Gravity's Rainbow: Part XXIII

Part XXIII begins Chapter 2, "Un Perm' au Casino Hermann Goering". I didn't know what that meant (I mean, I knew what five-sixths of it meant! It was the "perm'" part that was stumping me!) so I had to look it up. It means "A Furlough at the Hermann Goering Casino." And that's exactly what this chapter is about! It's about Tyrone Slothrop's furlough at the Herman Goering Casino in France. But being that everything in this book isn't exactly what it seems, it's also "L'expérience au Casino Hermann Goering"!

The quote used to open this chapter is

"You will have the tallest, darkest leading man in Hollywood." — Merian C. Cooper to Fay Wray

How does this relate? Is calling King Kong the tallest, darkest leading man the Hollywood equivalent of calling Poinstman's experiment on Tyrone Slothrop a furlough?

Slothrop is on furlough with his office mate and friend Tantivy Mucker-Maffick and Teddy Bloat, Tantivy's friend who has been spying on Slothrop. So already, it's feeling like a bit of a set-up for Slothrop. Not that I'm going off just those clues! I just read nearly two hundred pages of Pointsman drooling like one of his dogs over getting Tyrone Slothrop as a test subject!

This initial scene of Slothrop first laying eyes on the Casino, and the first morning as he looks out over the ocean in the cold morning weather is just lovely and tranquil. And that it's punctuated by a feeling deep within him that his day can't actually start until he hears a rocket explode is just fucking ugh. Yes, that's right. I just described something as "fucking ugh." That's why I'm such a great critic of intelligent literature. I know how to really deconstruct this shit.

Bloat comes into Slothrop's room "gnawing on a smoldering pipe" and now I can only think of him as Aarfy from Catch-22. And not just Aarfy. I'm picturing him as Charles Grodin from the film. So now my mental image of Bloat is that of a hipster Charles Grodin with Aarfy's psychotic demeanor.

Slothrop is immediately suspicious of Bloat. Perhaps because he should be suspicious of him! But mostly it's just because Slothrop is a paranoid personality and Bloat is basically a stranger to him. But also, I mean, he's right to be paranoid about him! I guess that's just the life of a paranoid. You're going to be paranoid and suspicious of everything and everyone and, occasionally, you'll be proven right. Which will just make you dig in your heels believing all the paranoia you were wrong about as well.

As Slothrop shaves and gets ready for the day, Tantivy begins yelling out the window at some French lasses. He looks back at his mates and says, "J'ai deux amis, aussi, by an odd coincidence. Par un bizarre coincidence, or something, oui?" Yeah. Or something is right, Tantivy. The word "coincidence" is the paranoiac's least accepted rationale. Nothing is coincidence. Which, when you're writing situations for characters in a novel, is ultimately true. Obviously nothing that happens to Slothrop or any of the others is a coincidence! As a writer, you can't actually write coincidences! So a character in a book should be a paranoiac! What does that do to a novel like Gravity's Rainbow? Ultimately it's a book about a guy who is trying to discover why his life is the way that it is and who made it that way. It's not all random and while, yes, he's paranoid, he's ultimately correct to be paranoid. But this is a novel. Even if Pynchon wrote a book where Slothrop wasn't correct to be paranoid, how would that be any different? Because Slothrop is still, as a character being written into situations by an author, being manipulated by some greater Them. Does Gravity's Rainbow ultimately not work or is its inability to cope with coincidence and conspiracy the entire point?! Or maybe it's just that none of us have any real free will because we're ultimately slaves to our kinks and desires and anxieties which force us to make the decisions we make. Like not being able to not write Gravity's Rainbow. Ultimately, Pynchon's ability to not write this book was hampered by his needs and desires in absolutely the same way Brigadier Pudding can't help gulping down Katje's fecal emissions.

