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| The Pynchon Files; Literary Tales of Conspiracist Paranoia | |
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| Tweet Topic Started: Feb 4 2015, 11:04 PM (274 Views) | |
| Snardbafulator | Feb 4 2015, 11:04 PM Post #1 |
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Thomas Ruggles Pynchon
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Thomas Pynchon's novel Gravity's Rainbow, which won the 1974 National Book Award but was rejected by the Pulitzer Prize Advisory Committee for being "turgid ... overwritten ... unreadable ... obscene," is considered by some critics (Harold Bloom in particular) to be the greatest postwar American novel and by consensus as an Ur-text of postmodern literature. Thankfully, when I got into the emerging field of Pynchon criticism a few years later, the word "postmodern" was not yet in the lexicon. But surely few novels of its time have generated as much academic discourse and launched as many doctoral dissertations. So I'm certain that somewhere buried in the back pages of a New Solidarity or a Campaigner there's a vicious attack on this arch-nominalist beatnik who sent "Professor" Irwin Corey to accept his National Book Award (to turn it down, as he did the Howells Medal, would have insulted the co-recipient, Isaac Bahevis Singer). After all, they savaged Frank Zappa. Seems the Bizarros hate everything I really love. So by all rights, the brief celebrity -- or should I say anti-celebrity, as Pynchon is our most notorious literary recluse since JD Salinger, even going as far as to lend his voice to several Simpsons spoofs of himself, one with a bag over his head -- Pynchon attained at that mid-70s moment should have been deeply threatening to the Bizarros as they were morphing from a political group filled with intellectually curious and highly literate young people into a cult pushing a hard-line reactionary cultural turn. Although only about a decade and a half younger than Old Man Lyndon (and still publishing! Last year's Bleeding Edge was nominated for a National Book Award and '09's Inherent Vice was released last month as a film by Paul Thomas Anderson to strong reviews), Pynchon's sympathies were deeply with, and his works attractive to, the New Left. But more than just the need to mop up another pretender in the name of left hegemony, Pynchon stands LaRouche's worldview on its head. Where LaRouche champions negentropy, Pynchon first attained notice with his short story Entropy. While LaRouche champions industrial civilization as the sine qua non of humanism and believes the only thing wrong is that there's not enough of it, Pynchon chronicles, in aching, hallucinatory prose and exhaustive encyclopedic detail, the turn that Western technocracy has taken into the realm of the anti-human. But even more threatening than this, Gravity's Rainbow in particular shares many node points with LaRouchean conspiracism. Set mainly in the months before and immediately after V-E Day and ostensibly "about" the German V-2 rocket program, Gravity's Rainbow is replete with a fully developed British psychological warfare effort ("It's getting to sound like the Tavistock Institute around here"), interlocking transnational cartels which funded the war on both sides and divided Germany's technological spoils, genocidal colonial policy and radically evil bureaucrats with grandiosely thanatoerotic worldviews, treating the surface "Germans-and-Japs" story of the war as little more than "a diversionary tactic." Pynchon himself is not a conspiracist, but as a double major in engineering physics and English at Cornell who spent some apprentice time as a technical writer for Boeing, unlike LaRouche he has a genuine understanding of the postwar rage for cybernetics and systems analysis and uses conspiracism, especially as filtered through the paranoid PsOV of his characters, to deconstruct our human obsession with system building of all types (systems which more often fail), even using the "quest narrative" trope which ignites the plot of GR to relentlessly interrogate our need, as readers, for closure. Some people, of course, find this insufferable. I find it bracing, insightful and brimming with epistemological truth. Golly must ol' Lyndon ever hate this guy's guts. So there's my introduction. What will follow will be three somewhat long excerpts from GR. Bear in mind that I'm not copy-pasting but lovingly typing them all in with my own li'l fingers, so posting them will be an ongoing project. Copyright lawyers please be merciful as I cower behind the Fair Use Doctrine ... First installment forthcoming: A Nazi séance with the shade of Walter Rathenau. Bob |
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| Snardbafulator | Feb 5 2015, 12:17 PM Post #2 |
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Thomas Ruggles Pynchon
