GR title

[Peter A Watts]

> I have always wondered what others make of the title of Gravity's 
> Rainbow, both literally and figuratively. Especially in the light of 
> the following quote, which I find a little confusing.
> 
>      Gravity, taken so for granted, is really something eerie, 
>      Messianic, extrasensory in Earth's mindbody (590).

this suggests to me sorta the same thing that we get at the very end
where, directly after the caption ASCENT we are reminded that it will 
always be betrayed to gravity, the mortal parabola; the soul may ascend, 
but in the end what goes up must come down. we always end up coming back 
to our oily fossil roots, descend back into the stuff of earth for 
another go.
praps messianic might be replaced by bodhisattvic here, to underscore the 
feeling that the reason we come back is to help our fellows in a kind of 
bootstrap operation of ascescion. or perhaps just providing a decoy for 
the elect; the preterite are the ones who can't go through the gate in 
the fold, despite the optimisms of any messiahs.
pynchon's pessimism replaces jesus with a slothrop; an incompetent or 
slothful kid who doesn't end up saving even his own ass. but the passages 
on the beauty and emotion of advent and the new world show us the hope 
that makes the let-down such a crash. (weed and zoyd become similar 
figures in Vineland).
i don't buy it though, because there's always something over the rainbow, 
gods beautiful sideshow to mortality's midway; the problem is that its 
boring as hell up there. Id rather be sitting with slothrop on those rare 
moments, brick of hash in his pocket "a very thick rainbow here, a stout 
rainbow cock driven down out of pubic clouds into Earth, green wet 
valleyed Earth, and his chest fills and he stands crying, not a thing in 
his head, just feeling natural. . .

-uwattp00 at mcl.ucsb.edu	
	the natural man is in open revolution 
	against the utterly inhuman form 
	of life
c.g. jung