Slothrop decides to wear a Hawaiian shirt on their picnic with the French lasses because that's a fashion option now thanks to the war in the Pacific! Man, couldn't we have defeated the Japanese before American GIs decided to go all-in on Hawaiian tourist culture? Although I guess it gave boring suburban white people a way to show they were loosening up and really getting wild by wearing Hawaiian shirts and lighting tiki torches in their backyards. Plus now they could euphemistically serve hot dogs in pineapple rings as oer d'oeuvres. Très chic!

Slothrop begins to feel that maybe he doesn't have to feel paranoid. The day is too lovely. The picnic too sensual. The company divine. But then comes the moment where it will all change. It begins with Bloat pointing to a woman standing by the sea and outright asking Slothrop if she's a friend of his. A mistake. A huge mistake, Bloat. When trying to get somebody to witness a thing you've manipulated so that they'll witness it, you cannot be the one to point it out to them. You must let them discover it themselves or it will mar the entire manipulation. If Slothrop had witnessed this woman (and the subsequent attack by an octopus which I've yet to mention) without Bloat pointing it out, perhaps later, Slothrop would not have begun to dissect every part of the interaction. Like how did Bloat just happen to have the crab to drive the octopus away? And how did Bloat know exactly how to drive the octopus away in the first place? And how come it was Bloat who pointed out the woman just before the attack anyway? And what was that thing that was said back at the hotel about coincidences?!

My friends and I used to go messing around in the Santa Cruz hills at night, hiking and junk. We eventually found an old abandoned set of buildings up there, unguarded. So we concocted a plan to take one of our other friends who didn't know about it up there where we would stumble upon a Satanic ritual. Some of our friends dressed up in black robes and set up candles and painted arcane symbols around one of the abandoned rooms. The plan was to have our friend, Bon Rowman, stumble upon it as we searched around the abandoned complex. But one friend, Bason Jeymer (our only actor friend, by the way!), took it upon himself to lead Bon Rowman to the building with the ritual, discover the Satanic ritual himself and then called Bon over in hushed words. "Bon! Bon! Come look at this! What's going on?!" As if it were nothing! As opposed to having Bon lead the way, stumble into the ritual, and be completely freaked out! As soon as Bason calmly called him over to check it out, the prank was ruined. Bon didn't buy it for a second. Anyway, that's the experiential veneer through which I interpreted this scene!

As Slothrop watches, Katje is attacked by the octopus which Pointsman trained to be enamored of Katje. Slothrop fails to save Katje until Bloat produces a crab and explains the octopus is just hungry. Slothrop uses the crab to lure the octopus away and Katje is saved.

Slothrop immediately becomes suspicious. Between Bloat having the crab and Katje's ID bracelet and one of the dancers speaking to the just-saved-from-the-octopus Katje in some language other than French, Slothrop can't help but be consumed by paranoia. Something isn't right here and he's right to think it isn't.

"So it is here, grouped on the beach with strangers, that voices begin to take on a touch of metal, each word a hard-edged clap, and the light, though as bright as before, is less able to illuminate . . . it's a Puritan reflex of seeking other orders behind the visible, also known as paranoia, filtering in. Pale lines of force whir in the sea air . . . pacts sworn to in rooms since shelled back to their plan views, not quite by accident of war, suggest themselves. Oh, that was no 'found' crab, Ace—no random octopus or girl, uh-uh. Structure and detail come later, but the conniving around him now he feels instantly, in his heart."

Subtly, during the rest of the picnic, Ghislaine, the woman who seems most associated with Bloat, gives off clues that Bloat is the master behind some grand manipulation here. And on the way back to the Casino, she nearly states it outright, suggesting the octopus was staged and that Slothrop should be very careful. Her revelation gives me goosebumps so I imagine it made Slothrop shit his pants. And then Katje tells Slothrop she thinks they were maybe destined to meet and that's it. Paranoid Level Alpha. His entire life's a set-up and, well, it's come to this . . . whatever this is!

