Rocket(s) & Balsphemy.5 of 20

[Terrance F. Flaherty]

The Nazi ideology of the Zero finds its avatar in Blicero.
To understand Blicero we need to look at Rilke. That Blicero
equates the "Oven"-his own private and Distinctly Teutonic
Gotterdammerung-with a Rilkean sense of "Destiny" should set
off some bells. When Otto commented on the word "Destiny",
he was rebuffed here, but not so fast, look at the text: 

It will come, it will, his Destiny (TRP's caps)
not that
way-but it will come
.Und nicht einmal sein Schritt klingt
aus dem tonlosen Los
.	Of all Rilke's poetry it's this Tenth
Elegy he most loves, can feel the bitter lager of Yearning
begin to prickle behind eyes and sinuses at remembering any
passage of...the newly-dead youth, embracing his Lament,
his last link,  leaving now even her marginally human touch
forever, climbing all alone, terminally alone, up and up
into the mountains of
primal Pain, with the wildly alien constellations overhead

.And not once
does his step ring from the soundless Destiny. 
It's he,
Blicero, who climbs the mountain
.

Otto wrote: 

" "Tonight he feels the potency of every word: words are
only an eye-twitch
away from the things they stand for." (100)

"Weissmann as Hitler: agnostic but superstitious, note the
repeated use of
the word "Destiny" on p. 98, one of Hitler's favorites:
"Die Vorsehung hat mich auserwählt." - "I was elected by
providence." For me the words "destiny" and "providence" are
not that far apart from each other considering the implicit
and necessary "control" they both express." "

Does TRP mean for the hair on the back of the reader's neck
to stand on end when s/he reads these words? DESTINY! TRP
works with stereotypes, with stock figures,  and he dresses
them up with ideas and history. Here, Blicero, seems
invested with, not so much Hitler as Hitler, but certainly
Hitler's notion of Destiny. But Blicero changes quite a lot.
His changes are reflected in his various readings of Rilke.
TRP's portrait of Weissmann recreates the prototype of the
German Rilke adept who evolves through the successive phases
of unconditional mystical adoration, national socialist
approbation and inward emigration. 


Trans. William H. Gass
And we, who have always though
Of happiness as ascending, 
Would feel emotion 
That almost undoes us
When a happy thing falls. 

For Blicero pain, as Enzian tells us, is all HIS, and not
the "primal" pain of disappointments and pain of loss we
feel for the deaths of one's we love, the pain, the love,
the loss that we all know is a universal natural part of
life of preterition, no, it is HIS, and is thus  but a
perversely engineered and artificial pornographic pain
associated in the short run with sado-masochistic
indulgences and in the long run with the  culmination of
gnostic death worship. Rilke condemns the Leid-Stadt as a
retreat where escapists subvert Earth's edifying negatives,
but Blicero turns it into a retreat where decadence subvert
Earth's edifying positives. So no, he's not the same as
Roger and Jessica in this regard. We should open the novel
V. if we have any doubt. But even here in GR Weissmann finds
the model for his own "city" some twenty years earlier in
Southwest Africa.  For Blicero it was simply a matter of
transporting  the sadistic rituals of Foppl's villa to a V-2
launching site in Holland and to bewitch Gottfried and Katie
as fairy-tale "children" waiting with him for the Oven.
Defending Blicero is no easy task, but surely that scene we
discussed, where again it is his tortured corruption Rilke
that gives the scene bone crushing force. Remember that
Blicero suspects that Katie does not take his perverted
death games seriously, that she only "plays at playing. " S
o he thinks of this as in some way betraying the imperative
from Sonnet 12 Part II:

"Want the Change," Rilke said, "O be inspired by the Flame!"

 The "Flame" itself is glossed as the Nazi war-conflagration
that is destroying  hundreds of thousands of "royal
moths"-young Germans who probably do not "want the Change,"
but are "only being used."  It is also, for Blicero, the
flame of the transforming Oven and of the Rocket.