direct hit! GR style

[Scott Badger]

> 
> David Casseres wrote:
> 
> >
> > And it gives him a hardon.  A hardon???  It seems pretty weird to get a
> > hardon over one's impending obliteration.
> 
Then Peter Mead responded:

> Dear David,
> 
>         Perhaps it is simply the urge toward survival in the face of an
> overwhelming death, not just of the individual, but of MANKIND as well
> (it has happened before, but there is nothing to compare to it now). A
> hardon is a tool of procreation.
> 
> Peter Mead


Just back from vacation and going through my e-mail (been gone for 2
weeks...so you can imagine what I'm facing) and I noticed several posts
on Slothrop, rockets and hardons.  Most link Slothrop's sexual response
to the threat of death and the rocket serves as a vehicle for that
threat.  It was my impression, though, that Slothrop was not reacting to
the rocket, but to the absence of Impolex G - the stimulus used in
Infant Tyrone's conditioning.  An absence defined by its inclusion in
the last rocket fired, number 00000.  In other words, Slothrop has gone
ultra paradoxical (I think that's the Pavlovian term - I don't have my
copy of GR handy) where he now reacts, not to the original stimulus, but
to a lack of it.  Somewhere in GR, I think it's mentioned that Slothrop
might or might not have been "deconditioned" and that deconditioning may
have gone "beyond the zero".  Transmarginal. 

I read Slothrop/Impolex G/hardon/rocket as an exploration into the
nature and extent of a causal (rational) world and the possibilities (at
least) of control that it would imply.  Do we live in a determined and
determinable world, where the chain of events is independant of the flow
of time, allowing determination (passive and active) of future events
from the present, or past?  Or, as in fluid dynamics, are downstream
events, essentially, unknowable?  As Pointsman wondered whether
"something in the air" triggered Slothrop's London affairs, perhaps
Pynchon is asking whether any future event, no matter how disconnected,
can be read in the present.