Dialectics and conspiracy

[Lycidas at worldnet.att.net]

Michael Perez wrote:
> 
> Henry wrote:
> "I've always thought that the safety of ground zero was a joke (see end
> of GR) as it goes against the bell-curve distribution that I would
> expect."
> 
> Joke it may be, but the point of the passage I quoted was that Pokler's
> paranoia had him thinking that They were going to make sure that it
> landed right on top of him, just as Slothrop thought the rocket with
> his name on it was aimed directly at him.  Both imagined a direct hit.
> 
> Michael

I think we are crossing the rockets up here, easy thing to
do in this novel, like crossing white whales in Moby-Dick.
What happens is that, because the rocket and its path is the
great big ambiguous unifying metaphor of the book, and it's
changing all the "time" and it means different things to
different people at different "times"  it's hard to discuss
without feeling like Ishmael monkeyroped to Queequeg aboard
the Anubis. 

This is Irish reductionism  but the test rocket doesn't
equal Slothrop's  THEY rocket of GR.25 Slothrop "has become
obsessed with...his name on it."  The test rocket here for
Pokler, Weissmann and company is congruent with the rockets,
the "fucking rockets" that have been and are falling in the
shivering episode. The THEY rocket for Pokler is not the
test rocket, the THEY rocket, is the "Destiny" rocket, the
"poor harassed german soul" rocket and  "the perfect
rocket"  "still up there, still descending..." GR426


If we go back and read that shivering episode we can compare
Slothrop's They rocket "paranoia" and Pokler's here. Science
metaphors are jokes in GR. It's a novel, not a physics book
acting like a novel. The important thing to get here is not
the science, but Poetry. For example, the theological and
philosophical can be directly compared and contrasted
here--- Puritan and German Romanticism and so on, and in so
doing, we can  illuminate the major themes of GR. If we read
the Puritan symbolism, Slothrop's family etc. in the
shivering episode, compare it to the episode with the rocket
raising--what the faithful seek, relics, text, parts,
scraps, of the rocket, Christian sickness, herero sos, 
etc., then the german sickness and so on, we are getting at
one of the most important things in GR--religion.