GRGR Finale: launching the 00000

[jbor]

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>From: Mark Wright AIA <mwaia at yahoo.com>


> I've always thought of Gottfried as a sacrifice, an Isaac who was not
> saved from the knife of Abraham. But it occurs to me that he might also
> be thought of as the first astronaut, can't he?

Yes, I can see that perhaps Blicero is perhaps trying to salvage something
for humanity from this terrible lost war by sacrificing his only begotten
son in this way. Restoring those Wandervogel dreams of space travel (despite
his own cynicism about the destructive instinct of man which will taint even
the space colonies to come) to their place in the Sun, over and above the
use of the rocket as a weapon.

That "first star" has a very Biblical ring to it, doesn't it? The birth of
Jesus as the beginning of Christianity; Gottfried's "transcendence" as the
birth of the space program ... in each a case of Apocalypse postponed?

Certainly a possibility.

> Perhaps there is some
> simple analogy being established between the
> astronaut/cosmonaut/experimental-lab-animal and the technocratic
> Fathers who throw that last switch: von Braun (and others, to be sure,
> in the US) and Korolev (I think) in the old USSR.  Both the US and the
> have USSR lost a few men and women over the years in the name of
> Pokler's (and "Ilse's") dream of transcendence.
>
> And that Imipolex Shroud is a fabulous image, isn't it?  Labial,
> erectile, erotically scented, even womb-like, snug at the icy pelvis of
> the phallic V-2...