brought to you by the letter G

[Jane Sweet]

G, G, G,  the G in Imipolex G is the Grail. Could be
Imipolex W (Word) or L (Logos)

That's it, but it's a mystery to us reading preterite, thank
god, only Blicero and those that can cross the uncrossable
Wall know what it is. 

In GR, paranoia, the ordering of experience, the projecting
of a world, is religious in nature: "there is something
comforting--religious if you want." [GR.434] Depending on
the character, it can be either a form of, or mixture of, or
a 
perversion of several religions. Slothrop is a King George
after the fact, England after the fact to pre-Industrial
American Puritan, an early religion, perverted and now under
the sway of the synthesis and control of secularized
rational
structures and history--the realm of D.  Slothrop's
"paranoia" is "a peculiar
sensitivity to what is revealed in the sky" [GR.26]. 

The Grail: the quest and the grail.  Stencil, Oedipa,
Slothrop, all
questers. In GR, the quests are defiled versions of the
sacral or mythical
journey. For example, Pointsman is a pavlovian
knight.  P's questers are secularized knights, Slothrop is
King George after the fact,  and their quests are  profane
mockeries of their religious ancestors. Fork in the road,
finger in the clouds, Fuck you spells. 

M&D Chapter 28 It opens with a passage from Wicks
Cherrycoke's
Spiritual Day-Book. Wick's asks, 

"what, in our corrupted Days, has become of Knights and
Castles, when neither is any
longer reasonable, or possible. No good can come of such
dangerous Boobyism." 

 What has become of Knights in GR? The Castles? The quest
for the Grail? 
Religious quests in GR are perversions of the historical
quests. In one story in GR, 
the Sangraal, the Holy Grail of Arthurian legend is now but
a replica, methyl metchacrylate, the blood of Christ, and
Pointsman is a member of the round (oil&plastics) table and
the Castle is  a complex physical/imaginative
structure--religious(tarot  etc.) in the realm of Blicero. 

"Blicero was a local deity."  "Blicero had grown on, into
another
animal
a werewolf
but with no humanity left in his eyes:
that had faded out, day after day, and been replaced by gray
furrows, red veins in patterns that weren't human. 

What has become of Knights in GR? The Castles? The quest
for the Grail?  Religious quests in GR are perversions of
the historical quests. In one story in GR,  the Sangraal,
the Holy Grail of
Arthurian legend is now but a replica, methyl metchacrylate,
the blood of
Christ, Pointsman is member of the round (oil & plastics)
table and the Castle is  a complex physical/imaginative
structure--religious structure in the realm of Blicero. 

In "The Quest Narrative," 
THE POETICS of PROSE,
Tzvetan Todorov says, "[T]he quest for the Grail is the
quest for a code. To find the Grail is to learn how to
decipher the divine language." Gravity's R. may be read as a
parodic fictionalization of the quest for the Logos.  

Logos:  Philosophy. a. In pre-Socratic philosophy, the
principle governing the cosmos, the source of this
principle, or human reasoning about the cosmos. b. Among the
Sophists, the topics of rational argument or the arguments
themselves. c. In Stoicism, the active, material, rational
principle of the cosmos; nous. Identified with God, it is
the source of all activity and generation and is the power
of reason residing in the human soul. 2. Judaism. a. In
biblical Judaism, the word of God, which itself has creative
power and is God's medium of communication with the human
race. b. In Hellenistic Judaism, a hypostasis associated
with divine wisdom. 3. Theology. In Saint John's Gospel,
especially in the prologue (1:1-14), the creative word of
God, which is itself God and incarnate in Jesus. In this
sense, also called Word. 

The love of language and the quest for the logos, another
Pynchon paradox. So when Slothrop is reading his
Plastic man (irony) "something about the man (Sir S.D.
Truck) despite obvious membership in the plot, keeps him
listening
an innocence, maybe a try at being friendly in the
only way he has available, sharing what engages and runs
him, a love of the Word." 207

tbc