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They arrive at Peter Sachsa's well after dark. She finds a séance just about to begin. She is immediately aware of her drab coat and cotton dress (hemline too high), her scuffed and city-dusted shoes, her lack of jewelry. More middle-class reflexes ... vestiges she hopes. But most of the women are old. The others are too dazzling. Hmm. The men look more affluent than usual. Leni spots a silver lapel-swastika here and there. Wines on the tables are the great '20s and '21s. Schloss Vollrads, Zeltinger, Piersporter -- it is an Occasion. The objective tonight is to get in touch with the late foreign minister Walter Rathenau. At the Gymnasium, Leni sang with the other children the charming anti-Semitic street refrain of the time: Knallt ab den Juden Rathenau, Die gottverdammte Judensau ... After he was assassinated, she sang nothing for weeks, certain that, if the singing hadn't brought it about, at least it had been a prophesy, a spell ... There are specific messages tonight. Questions for the former minister. A gentle sorting-out process is underway. Reasons of security. Only certain guests are allowed to go on into Peter's sitting room. The preterite stay outside, gossiping, showing their gums out of tension, moving their hands ... The big scandal around IG Farben is the unlucky subsidiary Spottbilligfilm AG, whose entire management are about to be purged for sending to OKW weapons procurement a design proposal for a new airborne ray which could turn whole populations, inside a ten-kilometer radius, stone blind. An IG review board caught the scheme in time. Poor Spottbilligfilm. It had slipped their collective mind what such a weapon would do to the dye market after the next war. The Götterdammerung mentality again. The weapon had been known as L-5227, L standing for Light, another comical German euphemism, like the A in rocket designations which stands for aggregate, or IG itself, Interessengemeinschaft, a fellowship of interests ... and what about the case of catalyst poisoning in Prague -- was it true that the VI b Group Staffs at the Chemical Instrumentality for the Abnormal have been flown east on emergency status, and that it's a complex poisoning, both selenium and tellurium ... the names of the poisons sober the conversation, like a mention of cancer ... The elite who sit tonight are from the corporate Nazi crowd, among whom Leni recognizes who but Generaldirektor Smaragd, of an IG branch that was interested, for a time, in her husband. But then abruptly there'd been no more contact. It would have been mysterious, a little sinister, except that everything in those days could reasonably be blamed on the economy ... In the crowd her eyes meet Peter's. "I've left him," she whispers, nodding, as he shakes hands. "You can put Ilse to sleep in one of the bedrooms. Can we talk later?" There is to his eyes a definite faunish slant. Will he accept that she is not his, any more than she belonged to Franz? "Yes, of course. What's going on?" He snorts, meaning they haven't told me. They're using him -- have been, various theys, for ten years. But he never knows how, except by rare accident, an allusion, an interception of smiles. A distorting and forever clouded mirror, the smiles of clients ... Why do they want Rathenau tonight? What did Ceasar really whisper to his protégé as he fell? Et tu, Brute, the official lie, is about what you'd expect to get from them -- it says exactly nothing. The moment of assassination is the moment when power and the ignorance of power come together, with Death as validator. When one speaks to the other then it is not to pass the time of day with et-tu-Brutes. What passes is a truth so terrible that history -- at best a conspiracy, not always among gentlemen, to defraud -- will never admit it. The truth will be repressed or in ages of particular elegance be disguised as something else. What will Rathenau, past the moment, years into a new otherside existence, have to say about the old dispensation? Probably nothing as incredible as what he might have said just as the shock flashed his mortal nerves, as the Angel swooped in ... But they will see. Rathenau -- according to the 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. His father Emil Rathenau had founded AEG, the German General Electric Company, but young Walter was more than another industrial heir -- he was a philosopher with a vision of the postwar State. He saw the war in progress as a world revolution, out of which would rise neither Red communism nor an unhindered Right, but a rational structure in which business would be the true, the rightful authority -- a structure based, not surprisingly, on the one he'd engineered in Germany for fighting the World War. Thus the official version. Grandiose enough. But Generaldirektor Smaragd and colleagues are not here to be told what even the masses believe. It might almost -- if one were paranoid enough -- seem to be a collaboration here, between both sides of the Wall, matter and spirit. What is it that they know that the powerless do not? What terrible structure behind the appearance of diversity and enterprise? Gallows humor. A damned parlor game. Smaragd cannot really believe in any of this, Smaragd the technician and manager. He may only want signs, omens, confirmations