Gravity's Rainbow: Part XXII

The first chapter ends on a scene with Roger and Jessica spending Boxing Day with Jessica's sister's family. The perspective begins with Penelope, Jessica's niece, in a kind of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland montage of previous themes and characters hinted at in the details of the day. Penelope's sister Claire received a Goliwog for Christmas evoking the Schwarzkommando and Operation Black Wing. The two fish Penelope watches at the beginning taking the shape of Pisces, reminding the reader of both The White Visitation's PISCES (Psychological Intelligence Schemes for Expediting Surrender) and the abundance of astrological references recently made in the Peter Sascha/Leni Pökler sections. The pantomime they have gone to see was Hansel & Gretel which reminds us of Katje and Gottfried and Weissman's game (they even hint at the gender swapping often engaged in by the group). Of course the rocket hits reminding us of Slothrop and everything else, really. The war and all that. After the rocket hits, Gretel sings a song that mentions "We can fly to the moon, we'll be higher than noon in our polythene home in the sky" alluding to Imipolex and Jamf's obsession with plastics and chemical structures (as well as living on the moon which is Franz and Leni's daughter Ilse's fantasy). We're reminded of Carrol and Peter and their experiments with and connections to the afterlife by Penelope's visit from the ghost of her father. I'm sure there's more but that's all my memory of the first reading of the book will allow for now!

After the perspective shifts from Penelope's view to Roger's, the narrative becomes a bunch of whinging and grousing on Roger's part about how he suddenly knows Jessica will soon leave him. He thinks it's because Jessica is being infected by the War but I think it's because of his "skinny, 20-pushup arms." Maybe try improving your body instead of just pushing pins in a map all day! I bet Beaver has thick, masculine 25-pushup arms! That's how many pushups gives you big biceps like mine, right?

"If the rockets don't get her there's still her lieutenant. Damned Beaver/Jeremy is the War, he is every assertion the fucking War has ever made—that we are meant for work and government, for austerity: and these shall take priority over love, dreams, the spirit, the senses and the other second-class trivia that are found among the idle and mindless hours of the day. . . . Damn them, they are wrong. They are insane."

I take back that bit about Roger whinging and grousing because in actuality, I love him very much. I love poor heartsick Roger and his romantic view of the world and I hate the War and everybody who would tell Roger that he is being silly or irrational or nonsensical or immature. Fuck those guys. Fuck them right in their boring holes because they're so boring they probably wouldn't like it at all.

Gravity's Rainbow: Part XXI

I really shouldn't be so hard on myself for not truly understanding large aspects of this book. I'm only on my second reading of the book which is, ultimately, the true first reading. It's the first time you can actually follow the relationships between characters, or see the importance of certain experiences each has during their journey. But more than that, it's important to come to a work of literature first through your own eyes and your own experiences. One of the themes Pynchon comes back to often is how everybody experiences something differently based on their motivations, education, past trials and travails, and their general emotional demeanor. We're all going to first get something different from the book than everybody else. Different parts of the text will stand out due to our own personal philosophies, hobbyhorses, and crotchets. Some people will want to go beyond that and try to ferret out what the author meant, specifically, with his choices and characters and metaphors based on Hansel and Gretel. What was happening during the time Pynchon was writing the novel that he might have been commenting on? What historical moments did he work with, and why, and how did he fictionalize them to express whatever it was he was trying to express? This won't lead anybody to one secret text which exposes the entire novel, flayed open and dissected for goggle-eyed students in lab coats to gawk at as they take notes on cradled clipboards. The texts will be varied, concentrating on different themes and ideas. Just as everybody approaches the novel from a different angle based on who they are.

What I'm saying is I'd like to establish my own relationship with the novel before I read any academic studies of it (which I almost certainly will). That's what this blog (and my Against the Day blog are meant to do. They aren't great insightful documents for other people. They're just my thoughts codified and left out for anybody to read. Enjoy them or not. But don't expect me to explicate every last bit of a book I'm only really just getting to know.

