I write another blog (several but this is the relevant one) where I discuss each line of Thomas Pynchon's Against the Day one at a time. Right now, it's fairly easy because it's just the first two chapters discussing the Chums of Chance adventure to Chicago. No sentences have been truly difficult. But as I do it, I often think about Gravity's Rainbow and how hard it would be. Here's the first sentence of this section which basically amounts to: "Hey! It's spring in late March!"
The great cusp—green equinox and turning, dreaming fishes to young ram, watersleep to firewaking, bears down on us.
If I were a bitter, cynical, bastard of a person, I'd think, "I'm trying to read a book, not analyzing Goddamned poetry!" Good thing I'm just a bitter, cynical, decent kind of person. No bastard here! Although for poetry, this is fairly easy. It's just Pynchon saying the date in four different ways: "great cusp," "green equinox," Gemini turning to Aries, and, once again but differently, Gemini (water) turning to Aries (fire) combined with winter (sleeping) turning to spring (waking). It really is poetry, like so much of this book. Which is one quarter of the reasons that make reading it so hard. The other three reasons are 1. changing perspective without notice, 2. tons of references nobody understands without research or having been there, and 3. reality often shifting, sometimes to dreams or daydreams, sometimes to "let's describe this scene as if it were a movie or comic book," or some other kind of strange hallucination. All of those things make this book difficult to read; all of those things make this book beautiful and surprising.
The second paragraph does much the same for the statement: "The war is nearing an end." It even mentions the resident of the asylum, Lloyd George, who believes he's the avatar of the war, is dying.
Life has also changed at the Casino Hermann Goering. Slothrop has learned that he isn't completely ineffective in his rebellions against the conspiracy against himself. He begins coming up with his "Proverbs for Paranoids" with the first proverb: "You may never get to touch the Master, but you can tickle his creatures." He learned that by forcing Dodson-Truck to confess some of what he knew, and for, well, whatever he did to have them take Katje away. That was probably mostly punishment for his work on Stephen Dodson-Truck. I mean, Pointsman also needed her back at The White Visitation to shit in Brigadier Pudding's mouth.
Slothrop has found himself increasingly in a state of reverie. That means he seems to be daydreaming a lot but another definition of reverie is "a fanciful or impractical idea or theory." In his reverie, he seems to somehow get in touch with the other side, and begins getting messages or transmissions or maybe impractical theories from the late Roland Feldspath, "long-co-opted expert on control systems, guidance equations, feedback situations for this Aeronautical Establishment and that." Roland was the spirit Carroll Eventyr was speaking with when we first meet Carroll Eventyr. At the time, Roland was speaking about his time in some kind of contact with Dominus Blicero. Roland's forte is control systems and he comments on how controls had gone topsy-turvy while "transected" with Dominus Blicero. He discusses how the wind is the major factor in the control of a rocket because, once launched, the rocketeers and rocket have lost contact. But Roland goes on:
"It's control. All these things arise from one difficulty: control. For the first time it was inside, do you see. The control is put inside. No more need to suffer passively under 'outside forces'—to veer into any wind. As if . . ."
Was Roland trying to describe the Schwarzgerat to them? That Blicero was experimenting with putting a living person in the rocket for means of control? And here I thought it was just a sex thing!
Roland describes his previous contact with Carroll as a bunch of bullshit about German economics because that's what all the ghosts are into. I think. Look, I failed statistics in college because it was too boring for the math to be that difficult. What I'm saying is that I'm also bored to tears by economics, even when it's discussed by a ghost! And I loved In Search of... so you'd think I'd be more into this. Maybe I'd have been more into it if economic models were described the way Roland describes them here, like wandering an empty city until you came to the edge and ventured into fields and then a forest where you, inevitably, can go no further, like all the mathematical theories reaching the limit of some confusing equation. And then that, somehow, brings us to the Rocket and the equations for its gravitational rainbow.
I'm sure if I were smarter, I'd understand what Roland's getting at. But I'm more on Slothrop's level of intelligence and so I react much like he does after these Roland reveries:
Afterward, Slothrop would be left not so much with any clear symbol or scheme to it as with some alkaline aftertaste of lament, an irreducible strangeness, a self-sufficiency nothing could get inside. . . .
As for Slothrop's non-daydreaming hours? He spends them learning German and learning about rockets and learning about propulsions and engineering and diagrams and ordnance. In doing so, he begins to realize how ridiculous the corporate connections are to the war effort. He tells a man named Hilary Bounce how ridiculous it is that the Germans are firing rockets out of a Shell company fuel manufacture site directly at Shell headquarters in London. Hilary, being a good corporate man, doesn't get what Slothrop is driving at. Can't this damn paranoid see that corporate profit and the business of war are two entirely different things that also just happen to rely on one another?!
Slothrop comes up with his second Proverb for Paranoids: "The innocence of the creatures is in inverse proportion to the immortality of the Master." I don't know what that means, exactly. I guess it means the more powerful a corporate entity or political position, the greater the dumb subservience of the people who work under it. Like these Goddamned idiotic Trump supporters who never see the terrible bullshit he's spouting or supporting and only pretend to see some greater good or generous scheme.
It's during this time that Slothrop begins to get the scent of the Schwarzgerat. He discovers blueprints for a rocket that needs some sort of insulation made of Imipolex G. What for? Turns out it's a state secret and not easy to uncover. Nobody will help him with it. But Slothrop learns Hilary has a teletype back to Shell in his room and he devises a means to get Hilary out of the room and get himself inside to send a message asking about Imipolex G. On the night he does this, after he gets the message back (to be read later), he heads to the party he sent Hilary and one of the dancers to, followed after by some sneaky sneak. The plot thickens!