of what's already in being, something to giggle over among the Herrenklub -- "We even have the Jew's blessing!" Whatever comes through the medium tonight they will warp, they will edit, into a blessing. It is contempt of a rare order. Leni finds a couch in a quiet corner of a room full of Chinese ivory and silk hangings, lies on it, one calf dangling, and tries to relax. Franz now will be home from the rocket-field, blinking under the bulb as Frau Silberschlag next door delivers Leni's last message. Messages tonight, borne on the lights of Berlin ... neon, incandescent, stellar ... messages that weave into a net of information that no one can escape ... "The path is clear," a voice moving Sachsa's lips and rigid white throat. "You are constrained, over there, to follow it in time, one step after another. But here it's possible to see the whole shape at once -- not for me, I'm not that far along -- but many know it as a clear presence ... 'shape' isn't really the right word ... Let me be honest with you. I'm finding it harder to put myself in your shoes. Problems you may be having, even those of global implication, seem to many of us here only trivial side-trips. You are off on a winding and difficult road, which you conceive to be wide and straight, an Autobahn you can travel at your ease. Is it any use for me to tell you that all you believe real is illusion? I don't know whether you'll listen or ignore it. You only want to know about your path, your Autobahn. "All right. Mauve: that's in the pattern. The invention of mauve, the coming to your level of the color mauve. Are you listening, Generaldirektor?" "I am listening, Herr Rathenau," replies Smaragd of IG Farben. "Tyrian purple, alizarin and indigo, other coal-tar dyes are here, but the important one is mauve. William Perkin discovered it in England, but he was trained by Hofmann, who was trained by Liebig. There is a succession involved. If it's karmic it's only in a very limited sense ... another Englishman, Herbert Ganister, and the generation of chemists he trained ... Then the discovery of Oneirine. Ask your man Wimpe. He is the expert on cyclized benzylisoquinilines. Look into the clinical effects of the drug. I don't know. It seems you might look in that direction. It converges with the mauve-Perkin-Ganister line. But all I have is the molecule, the sketch ... Methoneirine, as the sulfate. Not in Germany, but in the United States. There is a link to the United States. A link to Russia. Why do you think von Maltzan and I saw the Rapallo treaty through? It was necessary to move to the east. Wimpe can tell you. Wimpe, the V-Mann, was always there. Why do you think we wanted Krupp to sell them agricultural machinery so badly? It was also part of the process. At the time I didn't understand it as clearly as I do now. But I knew what I had to do. "Consider coal and steel. There is a place where they meet. The interface between coal and steel is coal-tar. Imagine coal, down in the earth, dead black, no light, the very substance of death. Death ancient, prehistoric, species we will never see again. Growing older, blacker, deeper, in layers of perpetual night. Above ground, the steel rolls out fiery bright. But to make steel, the coal tars, darker and heavier, must be taken from the original coal. Earth's excrement, purged out for the ennoblement of shining steel. Passed over. "We thought of this as an industrial process. It was more. We passed over the coal-tars. A thousand different molecules waited in the preterite dung. This is the sign of revealing. Of unfolding. This is one meaning of mauve, the first new color on Earth, leaping to Earth's light from its grave miles and aeons below. There is the other meaning ... the succession ... I can't see that far yet ... "But this is all the impersonation of life. The real movement is not from death to any rebirth. It is from death to death-transfigured. The best you can do is to polymerize a few dead molecules. But polymerization is not resurrection. I mean your IG, Generaldirektor." "Our IG, I should have thought," replies Smaragd with more than the usual ice and stiffness. "That's for you to work out. If you prefer to call this a liaison, do. I am here for as long as you need me. You don't have to listen. You think you'd rather hear about what you call 'life': the growing, organic Kartell. But it's only another illusion. A very clever robot. The more dynamic it seems to you, the more deep and dead, in reality, it grows. Look at the smokestacks, how they proliferate, fanning the wastes of the original waste over greater and greater masses of city. Structurally, they are strongest in compression. A smokestack can survive any explosion -- even the shock wave from one of the new cosmic bombs" -- a bit of a murmur around the table at this -- "as you all must know. The persistence, then, of structures favoring death. Death converted into more death. Perfecting its reign, just as the buried coal grows denser, and overlaid with more strata -- epoch on top of epoch, city on top of ruined city. This is the sign of Death the impersonator. "These