This probably would have been a good way to start my discussions on Chapter Two! But I was just thinking about it after the last section of the book which blew my mind wide open. So it goes here a bit early, two sections before starting Chapter Two. What can I do? (Aside from copy and pasting it and saving it for Part XXII (which I totally don't want to do))

This section finds Pointsman alone over Christmas but excited about his experiment with Slothrop. He's so excited that he keeps getting boners thinking about it! So is Slothrop's boner the stimulus now for Pointsman's boner? That's gay, right? Anyway, it allows Pointsman to start making puns which leads him to state this joke from the mainstream (so not smart and probably not funny because it's told by non-academic dolts): "What did the Cockney exclaim to the cowboy from San Antonio?" He doesn't give us the punchline but my guess is that it's either simply "'owdy pardner!" with a Cockney accent or whatever the rhyming slang for "Howdy partner" is. Eva Gardner, maybe? No wait. I get it. He gives the stupid answer before asking the riddle since he's spending time punning on the word "cortex" and how it can be translated to "bark" from Latin to English. So that's it. It's just "Cor, tex" (as in "Cor blimey! Me tea jus' up an kippered me pants at the car boot sale, ya berk!"). It's basically more of the Kenosha Kid way of reading things.

Maud Chilkes, a woman Pointsman has mentioned previously in his inability to flirt with her, blows him at The White Visitation Christmas party. I only mention this because it's hot and also because of this line in a paragraph that follows: "Maude knows something's up all right, the finances of PISCES pass through her hands, nothing escapes her." Hee hee. Right-o! Cor blimey!

We learn Gwenhidwy is still alive and get a bit of an update on how he's doing. Mostly it's singing and drinking. I love this bit: "He is descended directly from the Welshman in Henry V who ran around forcing people to eat his Leek." Plus he has a theory that the Big Bang was a masturbatory experience. I'm totally on board with that since it's how I described the creation of the universe in the DC Mythos based on Krona's observations of The Big Bang (see whatever comic book blog post in which I discussed this. Don't worry. There are only like 4500 of them. You'll find it in no time).

Gwenhidwy, who spends his time treating those the rockets have injured or displaced, has a paranoid theory about the city and how it grows like a living organism that has somehow chosen for the poorest, most abused of society, to be the expendable front in its defenses. The minorities and the poor have all been shunted to the east and south sides of the city because those were the places the City most feared danger or attack. From the sea or across the continent, from some Other place that is not England. That's where the east and south of London face and so that's where the City has chosen to place those it deems most expendable.

Gwenhidwy has another theory about the babies being born over the last year and how they fall, like the rockets, in a Poisson distribution. Is he suggesting they're Slothrop's kids? Probably not, right? But, I mean, why bring it up? Is it just Gwenhidwy's optimism, to point out that the constant state of universal randomness that can be measured by Mexico's statistics not only works for death but life as well?

The section ends with an allegory of bugs chewing away at the hay in Jesus' manger. Just getting on, their actions sometimes causing the other bugs to stumble and fall, with Jesus' cries off in the distance, sometimes heard and acknowledged as existing but of no real consequence to the lives below, chewing hay and getting on with it.

Harley Quinn

I'm not claiming that my blog, Eee! Tess Ate Chai Tea, is entirely responsible for the atmosphere that has led to the awesome Harley Quinn cartoon but there was an awful lot of finger banging talk in Season One, Episode Two.

So, I mean, you're all welcome.

Gravity's Rainbow: Part XX

This section is about Leni, Franz's wife, Peter Sascha's lover, Ilse's mom. She's just left Franz and living in a crappy broken down building no better than a skip with a bunch of other dissidents. She has a thought which pulled me out of reading to come here and transcribe it:

"Franz is just the type they want. They know how to use that. They know how to use nearly everybody. What will happen to the ones they can't use?"

I mean, chills, right? In a way she doesn't yet realize, she's also talking about her daughter Ilse. When Ilse can't be used, she's in a camp. But when they figure out a use for her, designed to get Franz back under control when he seems to be slipping his bonds, they let her out. But those who they can't even find this small use for? Like I said, chills.