Can this plot thicken much more?! Sure it can! Five hundred pages more! And how many of those pages will I understand? Hopefully at least 450 of them!
The great cusp—green equinox and turning, dreaming fishes to young ram, watersleep to firewaking, bears down on us.
If I were a bitter, cynical, bastard of a person, I'd think, "I'm trying to read a book, not analyzing Goddamned poetry!" Good thing I'm just a bitter, cynical, decent kind of person. No bastard here! Although for poetry, this is fairly easy. It's just Pynchon saying the date in four different ways: "great cusp," "green equinox," Gemini turning to Aries, and, once again but differently, Gemini (water) turning to Aries (fire) combined with winter (sleeping) turning to spring (waking). It really is poetry, like so much of this book. Which is one quarter of the reasons that make reading it so hard. The other three reasons are 1. changing perspective without notice, 2. tons of references nobody understands without research or having been there, and 3. reality often shifting, sometimes to dreams or daydreams, sometimes to "let's describe this scene as if it were a movie or comic book," or some other kind of strange hallucination. All of those things make this book difficult to read; all of those things make this book beautiful and surprising.
The second paragraph does much the same for the statement: "The war is nearing an end." It even mentions the resident of the asylum, Lloyd George, who believes he's the avatar of the war, is dying.
Life has also changed at the Casino Hermann Goering. Slothrop has learned that he isn't completely ineffective in his rebellions against the conspiracy against himself. He begins coming up with his "Proverbs for Paranoids" with the first proverb: "You may never get to touch the Master, but you can tickle his creatures." He learned that by forcing Dodson-Truck to confess some of what he knew, and for, well, whatever he did to have them take Katje away. That was probably mostly punishment for his work on Stephen Dodson-Truck. I mean, Pointsman also needed her back at The White Visitation to shit in Brigadier Pudding's mouth.
Slothrop has found himself increasingly in a state of reverie. That means he seems to be daydreaming a lot but another definition of reverie is "a fanciful or impractical idea or theory." In his reverie, he seems to somehow get in touch with the other side, and begins getting messages or transmissions or maybe impractical theories from the late Roland Feldspath, "long-co-opted expert on control systems, guidance equations, feedback situations for this Aeronautical Establishment and that." Roland was the spirit Carroll Eventyr was speaking with when we first meet Carroll Eventyr. At the time, Roland was speaking about his time in some kind of contact with Dominus Blicero. Roland's forte is control systems and he comments on how controls had gone topsy-turvy while "transected" with Dominus Blicero. He discusses how the wind is the major factor in the control of a rocket because, once launched, the rocketeers and rocket have lost contact. But Roland goes on:
"It's control. All these things arise from one difficulty: control. For the first time it was inside, do you see. The control is put inside. No more need to suffer passively under 'outside forces'—to veer into any wind. As if . . ."
Was Roland trying to describe the Schwarzgerat to them? That Blicero was experimenting with putting a living person in the rocket for means of control? And here I thought it was just a sex thing!
Roland describes his previous contact with Carroll as a bunch of bullshit about German economics because that's what all the ghosts are into. I think. Look, I failed statistics in college because it was too boring for the math to be that difficult. What I'm saying is that I'm also bored to tears by economics, even when it's discussed by a ghost! And I loved In Search of... so you'd think I'd be more into this. Maybe I'd have been more into it if economic models were described the way Roland describes them here, like wandering an empty city until you came to the edge and ventured into fields and then a forest where you, inevitably, can go no further, like all the mathematical theories reaching the limit of some confusing equation. And then that, somehow, brings us to the Rocket and the equations for its gravitational rainbow.
I'm sure if I were smarter, I'd understand what Roland's getting at. But I'm more on Slothrop's level of intelligence and so I react much like he does after these Roland reveries:
Afterward, Slothrop would be left not so much with any clear symbol or scheme to it as with some alkaline aftertaste of lament, an irreducible strangeness, a self-sufficiency nothing could get inside. . . .
As for Slothrop's non-daydreaming hours? He spends them learning German and learning about rockets and learning about propulsions and engineering and diagrams and ordnance. In doing so, he begins to realize how ridiculous the corporate connections are to the war effort. He tells a man named Hilary Bounce how ridiculous it is that the Germans are firing rockets out of a Shell company fuel manufacture site directly at Shell headquarters in London. Hilary, being a good corporate man, doesn't get what Slothrop is driving at. Can't this damn paranoid see that corporate profit and the business of war are two entirely different things that also just happen to rely on one another?!
Slothrop comes up with his second Proverb for Paranoids: "The innocence of the creatures is in inverse proportion to the immortality of the Master." I don't know what that means, exactly. I guess it means the more powerful a corporate entity or political position, the greater the dumb subservience of the people who work under it. Like these Goddamned idiotic Trump supporters who never see the terrible bullshit he's spouting or supporting and only pretend to see some greater good or generous scheme.
It's during this time that Slothrop begins to get the scent of the Schwarzgerat. He discovers blueprints for a rocket that needs some sort of insulation made of Imipolex G. What for? Turns out it's a state secret and not easy to uncover. Nobody will help him with it. But Slothrop learns Hilary has a teletype back to Shell in his room and he devises a means to get Hilary out of the room and get himself inside to send a message asking about Imipolex G. On the night he does this, after he gets the message back (to be read later), he heads to the party he sent Hilary and one of the dancers to, followed after by some sneaky sneak. The plot thickens!
Can this plot thicken much more?! Sure it can! Five hundred pages more! And how many of those pages will I understand? Hopefully at least 450 of them!
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