signs are real. They are also symptoms of a process. The process follows the same form, the same structure. To apprehend it you will follow the signs. All talk of cause and effect is secular history, and secular history is a diversionary tactic. Useful to you, gentlemen, but no longer so to us here. If you want the truth -- I know I presume here -- you must look into the technology of these matters. Even into the hearts of certain molecules -- it is they after all which dictate temperatures, pressures, rates of flow, costs, profits, the shapes of towers ... "You must ask two questions. First, what is the real nature of synthesis? And then: what is the real nature of control? "You think you know, you cling to your beliefs. But sooner or later you will have to let them go ... " A silence, which prolongs itself. There is some shifting in the seats around the table, but the sets of little fingers stay in touch. "Herr Rathenau? Could you tell me one thing?" It is Heinz Rippenstoss, the irrepressible Nazi wag and gadabout. The sitters begin to giggle, and Peter Sachsa to return to his room. "Is God really Jewish?" (Gravity's Rainbow pp. 163-67. Viking hardbound edition, 1973) |
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| Snardbafulator | Feb 9 2015, 12:59 PM Post #3 |
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Thomas Ruggles Pynchon
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In The Mittlewerke It's a Sunday-funnies dawn, very blue sky with gaudy pink clouds in it. Mud across the cobblestones is so slick it reflects light, so that you walk not streets but these long streaky cuts of raw meat, hock of werewolf, gammon of Beast. Tchitcherine has big feet. Geli had to stuff pieces of an old chemise in the toes of his boots so they'll fit Slothrop. Dodging constantly for jeeps, ten-ton lorries, Russians on horseback, he finally hitches a ride from an 18-year old American first lieutenant in a gray Mercedes staff car with dents all over it. Slothrop frisks mustaches, flashes his armband, feeling defensive. The sun's already warm. There's a smell of evergreens on the mountains. This rail driving, who's attached to the tank company guarding the Mittlewerke, doesn't think Slothrop should have any trouble getting inside. English SPOG [Special Projectiles Operations Group] have come and gone. Right now American Army Ordnance people are busy crating and shipping out parts and tools for a hundred A4s [V-2 rockets]. A big hassle. "Trying to get it all out before the Russians take over." Interregnum. Civilians and bureaucrats show up every day, high-level tourists, to stare and go wow. "Guess nobody's seen 'em this big before. I don't know what it is. Like a burlesque crowd. Not gonna do anything, just here to look. Most of them bring cameras. Notice you didn't. We have them for rent at the main gate, if you're interested." One of the many hustles. Yellow James the cook has got him a swell little sandwich wagon, you can hear him in the tunnels calling, "Come an' get 'em! Hot 'n' cold and dripping with greens!" And there'll be grease on the glasses of half these gobbling fools in another five minutes. Nick De Profundis, the company lounge lizard, has surprised everybody by changing, inside the phone booth of factory spaces here, to an energetic businessman, selling A4 souvenirs: small items that can be worked into keychains, money clips or a scatter-pin for that special gal back home, burner cups of brass off the combustion chambers, ball bearings from the servos, and this week the hep item seems to be SA 100 acorn diodes, cute little mixing valves looted out of the Telefunken units, and the even rarer SA 102s, which of course fetch a higher price. And there's "Micro" Graham, who's let his sideburns grow and lurks in the Stollen where the gullible visitors stray: "Pssst." "Pssst?" "Forget it." "Well now you've got me curious." "Thought you looked like a sport. You taking the tour?" "I-I only stepped away for a second. Really, I'm going right back ... " "Finding it a little dull?" Oily Micro moves in on his mark. "Ever wonder to yourself: 'What really went on in here?'?" The visitor willing to spend extravagant sums is rarely disappointed. Micro knows the secret doors to rock passages that lead through to Dora, the prison camp next to the Mittlewerke. Each member of the party is given his own electric lantern. There is a hurried, basic instruction on what to do in case of any encounter with the dead. "Remember they were always on the defensive here. When the Americans liberated Dora, the prisoners who were still alive went on a rampage after the material -- they looted, they ate and drank themselves sick. For others, Death came like the American Army, and liberated them spiritually. So they're apt to be on a spiritual rampage now. Guard your thoughts. Use the natural balance of your mind against them. They'll be coming at you off-balance, remember." A popular attraction is the elegant Raumwaffe spacesuit wardrobe, designed by famous military couturier Heini of Berlin. Not only are these turnouts dazzling enough to thrill