One of the aspects of Gravity's Rainbow narration style is how it almost exclusively mentions those things the character whose perspective the story is currently being told through would know. So we don't get much blatant and forthright discussion of the German death camps. We get maybe one mention of the atomic bombing of Japan. But we get reference after subtle reference to the existence and/or possibility of these things. The novel is informed by these tragedies while never really looking directly at them.

This section broke part of my mind because I realized that this book was written in 1973. So a lot of it is about 1973. Which isn't something I really thought about during the first read through and wasn't anything I thought about until reading this section. It's a commentary about the youth anti-war revolution of the 60s, right? And maybe the heart of what it's getting at is the writing on the wall: "AN ARMY OF LOVERS CAN BE BEATEN." So my mind broke because I began to realize, "I'm too far past 1973 to truly understand, on my own, without any guides, some major aspects of this book." So the part of me that sees the futility of truly understanding the majority of Pynchon's themes starts breaking in to say, "Yeah. Duh! That's why you're supposed to be making immature jokes about what you're reading! To camouflage your lack of understanding!" And then the truly stupid part of me that constantly forgets that says, "Oh yeah! Other people can point out how this section parallels the anti-war movement! Somebody else can explain who Rosa Luxemburg is and why she's mentioned! Some huge nerd can point out that Triangle D isn't a dirty reference but a Greek letter and math notation! You just enjoy the book as best you can, dumby."

There's that moment (after all the masturbation talk and then the sex with a Jewess talk that leads to masturbation (by other readers, I mean! Ahem)) when she meets with her old school friend Richard Hirsch, surprised to find he didn't die out on the front in France, which reads almost exactly as if it were a young American woman running into a friend she'd thought lost in Vietnam. The section is rife with astrology, something Leni wholeheartedly believes in. It might as well be the 60s moving on into the 70s.

Going back to the above quote, I suppose the question "What will happen to the ones they can't use?" can also be viewed in terms of the 1960s and 70s anti-war movement. How many Kent States did the politicians and soldiers actively long for? We see that even now with how much they want to run down protestors or send in the military to quash any protest criticizing police and government. It's so disturbing to see how many Americans have terrorist mindsets, especially now that so many of them have been inundated with so much propaganda.

That's not to totally let everybody off the hook though! As we'll see later, Pynchon sees in the overarching conspiracy how both sides simply wind up fighting for the rich and powerful. The bit where Pirate discovers he's working for Them whether he's with them or against them seems prophetic in this day and age and how corporations and government have infiltrated and manipulated the Green Movement for their own personal gain. Even when fighting for a better world, money and power manages to climb on top and direct the conversation.

"'Not produce,' she tried, 'not cause. It all goes along together. Parallel, not series. Metaphor. Signs and symptoms. Mapping on to different coordinate systems, I don't know . . .' She didn't know, all she was trying to do was reach."

Is this not an explanation for how to read Gravity's Rainbow itself? Every section seems almost a short story that can be read out of context with the rest of the book. Sure, it all sort of tells a linear story. But so, in a way, do all of Roger Mexico's pins in his map representing rocket strikes. There's data to be analyzed, something to be learned. But the order of the strikes doesn't really matter, do they? If only we, as readers, could read every section in parallel rather than in a series. Would something more come together?

"But he said: 'Try to design anything that way and have it work.'"

Ha ha! Did it work, Tom? Has it worked? I don't think I'm smart enough to say.

I still don't know what the significance of the colors "magenta and green" are but they stealthily poke up their heads in this chapter too in the description of the destroyed paint factory Franz worked at before moving on to rockets: ". . . paint cans exploded in great bursts of crimson and bottle-green. . . ."

