The epigraphs in *GR*

[Otto Sell]

> ... but that epigraph, which, in retrospect, at least, reads like somthing
outta
> Fritjof Capra

I absolutely agree with you - and every hippie from 1968 would have agreed
with v. Braun who is getting the categories science and belief absolutely
confused. This confusion of two poles of a binary opposition Pynchon
couldn't let go by (it's an ironical view at the esoterical wave in the US
at that time too :-) There simply cannot be a scientific answer to our
religious questions.

"Nature does not know extinction; all it knows is transformation.
Everything science has taught me and continous to teach me,
strengthens my belief in the continuity of our
spiritual existence after death."

Using this is definitely irony by Pynchon to "set one up for reading GR
indeed beneath that trajectory from the
V-2 to both the Apollo program and the ICBM race ..." and we all should bear
it in mind. Here, at the very beginning you already find what is said much
later with the sentence: "a good Rocket to take us to the stars, an evil
Rocket for the World's suicide, the two perpetually in struggle." (episode
71, p. 727)

What v.B. is trying to give is some scientific explanation for the belief
(how can a major scientist in nazi-Germany not be agnostic?), a scientific
discovery of god - but then god, the belief is nothing anymore, just a
simple proven fact.

Thanks to jbor for the old post:
<NASA evidentally liked to quote from this volume during
> the first (July, 1969) moon launch.
<"Nothing disappears without a trace."

Pynchon is always good for leaving out an important sentence from a quote
sending the reader into research.

Weisenburger says that the word Pynchon quoted are from "the remarks of
W.v.B., the Nazi and NASA rocket engineer, before the July 1969
Apollo moon launch." (15) and has two books by v.B. in his bibliographie.
 I would guess they're quoted from there. Great times for Pynchon,
 these things happen and these books (1968 and 1969) come out
while he is actually writing GR.

So v.B. actually is telling this to the Puritans who have paid him for
building another rocket with Neil Armstrong as Gottfried. It's a politicians
speech and no politician in America can leave god out of his speeches. Von
Braun cannot admit that they would be no flight to the moon without the
ICBM's, not on the American and not on the Russian side. The scientific
approach to the stars was a camouflage for military use of the invented
technology.

"Man is the best computer we can put aboard a spacecraft ... and the only
one that can be mass produced with unskilled labor. " from
http://www.qotd.org/

<"So, Wernher, how do you feel about all the death and such that your V-2
<and ABMA programs caused, not to mention that which it rode on the
<back of, y'know, the Holocaust'n'all?"

This, magnificently put into words, is what obviously nobody asked him, but
what should have been done, right? Or does anybody believe that a nazi of
his rank did not knew what was going on in the camps? And what about the
Mittelwerke and Camp Dora? He knew and he was guilty, but neither the
Americans nor the Russians would have punished him - "They" needed people
like him who are not very much concerned with the lost of lives along the
way technology goes. What v.B. did no see Pynchon does: the possible
extermination of all mankind ("us") by his skills and not only of some
killed technicians at a teststand or some astronauts orbiting forever or
some decades ago the people of Antwerp and London and the workers in the
death-camps. . . .

"Wernher von Braun went from enemy to national hero because of his
involvement in the creation of the Saturn V rocket, the rocket that in 1969
put a man on the moon. Questions about his military allegiances were set
aside for the time while he was cast as a national hero.
One of the main questions raised by the story of Wernher von Braun is
whether a man's achievements should be based on where and why he did
something or if it should be based on pure scientific benefit in the long
run. Von Braun's story raises some compelling questions relating to this.
Ultimately, to this point in history, the V-2 and the ICBM far outweigh the
few forays into space made possible by von Braun's rocket technology."

from:
NATIONAL HERO OR ENEMY TO THE WORLD?
at:  http://www.akula.com/~donefer/paper/

Otto

PS:
Dunno remember where I got this on Spaceflight from. He confuses *sky* and
*heaven*, which are the same word in German:
"It will free man from his remaining chains, the chains of gravity which
still tie him to this planet.
It will open to him the gates of heaven."
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