even the juvenile leads of a space-operetta, down to the oddly-colored television images flickering across their toenails, but Heini has even thought of silks for the amusing little Space-Jockeys (Raum-Jockeier) with their electric whips, who will someday zoom about just outside the barrier-glow of the Raketen-Stadt, astride "horses" of polished meteorite all with the same stylized face (a high-contrast imago of the horse that follows you, emphasis on its demented eyes, its teeth, the darkness under its hindquarters ... ), with the propulsive gases blowing like farts out their tail ends -- the juvenile leads giggle together at this naughty bathroom moment, and slowly, in what's hardly more than a sigh of gravity here, go bobbing, each radiant in a display of fluorescent plastics, back into the Waltz, the strangely communal Waltz of the Future, a slightly, disquietingly grainy-dissonant chorale implied here in the whirling silence of faces, the bare shoulderblades slung so space-Viennese, so jaded with Tomorrow ... Then come -- the Space Helmets! At first you may be alarmed, on noticing that they appear to be fashioned from skulls. At least the upper dome of this unpleasant headgear is certainly the skull of some manlike creature built to a larger scale ... Perhaps Titans lived under this mountain, and their skulls got harvested like giant mushrooms ... The eye-sockets are fitted with quartz lenses. Filters may be slipped in. Nasal bone and upper teeth have been replaced by a metal breathing apparatus, full of slots and grating. Corresponding to the jaw is a built-up section, almost a facial codpiece, of iron and ebonite, perhaps housing a radio unit, thrusting forward in black fatality. For an extra few marks you're allowed to slip one of these helmets on. Once inside these yellow caverns, looking out now through neutral-density orbits, the sound of your breath hissing up and around the bone spaces, what you thought was a balanced mind is little help. The compartment the Schwarzkommando were quartered in is no longer an amusing travelogue of native savages taking on ways of the 21st century. The milk calabashes appear only to be made of some plastic. On the spot where tradition sez Enzian had his Illumination, in the course of a wet dream where he coupled with a slender white rocket, there is the dark stain, miraculously still wet, and a smell you understand is meant to be that of semen -- but is really closer to soap, or bleach. The wall-paintings lose their intended primitive crudeness and take on primitive spatiality, depth and brilliance -- transform, indeed, to dioramas on the theme "The Promise of Space Travel." Lit sharply by carbide light which hisses and smells like the bad breath of someone quite familiar to you, the view commands your stare. After a few minutes it becomes possible to make out actual movement down there, even at the immense distances implied by the scale: yes, we're hanging now down the last limb of our trajectory in to the Raketen-Stadt, a difficult night of magnetic storm behind us, eddy currents still shimmering through all our steel like raindrops that cling to vehicle windows ... yes, it is a City: vegetable "Ho-ly"s and "Isn't that something!"s go away echoing as we crowd about the bloom of window in this salt underground ... Strangely, these are not the symmetries we were programmed to expect, not the fins, the streamlined corners, pylons, or simple solid geometries of the official version at all -- that's for the ribbon clerks back on the Tour, in the numbered Stollen. No, this Rocket-City, so whitely lit against the calm dimness of space, is set up deliberately To Avoid Symmetry, Allow Complexity, Introduce Terror (from the Preamble to the Articles of Immachination) -- but tourists have to connect the look of it back to things they remember from their times and planet -- back to the wine bottle smashed in the basin, the bristlecone pines outracing Death for millennia, concrete roads abandoned years ago, hairdos of the late 1930s, indole molecules, especially polymerized indoles, as in Imipolex G -- Wait -- which one was thinking that? Monitors, get a fix on it, hurry up -- But the target slips away. "They handle their own security down inside," the young rail is telling Slothrop, "we're here for Surface Guard only. Our responsibility ends at Stollen Number Zero, Power and Light. It's really a pretty soft racket for us." Life is good, and nobody's looking forward much to redeployment. There are fräuleins for screwing, cooking, and doing your laundry. He can put Slothrop on to champagne, furs, cameras, cigarettes ... Can't just be interested in rockets, can he, that's crazy. He's right. One of the sweetest fruits of victory, after sleep and looting, must be the chance to ignore no-parking signs. There are struck Ps in circles up all over the place, nailed on trees, wired on girderwork, but the main tunnel entrances are pretty well blocked with vehicles by the time the dimpled Mercedes arrives. "Shit," hollers the young tanker, turns off his engine and leaves the German short at no particular angle