We learn the history of Franz and how he came to be working on the rockets (after the paint factory burned down and he began putting up advertisements for movies that turned out to be maybe not movies at all but times and dates for the meeting of revolutionaries?) and how Leni came to leave him and went to let Peter Sascha know. In this part, we get a bit about assassinations which reminded me of the moment Omar is killed in The Wire:

"The moment of assassination is the moment when power and the ignorance of power come together, with Death as validator."

Only somebody who is ignorant of who the powerful is, of what he represents, can muster the nerve to murder them. Nobody dared go after Omar until somebody who didn't know anything about Omar decided to. It's probably exactly what happened between Caesar and Brutus too! The subject of assassination comes up because that night, Peter Sascha is trying to contact a man named Walter Rathenau, a former minister who was assassinated and whose import to one of the main themes of Gravity's Rainbow will probably be lost on first time readers. And also second time readers (which would normally be me but, well, sometimes I notice things?).

"Rathenau—according to histories—was prophet and architect of the cartelized state. From what began as a tiny bureau at the War Office in Berlin, he had coordinated Germany's economy during the World War, controlling supplies, quotas and prices, cutting across and demolishing the barriers of secrecy and property that separated firm from firm—a corporate Bismarck, before whose power no account book was too privileged, no agreement too clandestine."

A large part of the conspiracy that everybody lives under is that of The Firm, or the generalized "They." I'm pretty sure that entire conspiracy is the corporations coordinating to manipulate everything—the war, the economy, people's lives—simply to increase profits. Before this account of Rathenau, there's a minor story about how one corporation built a weapon that would blind people in a ten mile radius but they were censured by the rest of the corporations because a bomb like that would destroy the dye industry post-War. So you see, the war must be waged in a way that profits everybody, during and after!

The section ends with Rathenau's words through Peter Sascha. I don't know what it means, what any of it means! Something about the creation of plastics, maybe? It ends with this "You must ask two questions. First, what is the real nature of synthesis? And then: what is the real nature of control?" Hmm. Maybe I should think about reading a book about Gravity's Rainbow instead of Gravity's Rainbow! Because then instead of exclaiming after each paragraph, "Duh!", maybe I'll be able to exclaim, "Aha!"

Gravity's Rainbow: Part XIX

Carroll Eventyr finally gets his own section. Or part of a section seeing as how Pynchon loves to start a section from one character's point of view and then slip into the memory of another character when the first character remembers an experience they had with that new character and then that character has a memory of another character whose point of view we wind up slipping into.

That's a thing that happens, right? I'm not just a terrible reader? Am I?!

Well, that question is answered almost immediately as the point of view shifts to Nora Dodson-Truck observing Carroll in the memory of Carroll's medium powers first expressing themselves. She didn't quite catch who was coming through, nor remembered exactly what was said, but she recognized something spiritual happening because she immediately took a sidewalk artist's ochre chalk and drew a pentagram around her and Carroll.

Back to Carroll, he suspects that, perhaps, his sudden psychic powers expressed themselves as a way to keep Nora close to him (apparently they were engaged in an affair). Had he felt her slipping away and in an effort to keep her close, he called up "the control" (Peter Sascha, the voice, or spirit, on the other side that helps facilitate meetings with certain people passed on).

Carroll's drama with Nora, simply hinted at in the beginning of this short tale, careens into descriptions of the paranormal characters at The White Visitation. These general descriptions of the powers of the various people eventually focuses on Gavin Trefoil and his ability to change his skin color from albino white to a dark, purplish black. Speculation on how this could work scientifically turns into a mini-play (written by Rollo Groast to his father? Or just imagined by the narrator? Or by us, the readers?) about how the cells in the Central Nervous System react to becoming cells in the epidermis. It becomes an allegory of life and death on the human level, and the possibility of ascending to a heaven, an old home to be called back to. But which, ultimately, must remain theoretical, a dream, a fantasy, because no messages are ever sent back by those who pass on.

