presence, from acts of minor surrealism—which, taken in the mass, are an act of suicide, but which in its pathology, in its dreamless version of the real, the Empire commits by the thousands every day, completely unaware of what it's doing. . . ."
I love the image of the Empire committing suicide by its very nature. The idea that Britain thinks it's making the world in its own image but what it's actually doing is bringing the world to itself, incorporating the world into it, and changing itself forever. In a sense, immolating itself with diversity.
Next, we listen to the choir and must realize this is the War's evensong. Come! It is time to float, omnisciently, over the island and see what the War is doing, how it's acting, how it's transforming reality! First, let us begin with toothpaste and toothpaste containers and how they're transformed, perhaps transsubstantiated!, into weapons and vehicles of the War! And how those toothpaste tubes, how they do their duty as toothpaste tubes before doing their duty as war machines! Through one mundane item, Pynchon tracks how it connects those on the homefront with those on the battlefront. He explains the cycle so that he may shine a light on the way the War obfuscates this connection in its need to keep a stark divider between homefront and battlefront. He says of the Allied war effort, "it wants a machine of many separate parts, not oneness, but a complexity. . . . Yet who can presume to say what the War wants, so vast and aloof is it . . . so absentee."
Is Pynchon preparing the reader for the vast conspiracy to be speculated upon later? The need to hide the connections because the Corporate connections show a War that has no sides at all, really. Just a bunch of German and American and British Corporations that all have a hand in the tills of the War, and all seemingly work together in vast and mysterious ways to build the rockets which they fire not upon the enemy but, seemingly, upon themselves. The parts must be kept separate and obfuscated so that nobody knows, until it's too late, that they're all working for the same cause. Even when they fight against it, they're working for it, as Pirate finds out later.
Speaking of which, the whole Counterforce situation that arises later reminds me of the documentary Planet of the Humans which takes a deep dive into green energy and where the money comes to support it and how the definition of "green energy" gets distorted to the point that it no longer legally means what people think it means. And thus the people fighting for what they believe is green energy turns into a bunch of people fighting on the same side as fossil fuel backers and producers. Watching that documentary really helped me get a grasp on what was happening in the Counterforce section of the book.
At least I think it did! I still need to re-read it!
The paragraph decides not to end and begin a new paragraph when it begins discussing a mental patient at The White Visitation who believes he is World War II because I guess it's still discussing the same thing? What is the War? Is it possibly a vast conspiracy? Is it possibly a never ending cycle between civilian life and war casualties? Is it an insane man in a mental hospital on the cliffs overlooking the North Sea?
Pynchon allows some speculation on the mental patient: is he actually the War? Or just the person chosen to die for the War so it will live on? And what if it does live on? Where and when will it return? What terrible gifts will it bring the future generations? Will they embrace the gifts? Or will they just fart.
That was actually a pretty literal synopsis!
Oh! Oh! A new paragraph! My, that was a long one. Two pages! No way this next one can be...oh. Oh shit. Five pages?! Come on, Pynchon! You're doing my head in!
Luckily, this five pages of paragraph aren't some abstruse philosophical or conspiracy minded musing on the War. I mean, it might be! But at least on the surface, it's a description of Christmas in London near the end of the War but while the threat of the rockets still exist. We get a description of wedding dresses from weddings that never came to be. Descriptions of prisoners of war back from Indo-China staring half-starved and gawking at the women braving the possibility of rockets to find some Christmas gifts for their children. A description of Italian postal carriers who grope those women shoppers with their "dead hands." The GIs back from the front who just want their normal lives back, who want to maybe learn to identify and get to know those children. And those children! We get descriptions of the toys they were given last year, toys made from recycled Spam tins, which they take in stride having played with actual Spam tins the months and seasons before. Yet now, this year, as the War is nearing an end, the toys are once more back to normal.
Then there's a bit about the older people and how they watch as the clocks run faster due to the War's burden on the energy grid. It's a complicated bit that I'm going to need to re-read after giving my brain a short break from this incessant paragraph. See you immediately after this paragraph ends in your timeline but after a good long break in mine!
