Inspiration wanted

[Enobarbus]

Mike Weaver wrote:
> 
> I'm a p-list reader rather than a P reader these days, finding the
> contemporary political commentaries and reports posted by Doug and others
> far more interesting than the interminable pontifications, by certain
> nameless (ha ha) Olympians, on what our favourite author Really Means.
> 
> That being the case I could do with a little help from those nearer to the
> texts than me.
> 
> I've just been talking to a friend in Cambridge (U.K.) who is developing a
> very modern art form.  He used to be a painter in the Cubist tradition,
> moved from paint to pixel, started using Kai's Power Goo and now is
> producing gigabyte size animations which are his raw material in his role
> as VJ, both in a dance band  with a couple of DJs/musicians (Timeline), and
> as a resident VJ at The Junction, one of Cambridge's main venues. Solo he
> goes by the name Rocket Vision.
> 
> He's never read GR, though I gave him a copy years ago.  I'd like to send
> him a few excerpts from GR, relating to the Rocket, which might inspire him
> in his artistic production.  I just don't have time to dive for the waiting
> pearls, so if anyone busy snorkeling could make some suggestions, I would
> be very grateful.
> 
> In anticipation:
> thanks from the weavercreature






Moby-Dick has been painted, sculpted, performed, filmed,
written... times. 
The late J. Bonham of Led-Zeppelin had a "Moby-Dick." 

Reading this Chapter in V., and Poe, I am more inclined to
suggest "No Quarter." 

Does get me into the land of Dante's Dis and up on a
Japanese Mountain where the birds (in Poe's Pym the gull
like a puppeteer, the sailor alive by the strings, the gull
tugging on the sailor's liver and the men, castaway, the
gull dropping the morsel of human flesh from the
hermaphrodite brig) will eat Grandmothers and the Egyptian
White Monkey God is a Goddess, can't remember her name. 


http://www.umich.edu/~newsinfo/MT/95/Dec95/mta18d95.html

http://www.ibiblio.org/wm/paint/auth/pollock/pollock.moby-dick.jpg




The White Whale of M-D and the White V-2 of GR are the
unifying principles in both texts. 
The central metaphors.
They are  the megatexts. 
Both colossal objects of veneration and fear, love
and dread, capable of great violence. They personify  Man's
agencies of destruction and his means of transcending
physical limitations. 

Oil and capital....


The shape of the Rocket  and its Parabola, its flight, is
homosexual. It is also  sado- masochistic. It is a
self-destructive power struggle
and a  "ritual of love ..."  GR 223. So characters in the
novel find delight "in ritual sub-missions" to their
"Master," the male embodiment of a technological power. To
be at the Mercy of the Rocket, to surrender, a personal and
dark surrender, to the Void, to delicious,  screaming
collapse ...(GR 578).

The parabola of the Rocket is "certain secret lusts that
drive the planet ...over its peak and down, plunging,
burninq, toward a terminal orgasm." (GR 223).


It's a "deathwish," and it cums true  to those  "fatally
receptive..." (GR 300-01).

 This yearning for Death and destruction can be read in
those "Rocket limericks." 

Film. Certainly there is a lot of film in that Rocket. 
Cinematographical "Zeno's paradox,  calculus, dividing into
an infinite number of time-frames. 

Intercourse with rockets.(GR 305-07, 311). 

Novel's death-love theme, i.e. Etzel Oelsch. 

Howabout Enzian's "illumination" "with a slender white
rocket," which
left on the floor Mittelwerke a "dark stain, miraculously
still wet, and a
smell understand is meant to be that of semen --but it is
really to soap, or bleach" (GR 297). 

And Enzian is a Moses figure. He is also led to believe that
by
understanding the Rocket (Slothrop's studies the Rocket with
a linguist, even the great linguist cannot read the brow of
the White Whale) he would come to understand truly his
manhood (GR 324), but  disillusioned he realize that
homosexual  love in "white autumn-prone Europe" (GR 322) 
"once past the
orgasming of it, had to do with masculine technologies, and
business cartels, contracts, 
with winning and losing (GR 324) .