And now we see them, Nora and Carroll, together in their intimacy, in Nora's power, in Carroll's fear. Nora uses all those at The White Visitation as windows to something past the world we know. She tries to see something, some "Outer Radiance," but gets back nothing, time and time again. She has become empty in that search. Maybe, once, she used them for hope. But now she just uses them, cynically, to reiterate the Zero, to show her, again and again, that no matter what their powers profess to explain, she witnesses nothing. Nothing at all.

This is a complicated section featuring characters we never really learn a whole lot about. So I'm speculating wildly here with what textual evidence I'm able to comprehend!

Nora can't believe but it doesn't keep each of them from trying to convince her, to impress her with their abilities. Cherrycoke, the psychometrist, speaks of visions he sees when touching objects owned by other people. Over and over, he tells Nora things he should not know about her and yet she expresses her denials, no matter how accurate his guesses.

But Cherrycoke does get visions. His visions of St. Blaise's encounter with an angel on a bombing run the most substantial proof of his gifts. Nobody but St. Blaise and his wingman knew of this event but Cherrycoke picked up on it. St. Blaise believed it was a trick, Cherrycoke's divination of this event. But he couldn't have known from anybody else because the wingman was dead. And so Carroll Eventyr decided to reach out across the gap to this dead man, to certify what Cherrycoke had discovered.

The wingman's name is Terence Overbaby. Does anybody in academia know definitively how Pynchon picked his characters' names because this is getting ridiculous!

When Carroll tries to contact Terence, we, the readers, get a short biography of Peter Sascha, Carroll's spirit control. A medium himself, killed in 1930 by a blow from a police man, he used to do readings and séances for high ranking officials. One of them was Weissman, just back from Africa with his Herero aide (Enzian). Also at these functions, for his drugs (used in various paranormal ways, I suppose?), was Wimpe, the chemist who "befriends" Enzian's half-brother, Tchitcherine. These are connections I absolutely would not have made the first time reading this book.

During this scene at Sascha's séance, a man named Walter Asch has something happen to him. As each of the people at the event watch, they all interpret it in various ways. This theme, that we all interpret a "text" based on our own biases and experiences, we've seen previously in the way the members of The White Visitation viewed Slothrop's ability to predict rocket impacts with his hard-on. In these interpretations, we first experience a point of view through Enzian's eyes.

A new moment now, an interaction between Roger Mexico and Edward Treacle about needing to study death and the afterlife in order to understand life, since they are two sides of one conversation. Edward brings up the Herero as a culture who take it as gospel that they constantly speak with their dead.

Finally, we learn that Peter Sascha was in love with Leni Pökler, separated wife of Franz Pökler who worked on the rocket with Weissman, mother of Ilse, the young woman who would spend her life in a camp, only allowed short visits to go with her father to Zwölfkinder (if it was actually Ilse at all, of course!).

And that's it! Once again, just a lot of plot summary as I try to wrap my head around as much of this stuff as I can. Mostly so it's all in there when I need it for later sections when all of this information is referenced!

Gravity's Rainbow: Part XVIII

This section begins in the middle of a dream Pointsman is having. Kind of. I guess it begins with Pointsman asking himself, "When did you enter the paradoxical phase? Because it must have happened recently. You're now sleeping through the noise of all those bombers noisily flying by! So much noise! But also so much sleep! And what are you doing instead of waking up? You're dreaming!" If Pynchon ever reads my blog, he'll probably be thinking, "Damn! That young man said it how I should have!"

Also, I'm not a young man. But I still get called a young man by really old men. It's super fucking cute.

Part way through the description of the dream, as Pointsman is leaving his house to enter the childhood village where he grew up, he begins to remember how previous dreams in this location usually go. He usually walks out of his house and turns right where he winds up in a cemetery and then begins to fly. But he can only rise so far, slowing as he goes. And then he stops. You know. The way the rocket does. I mean until it begins to fall, of course. I'm not dumb! I've known how rockets work since I was like twelve! But this time in the dream, he goes left. I suppose that's the direction where the rocket falls back to Earth? It's also known as the sinister direction. You know. Left. Which Pointsman mentions to the woman who is his wife whom he doesn't know at all because he's never had one. It's sinister time!