It would be cool if I knew some of the themes I should be concentrating on so that I could understand some of these passages in the context of those themes. But I feel like the theme in Gravity's Rainbow is everything and all of these sections are just Pynchon writing, "Hey, here's another weird thing I was thinking about. You should think about it too. So, you know how old people are like 'My time is short and it just feels like time keeps going faster every year?' Well, did you also know that due to the electrical load on the grids in Britain during the War, electric clocks actually did speed up? Wouldn't that have been a huge mind fuck! Being elderly during that time! Woo boy! Crazy, right? Also, remember that time people lost a week due to the change from the Julian calendar to the Gregorian calendar? What if somebody actually lived through that week? What would that have been like? I wonder who was alive during that so I can use that in another book. Let me see...oh! Mason and Dixon! Perfect! From the start, those characters set up the idea of boundaries! I can jizz that kind of shit out without even having breakfast!"
So after the old people you get a scene of a foggy London street which is compared to a lone beach so—hey! why not?!—let's get a long description of the beaches and the barbed wire and the abandoned cruise ships too! And since we've moved on now, lets' move on up to the foggy downs beyond the cliffs overlooking those beaches! I mean, the reader is probably lost now anyway! What better way to imagine that sense of being lost in the writing by moving the reader all over a geographic landscape at the same time?! Eventually we'll get back to the church scene, right? And then the reader can think, "Well, I made it back to the part of this scene I remember. I suppose all that other stuff didn't really matter. What did it have to do with plot, anyway? Plot is all there is! Plot, plot, plot!"
When the narrator does welcome all back to the church, it's described as a refuge for all those tired of, exhausted by, the routine of the War.
"Come then. Leave your war awhile, paper or iron war, petrol or flesh, come in with your love, your fear of losing, your exhaustion with it. All day it's been at you, coercing, jiving, claiming your belief in so much that isn't true. Is that who you are, that vaguely criminal face on your ID card, its soul snatched by the government camera as the guillotine shutter fell—or maybe just left behind with your heart, at the Stage Door Canteen, where they're counting the night's take, the NAAFI girls, the girls named Eileen, carefully sorting into refrigerated compartments the rubbery maroon organs with their yellow garnishes of fat—oh Linda come here feel this one, put your finger down in the ventricle here, isn't it swoony, it's still going. . . . Everybody you don't suspect is in on this, everybody but you: the chaplain, the doctor, your mother hoping to hang that Gold Star, the vapid soprano last night on the Home Service programme, let's not forget Mr. Noel Coward so stylish and cute about death and the afterlife, packing them into the Duchess for the fourth year running, the lads in Hollywood telling us how grand it all is over here, how much fun, Walt Disney causing Dumbo the elephant to clutch to that feather like how many carcasses under the snow tonight among the white-painted tanks, how many hands each frozen around a Miraculous Medal, lucky piece of worn bone, half-dollar with the grinning sun peering up under Liberty's wispy gown, clutching, dumb, when the 88 fell—what do you think, it's a children's story? There aren't any. The children are away dreaming, but the Empire has no place for dreams and it's Adults Only in here tonight, here in this refuge with the lamps burning deep, in pre-Cambrian exhalation, savory as food cooking, heavy as soot. And 60 miles up the rockets hanging the measureless instant over the black North Sea before the fall, ever faster, to orange heat, Christmas star, in helpless plunge to Earth. Lower in the sky the flying bombs are out too, roaring like the Adversary, seeking whom they may devour. It's a long walk home tonight. Listen to this mock-angel singing, let your communion be at least in listening, even if they are not spokesmen for your exact hopes, your exact, darkest terror, listen."
There's that mention of Dumbo and his magic feather again! This mention of belief in something, in anything, even if that thing cannot and will not save you. They (capital 'T') need you to believe in something greater so that you believe in the cause They need you to fight for, to keep Them in power and money. It doesn't matter what this thing is. A magic feather? A lucky bone? a Miraculous Medal? A half-dollar? A sense of patriotic fervor? Christ Himself? It's all the same. It's a magic feather that enables you to ignore your fear of flying, your fear of death, so that you can perform a trick for Them.