on the broad muddy apron. Leaving keys in the car too, Slothrop's learning to notice items like this ... The entrance to the tunnel is shaped like a parabola. The Albert Speer Touch. Somebody during the thirties was big on parabolas anyhow, and Albert Speer was in charge of the New German Architecture then, and later he went on to become Minister of Munitions, and nominal chief customer for the A4. This parabola here happens to be the inspiration of a Speer disciple named Etzel Ölsch. He had noted this parabola shape around on Autobahn overpasses, sports stadiums u.s.w., and thought it was the most contemporary thing he'd ever seen. Imagine his astonishment on finding that the parabola was also the shape of the path intended for the rocket through space. (What he actually said was, "Oh, that's nice.") It was his mother who'd named him after Atilla the Hun, and nobody ever found out why. His parabola had a high loft to it, and the railroad tracks run in underneath, steel into shadows. Battened cloth camouflage furls back at the edges. The mountain goes sloping away above, rock cropping out here and there among the bushes and the trees. Slothrop presents his sooper dooper SHAEF pass, signed off by Ike and even more authentic, by the colonel heading up the American "Special Mission V-2" out of Paris. A Waxwing specialty of the house. B Company, 47th Armored Infantry, 5th Armored Division appears to be up to something besides security for this place. Slothrop is shrugged on through. There is a lot of moseying, drawling and country humor around here. Somebody must've been picking his nose. A couple days later Slothrop will find a dried piece of snot on the card, a crystal brown visa for Nordhausen. In past the white-topped guard towers. Transformers buzz through the spring morning. Someplace chains rattle and a tailgate drops. Between ruts, high places, ridges of mud are beginning to dry out in the sun, to lighten and crumble. Nearby the loud wake-up yawn and stretch of a train whistle cuts loose. In past a heap of bright metal spheres in daylight, with a comical sign PLEEZ NO SQUEEZ-A DA OXYGEN-A UNIT, EH? how long, how long you sfacim-a dis country ... In under parabola and parable, straight into the mountain, sunlight gone, into the cold, the dark, the long echoes of the Mittlewerke. There is that not-so-rare personality disorder known as Tannhäuserism. Some of us love to be taken under mountains, and not always with horny expectations -- Venus, Frau Holda, her sexual delights -- no, many come, actually, for the gnomes, the critters smaller than you, for the sepulchral way time stretches along your hooded strolls down here, quietly through courtyards that go for miles, with no anxiety about getting lost ... no one stares, no one is waiting to judge you ... out of the public eye ... even a Minnesinger needs to be alone ... long cloudy-day indoor walks ... the comfort of a closed place, where everyone is in complete agreement about Death. Slothrop knows this place. Not so much from maps he had to study at the Casino as knowing it in the way you know someone is there ... Plant generators are still supplying power. Rarely a bare bulb will hollow out a region of light. As darkness is mined and transported from place to place like marble, so the light bulb is the chisel that delivers it from its inertia, and has become one of the great secret ikons of the Humility, the multitudes who are passed over by God and History. When the Dora prisoners went on their rampage, the light bulbs in the rocket works were the first to go: before food, before the delights to be looted out of the medical lockers and the hospital pharmacy in Stollen Number 1, these breakable, socketless (in Germany the word for electric socket is also the word for Mother -- so, motherless too) images were what the "liberated" had to take ... The basic layout of the plant was another inspiration of Etzel Ölsch, a Nazi inspiration like the parabola, but again also a symbol belonging to the Rocket. Picture the letters SS each stretched lengthwise a bit. These are the two main tunnels, driven over a mile into the mountain. Or picture a ladder with a slight S-shaped ripple in it, lying flat: 44 runglike Stollen or cross-tunnels, linking the two main ones. A couple hundred feet of rock mountain, at the deepest, press down overhead. But the shape is more than an elongated SS. Apprentice Hupla comes running in one day to tell the architect. "Master!" he's yelling, "Master!" Ölsch has taken up quarters in the Mittlewerke, insulated from the factory down a few private drifts that don't appear on any map of the place. He's getting into a grandiose idea of what an architect's life should be down here, insisting now on the title "Master" from all his helpers. That isn't his only eccentricity, either. Last three designs he proposed to the Führer were all visually in the groove, beautifully New German, except that none of the buildings will stay up. They look normal enough, but they are designed to fall down, like fat men at the opera falling asleep into someone's lap, shortly after the last