"instant talion"

[Terrance F. Flaherty]

It's Weissmann that thinks it's blasphemy. For the boy it is
not blasphemy, it is his religion. But of course Weissmann,
like the Missionary society believes in blasphemy.   



blas·phe·my (bl²s“f
-m¶) n., pl. blas·phe·mies. 1.a. A
contemptuous or profane act, utterance, or writing
concerning God or a sacred entity. b. The act of claiming
for oneself the attributes and rights of God. 2. An
irreverent or impious act, attitude, or utterance in regard
to something considered inviolable or sacrosanct. [Middle
English blasfemie, from Late Latin blasph¶mia, from Greek,
from blasph¶mein, to blaspheme. See BLASPHEME.]

The way I read it, Weissmann, like the Rhenish Missionary
Society who corrupted the boy, believes in blasphemy. 
What's critical here is, again, Weissmann's reading or we
should say mis-reading and identification with Rilke's
poetic "hero." 

The paragraph begins with a statement about "every true
god." Every true god must be both organizer and destroyer.
Weissmann did not understand this concept until his own
CONQUEST in Africa. It is out in the desert, out where we
might imagine "few would find him", where the constellations
of danger change, the danger he can't bring himself to name
even in cities....

Cities? 

These are all allusions to Rilke's poems, for example, 


>From The Sixth Elegy

The hero is strangely close to those who died young. 
Permanence
does not concern him. He lives in continual ascent,
moving on into the ever changed constellation
of perpetual danger. Few would find him there...

[ GR.99 ] ...this scholarly white that seemed so in love
with language. Carrying in his kit a copy of the Duino
Elegies, just off the presses when he embarked for Sudwest,
a gift from mother at the boat, the odor of new ink dizzying
his nights as the old freighter plunged tropic after tropic
...until the constellations, like the new stars of
Pain-land, had become all unfamiliar and the earth's
season's reversed...

And the historical reference is given, that 20 years
earlier, the crush of the Herero Rising, and how can we
forget Weissmann's role, his "bit part" in Mondaugen's
Story, the nostalgic longing for genocide, the siege party
he attends with V, the murder and bloody pleasure he gives
her, the way time is stopped, then reversed, the tropics
reversed to North, the world machine driven by slave labor
is literally upside down. 

In GR it is the realm of Dominus Blicero, the Zone, where
the Zone's worst specter rules, the winter, "Earth has
turned over in its sleep, and the tropics are reversed...."
[373]

And we cannot dismiss the historical allusions to  Hitler,
swastikas, the Winter in Berlin, winter is here behind the
look of summer....[373] and again page 666

But here it is the experience of instant talion, the
blasphemy he believes in, the punishment, it drives him
insane with lust. For the boy it is what happens during sex,
but not for Weissmann, for him it is buggery, sodomy,
blasphemy and instant talion.