And back to the mass, to the evensong, sung to bring all together, to smash the boundaries of self, of our own peculiar fears and anxieties, so that we might sing away, as a group, as one, all of our own individual darknesses. So that we can share in a moment of hope for something better, for salvation.
The story slips into second person, imagining the readers themselves are there that night, long ago, to get a glimpse of their salvation, to see the miracle baby, the one who will redeem us all for our greed and lust and envy, for our bombs and our wars and our unimaginable, unending need to murder the other. This tiny baby, this possible Christ, this unimaginable frail redeemer . . . how is that our only hope for salvation? And yet . . .
"But on the way home tonight, you wish you'd picked him up, held him a bit. Just held him, very close to your heart, his cheek by the hollow of your shoulder, full of sleep. As if it were you who could, somehow, save him. For the moment not caring who you're supposed to be registered as. For the moment anyway, no longer who the Caesars say you are."
In my narcissism, this reminded me of a poem I wrote in college (look at this brave act! putting some old, humiliating piece of youthful writing on the Internet! So brave!):
Being There
As the cross was set upon the ground and ready to be raised to stand up high, I thought of the coming vengeance.
As they led the 'Messiah' to his proving grounds, I laughed and scorned his hated name.
As they threw his bones upon the ground, I was the first to kick him.
And they tore off his clothes and they spit on his face and they laid him upon his wooden tomb.
And the crowd roared for a miracle, but the heavens would not open up.
As they bound his wrists upon the posts, I felt my own wrists burn.
As they tied his ankles around the base, I felt that I might fall.
As they put the crown of jagged thorns upon his human brow, I felt the sting of angry barbs encircling my own.
And the pounded the nails down into his wrists and they raised the cross to stand up high, and one of them ran him through with his spear.
And the crowd roared for a miracle, but the heavens would not open up.
As the blood flowed down his broken wrists, I thought of every man I'd fought.
As the blood ran down his gasping chest, I thought of all my words against God.
As the blood seeped down below his waist, I thought of every woman I'd known.
And he called to the Lord and the guards they all laughed and a few of the women, they cried.
And the crowd began to walk away for the heavens would not open up.
All grew quiet as he sighed his last breaths, and I suddenly knew I was wrong.
So I cried to the Lord that I should be forgiven but knew that he ignored all my words.
And I walked away to live my life so that Jesus Christ might die.
The section ends asking what have they, these men taking a break from their war lives, given to use here this night? Or, more apt, what have we taken from them?
As they led the 'Messiah' to his proving grounds, I laughed and scorned his hated name.
As they threw his bones upon the ground, I was the first to kick him.
And they tore off his clothes and they spit on his face and they laid him upon his wooden tomb.
And the crowd roared for a miracle, but the heavens would not open up.
As they bound his wrists upon the posts, I felt my own wrists burn.
As they tied his ankles around the base, I felt that I might fall.
As they put the crown of jagged thorns upon his human brow, I felt the sting of angry barbs encircling my own.
And the pounded the nails down into his wrists and they raised the cross to stand up high, and one of them ran him through with his spear.
And the crowd roared for a miracle, but the heavens would not open up.
As the blood flowed down his broken wrists, I thought of every man I'd fought.
As the blood ran down his gasping chest, I thought of all my words against God.
As the blood seeped down below his waist, I thought of every woman I'd known.
And he called to the Lord and the guards they all laughed and a few of the women, they cried.
And the crowd began to walk away for the heavens would not open up.
All grew quiet as he sighed his last breaths, and I suddenly knew I was wrong.
So I cried to the Lord that I should be forgiven but knew that he ignored all my words.
And I walked away to live my life so that Jesus Christ might die.
The section ends asking what have they, these men taking a break from their war lives, given to use here this night? Or, more apt, what have we taken from them?
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