rivet is driven, the last forms removed from the newly set allegorical statue. This is Ölsch's "deathwish" problem here, as the little helpers call it: it rates a lot of gossip in the commissary at meals, and beside the coffee urns out on the gloomy stone loading docks ... It's well after sunset now, each desk in the vaulted, almost outdoor bay has its own incandescent light on. The gnomes sit out here, at night, with only their bulbs shining conditionally, precariously ... it all might go dark so easily, in the next second ... Each gnome works in front of his drawing board. They're working late. There's a deadline -- it's not clear if they're working overtime to meet it, or if they have already failed and are here as punishment. Back in his office, Etzel Ölsch can be heard singing. Tasteless, low beer-hall songs. Now he is lighting a cigar. Both he and the gnome Apprentice Hupla know that this is an exploding cigar, put in his humidor as a revolutionary gesture by persons unknown but so without power that it doesn't matter -- "Wait, Master, don't light it -- Master, put it out, please, it's an exploding cigar!" "Proceed, Hupla, with the intelligence that prompted your rather rude entrance." "But -- " "Hupla ... " Puffing masterful clouds of cigar smoke. "It-it's about the shape of the tunnels here, Master." "Don't flinch like that. I based the design on the double lightning-stroke, Hupla -- the SS emblem." "But it's also a double integral sign! Did you know that?" "Ah. Yes: Summe, Summe, as Leibniz said. Well, isn't that -- " BLAM. All right. But Etzel Ölsch's genius was to be fatally receptive to imagery associated with the Rocket. In the static space of the architect, he might've used a double integral now and then, early in his career, to find volumes under surfaces whose equations were known -- masses, moments, centers of gravity. But it's been years since he's had to do with anything that basic. Most of his calculating these days have been with marks and pfennigs, not functions of idealistic r and θ, naïve x and y ... But in the dynamic space of the living Rocket, the double integral has a different meaning. To integrate here is to operate on a rate of change so that time falls away: change is stilled ... "Meters per second" will integrate to "meters." The moving vehicle is frozen, in space, to become architecture, and timeless. It was never launched. It will never fall. In the guidance, this is what happened: a little pendulum was kept centered by a magnetic field. During launch, pulling gs, the pendulum would swing aft, off center. It had a coil attached to it. When the coil moved through the magnetic field, electric current flowed in the coil. As the pendulum was pushed off center by the acceleration of the launch, current would flow -- the more acceleration, the more flow. So the Rocket, on its own side of the flight, sensed acceleration first. Men, tracking it, sensed position or distance first. To get the distance from acceleration, the Rocket had to integrate twice -- needed a moving coil, transformers, electrolytic cell, bridge of diodes, one tetrode (an extra grid to screen away capacitive coupling inside the tube), an elaborate dance of design precautions to get what human eyes saw first of all -- the distance along the flight path. There was that backward symmetry again, one that Pointsman missed but Katje didn't. "A life of its own," she said. Slothrop remembers her reluctant smile, the Mediterranean afternoon, the peeling twist of a eucalyptus trunk, the same pink, in that weakening light, as the American officer's trousers Slothrop wore once upon a time, and the acid, the pungent smell of the leaves ... The current, flowing in the coil, passed a Wheatstone bridge and charged up a capacitor. The charge was the time integral of the current flowing in the coil and the bridge. Advanced versions of this so-called "IG" guidance integrated twice, so that the charge gathering on one side of the capacitor grew directly as the distance the Rocket had traveled. Before launch, the other side of the cell had been charged up to a level representing the distance to a particular point in space. Brennschluss [motor cutoff] exactly here would make the Rocket go on to hit 1000 yards east of Waterloo Station. At the instant the charge (BiL) accumulating in the flight equaled the preset charge (AiL) on the other side, the capacitor discharged. A switch closed, fuel cut off, burning ended. The Rocket was on its own. That is one meaning of the shape of the tunnels down here in the Mittlewerke. Another may be the ancient rune that stands for the yew tree, or Death. The double integral stood in Etzel Ölsch's subconscious for the method of finding hidden centers, inertias unknown, as if monoliths had been left for him in the twilight, left behind by some corrupted idea of "Civilization," in which eagles cast in concrete stand ten meters high at the corners of stadiums where the people, a corrupted idea of "The People" are gathering, in which birds do not fly, in which imaginary centers far down inside the solid fatality of stone are