Other rocket imagery in the dream: a white light falling from the sky and the time of day, 6 o'clock, where the hands are straight up and down.

Pointsman awakes with a start at the tentative knocking on his door of Thomas Gwenhidwy who has come to report that Spectro has been killed in a rocket blast. That's what makes him realize he's in the paradoxical phase. He sleeps through loud noises but wakes to quiet ones. Also Gwenhidwy means a lot of different things in Welsh depending on how I put them into Google the Terrible Translator. It can mean filthy smile or white filtrate! I think it also meant something else when I put it in some weird way but I've forgotten because I did that a few days ago.

As Pointsman contemplates his mortality in the face of Spectro's death, I can't help thinking of the seven scientists who have shared The Book (five of whom are dead now) as a superhero group, probably because of names like Lamplighter and Spectro. Plus they're all being picked off in some Watchmen style plan by the smartest man in the world. It's a weird superhero group though because they're battling the Nazis and their super weapons by studying conditioning and madness and paranoia but failing at every turn. How could they succeed? What are they studying that can be used proactively against the rocket, against pure violence? Abreactions, conditioning, madness, hysteria? Like the sound of the rocket coming only after it hits, the things they study are the results, the after-effects, of the rocket's violence. Like how Roger's statistics can't save anybody, it can only offer some kind of understanding of the pattern of the rockets which seems to offer a vague hope or slight control, Pointsman and his group's studies will not save one life. But it might shine new light on how people become numb to the death all around them, how people can live with the possibility of instantaneous obliteration in the same way they've always lived without it. In a way, it's nothing new. It's just one more way to die that must be cloaked in denial and disbelief if one wants to get anything done at all during daylight hours.

Pointsman even sees himself as the Superman of the group, the lone survivor (he apparently can't imagine that the lone survivor of The Book's group might be Gwenhidwy), stepping up to accept the Nobel Prize for finally discovering the proof that it all, every single aspect of human behavior, comes down to physiology. He even imagines his final obstacle as some arch nemesis, some super villain (or Minotaur or Nazi hound or silent killer). In some way I don't totally understand because I've never had any ambition, he has his own death wrapped up in his fantasy of his final and ultimate success. Perhaps it seems more glorious to him this way, more heroic.

But he had lost that dream many years ago, beat down by routine and funding and bosses. Until now. Now, with Slothrop in his sights, he once again sees the possibility of seeing Pavlov's work completed and bringing the ultimate truth of why humans are what they are and why they do what they do to all mankind. Or maybe he just desperately needs to know why Slothrop gets hard-ons at places the rockets will fall. He probably makes a big deal about it so that the reader, realizing they still have six hundred pages left in the book, will be all, "Oh! Yeah! I want to know the answer to that too! I'm going to totally stick with this book to find out the answer which Pynchon will definitely reveal to me!" Ha ha! Idiot.

Slothrop has already been sent to the Riviera so I guess Pointsman's experiment has already started. Oh yeah. That makes sense since I am only about thirty pages away from Chapter 2.

"There's something here, too transparent and swift to get a hold on—Psi Section might speak of ectoplasms—but he knows that the time has never been better, and that the exact experimental subject is in his hands. He must seize now, or be doomed to the same stone hallways, whose termination he knows. But he must remain open—even to the possibility that the Psi people are right. "We may all be right," he puts in his journal tonight, "so may be all we have speculated, and more. Whatever we may find, there can be no doubt that he is, physiologically, historically, a monster. We must never lose control. The thought of him lost in the world of men, after the war, fills me with a deep dread I cannot extinguish. . . ."

Another possibility is that Pointsman simply fears losing the funding he's been getting because of the War. The only way to keep going after the War is to run the Slothrop Experiment! And also to bribe Pudding with poo-poo and pee-pee.