all

[rj]

His first thought was that he'd written it himself and forgot ....

                       ROCKETMAN WAS HERE

  His first thought was that he'd written it himself and forgot. Odd
that that should've been his first thought, but it was. Might be he was
starting to implicate himself, some yesterday version of himself, in the
Combination against who he was right then. In its sluggish coma, the
albatross stirred.
  Past Slothrops, say averaging one a day, ten thousand of them, some
more powerful than others, had been going over every sundown to the
furious host. They were the fifth-columnists, well inside his head,
waiting the moment to deliver him to the four other divisions outside,
closing in. . . .
  So, next to the other graffiti, with a piece of rock, he scratches his
sign:

                  (insert personal mandala here)

  Slothrop besieged. Only after he'd left it half a dozen more places
did it dawn on him that *what he was really drawing was the A4 rocket*,
seen from below. By which time he'd become tuned to other fourfold
expressions--variations on Frans van der Groov's cosmic
windmill--swastikas, gymnastic symbols FFFF in a circle symmetrically
upside down and backward, Frisch Fromm Frölich Frei over neat doorways
in quiet streets, and crossroads, where you can sit and listen in to
traffic from the Other Side, hearing about the future (no serial time
over there: events are all there in the same eternal moment and so
certain messages don't always "make sense" back here: they lack
historical structure, they sound fanciful, or insane).
  The sand-colored churchtops rear up on Slothrop's horizons, apses out
to four sides like rocket fins guiding the streamlined spires . . .
chiseled in the sandstone he finds waiting the mark of consecration, a
cross in a circle. At last, lying one afternoon spread-eagled at his
ease in the sun, at the edge of one of the ancient Plague towns he
becomes a cross himself, a crossroads, a living intersection where the
judges have come to set up a gibbet for a common criminal who is to be
hanged at noon. Black hounds and fanged little hunters slick as weasels,
dogs whose breeds have been lost for 700 years, chase a female in heat
as the spectators gather, it's the fourth hanging this spring and not
much spectacle here except that this one, dreaming at the last instant
of who can say what lifted smock, what fat-hunched gnädige Frau Death
may have come sashaying in as, gets an erection, a tremendous darkpurple
swelling, and just as his neck breaks, he actually *comes* in his ragged
loin-wrapping creamy as the skin of a saint under the purple cloak of
Lent, and one drop of sperm succeeds in rolling, dripping hair to hair
down the dead leg, all the way down, off the edge of the crusted bare
foot, drips to the earth at the exact centre of the crossroad where, in
the workings of the night it changes into a mandrake root. Next Friday,
at dawn, the Magician, his own moving Heiliginschein rippling infrared
to ultra-violet in spectral rings around his shadow over the dewy grass,
comes with his dog, a coal-black dog who hasn't been fed for a few days.
The Magician digs carefully all around the precious root till it's held
only by the finest root-hairs--ties it to the tail of his black dog,
stops his own ears with wax and then comes out with a piece of bread to
lure the unfed dog *rrrowf!* dog lunges for bread, root is torn up and
lets loose its piercing and fatal scream. The dog drops dead before he's
halfway to breakfast, his holylight freezes and fades in the million
dewdrops. Magician takes the root tenderly home, dresses it in a little
white outfit and leaves money with it overnight: in the morning the cash
has multiplied tenfold. A delegate from the Committee on Idiopathic
Archetypes comes to visit. "Inflation?" the magician tries to cover up
with some flowing hand-moves. "'Capital?' Never heard of that." "No,
no," replies the visitor, "Not at the moment. We're trying to think
ahead. We'd like very much to hear about the basic structure of this.
How bad was the scream, for instance?" "Had m'ears plugged up, couldn't
hear it." The delegate flashes a fraternal business smile. "Can't say as
I blame you. . . ."
  Crosses, swastikas, Zone-mandalas, how can they not speak to Slothrop?
He's sat in Saurë Bummer's kitchen, the air streaming with kif moirés,
reading soup recipes and finding in every bone and cabbage leaf
paraphrases of himself . . . news flashes, names of wheelhorses that
will pay him off enough for a certain getaway. . . . He used to pick and
shovel at the spring roads of Berkshire, April afternoon's he's lost,
"Chapter 81 work," they called it, following the scraper that clears the
winter's crystal attack-from-within, its white necropolizing . . .
picking up rusted beer cans, rubbers yellow with preterite seed, Kleenex
wadded to brain shapes hiding preterite snot, preterite tears,
newspapers, broken glass, pieces of automobile, days when in
superstition and fright he could *make it all fit*, seeing clearly in
each an entry in a record, a history: his own, his winter's his
country's . . . instructing him, dunce and drifter, in ways deeper than
he can explain, have been faces of children out the train windows, two
bars of dance music somewhere, in some other street at night, needles
and branches of a pine tree shaken clear and luminous against night
clouds, one circuit diagram out of hundreds in a smudged yellowing
sheaf, laughter out of a cornfield in the early morning as he was
walking to school, the idling of a motorcycle at one dusk-heavy hour of
the summer . . . and now, in the Zone, later in the day he became a
crossroad, after a heavy rain he doesn't recall, Slothrop sees 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. . . . 

                     *Gravity's Rainbow*, Thomas Pynchon (pp 625-626)