thought of not as "heart," "plexus," "consciousness," (the voice speaking here grows more ironic, closer to tears which are not all theatre, as the list goes on ... ) "Sanctuary," "dream of motion," "cyst of the eternal present," or "Gravity's gray eminence among the councils of the living stone." No, as none of these, but instead a point in space, a point hung precise as the point where burning must end, never launched, never to fall. And what is the specific shape whose center of gravity is the Brennschluss Point? Don't jump at an infinite number of possible shapes. There's only one. There's a Brennschluss point for every firing site. They still hang up there, all of them, a constellation waiting to have a 13th sign of the Zodiac named for it ... but they lie so close to Earth that from many places they can't be seen at all, and from different places inside the zone where they can be seen, they fall into completely different patterns ... Double integral is also the shape of lovers curled asleep, which is where Slothrop wishes he were now -- all the way back with Katje, even lost as he might feel again, even more vulnerable than now -- even (because he still honestly misses her), preserved by accident, in ways he can't help seeing, accident whose own much colder honesty each lover has only the other to protect him from ... Could he live like that? Would They ever agree to let him and Katje live like that? He's had nothing to say to anyone about her. It's not the gentlemanly reflex that made him edit, switch names, insert fantasies into the yarns he spun for Tantivy back in the ACHTUNG office, so much as the primitive fear of having a soul captured by a likeness of image or of a name ... He wants to preserve what he can of her from Their several entropies, from Their softsoaping and Their money: maybe he thinks that if he can do it for her he can also do it for himself ... although that's awful close to nobility for Slothrop and The Penis He Thought Was His Own. In the sheet-metal ducting that snakes like a spine along the overhead, plant ventilation moans. Now and then it sounds like voices. Traffic from somewhere remote. It's not as if they were discussing Slothrop directly, understand. But he wishes he could hear it better ... Lakes of light, portages of darkness. The concrete facing of the tunnel has given way to whitewash over chunky fault-surfaces, phony-looking as the inside of an amusement park cave. Entrances to cross-tunnels slip by like tuned pipes with an airflow at their mouths ... once upon a time lathes did screech, playful machinists had shootouts with little brass squirt cans of cutting oil ... knuckles were bloodied against grinding wheels, pores, creases and quicks were stabbed by the fine splinters of steel ... tubeworks of alloy and glass contracted tinkling in air that felt like the dead of winter, and amber light raced in phalanx among the small neon bulbs. Once, all this did happen. It is hard down here in the Mittlewerke to live in the present for very long. The nostalgia you feel is not your own, but it's potent. All the objects have grown still, drowned, enfeebled with evening, terminal evening. Tough skins of oxides, some only a molecule thick, shroud the metal surfaces, fade out human reflection. Straw-colored drive belts of polyvinyl alcohol sag and release their last traces of industrial odor. Though found adrift and haunted, full of signs of recent human tenancy, this is not the legendary ship Marie-Celeste -- it isn't bounded so neatly, these tracks underfoot run away fore and aft into all stilled Europe, and our flesh doesn't sweat and pimple here for the domestic mysteries, the attic horror of What Might Have Happened so much as for our knowledge of what likely did happen ... it was always easy, in open and lonely places, to be visited by Panic wilderness fear, but these are the urban fantods here, that come to get you when you are lost or isolate inside the way time is passing, when there is no more History, no time-traveling capsule to find your way back to, only the lateness and the absence that fill a great railway shed after the capital has been evacuated, and the goat-god's city cousins wait for you at the edges of the light, playing the tunes they always played, but more audible now, because everything else has gone away or fallen silent ... barn-swallow souls, fashioned of brown twilight, rise toward the white ceilings ... they are unique to the Zone, they answer to the new Uncertainty. Ghosts used to be either likenesses of the dead or wraiths of the living. But here in the Zone categories have been blurred badly. The status of the name you miss, love, and search for now has grown ambiguous and remote, but this is even more than the bureaucracy of mass absence -- some still live, some have died, but many, many have forgotten which they are. Their likenesses will not serve. Down here are only wrappings left in the light, in the dark: images of the Uncertainty ... (Gravity's Rainbow pp. 295-303. Viking hardbound edition, 1973) |
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9:20 AM Jul 11