There is also a  connection between the phallic Rocket which
pierces" into the virgin-blue robes of the sky" (GR 465) and
"masculine technologies" that
lay waste the world is, of course, a neo-Freudian
commonplace.

As Eric noted, the Rocket, however is both a revengeful
phallus and a passively submissive "womb" (GR 75O). 

This, btw,  is consistent with the novel's theme that the
roles of oppressor and victim are interchangeable. 

On could paint an innocent girl straddling a  rockets or
canons (GR
293, 694)or on the other hand one paint the Rocket as "a
reluctant virgin" (a Swan,  Yeats has been noted) GR 426
and   "a baby Jesus" with throngs of Herods after it. 
	
ANd the  Rocket is Absolute or at least it ingeniously
unites all symbols of the absolute in the novel. 

>From below it is the cross (GR 563) , a mandala (GR 361,
563) , a Swastica and 
it evokes the "Tree of Life" (GR 694)	(GR 314-l5, 52O), (GR
624, 753). 

The Rocket is a "Holy Text" and the "Word" (GR 25) or the
Messias himself. So one couls paint the Martyr following the
"stations of the cross" towards Golgotha (GR 5O2). 

The Rocket also unites the symbols of transcendental
yearning in the novel and  it not only promises salvation
and transcendence (GR 322, 4O0, 758) but also a longed for
cataclysmic annihilation (GR 49, 322, 396, 694, 727). 



The attraction it exerts, on America, on IBM, on  Von Braun,
Pokler, Weissmann, Slothrop, is Religious, they are "all
equally at the Rocket's mercy" (GR 4O2) and
Christian are not the only "pilgrims along the roads of
miracle" that will collect "every bit and piece" of Rocket
hardware as "a sacred relic," "every
scrap of manual" as "a verse of the Scripture" (GR 391). 


One could paint the anarchy of the Zone time space where
people  organize "Rocketraising"  festivals and the Rocket
becomes a symbol of Spring's victory over deathlike Winter
(GR 36l)l4 or of humanity over entropy (GR 324).



But the Rocket has to be many things, it must answer to a
number of different shapes in the dreams of those who touch
it --in combat, in tunnel, on paper --it must survive
heresies shining, unconfoundable ...and heretics there will
be: Gnostics who have been taken in a rush of wind and fire
to the chambers of the Rocket-throne ...Kabbalists who study
the Rocket as Torah, letter by letter --rivets, burner cup
and brass rose, its text is theirs to permute and combine
into new revelations, always unfolding ...Manichaeans who
see two Rockets, good and evil, who speak together in the
sacred idiolalia of the Primal Twins (some say their names
are Enzian and Blicero) of a good Rocket to take us up to
the
stars, an evil- Rocket for the World's suicide, the two
perpetually in struggle (GR 727).



The Rocket stands  for IMB and Cold Spring Harbor and the
Holocaust and Vietnam...
there is the "Rocket-cartel," a "structure cutting across
every agency human and
paper" (GR 566), the Rocket that was once the Virgin is now
the Dynamo that monopolizes all power  for its own purposes.

And "They", They will nothing of starving  whole populations
by
stripping the potato fields to distil alcohol for the
Rocket's  fuel
{GR 55O) and of course it will be the "poorest and most
helpless"
who will be Killed in a "strange gradient of death" {GR 423)
that will
spares the ruling elite. 

The Rocket seems to lose some of its more  "charismatic"
qualities, when brought under
total control (GR 3Ol) with the help of "bourgeois"
mathematical formulas (GR 239). And those responsible for
this "conspiracy between human beings and techniques" will
camouflage their real intentions by proclaiming "Money be
damned, the very
life of (insert name of Nation) is at stake." So They
skillfully conceal  what "They" are up to. Making money and
War, "I need my night's blood, my funding, funding, ahh
more,  more ...(GR521). 



A peacock, the German's rockets (GR 223).
The symbol of reincarnation, rebirth and immortality? 
Or ironically, however, the same mythical bird for pride,
disobedience and hubris? 

The  Rocket is also a symbol of human vanity. 

The Rocket is an entire system won, away from the feminine
darkness,
held against the entropies of lovable but scatterbrained
mother Nature. 

But of course whenever it explodes, be it by accldcnt just
after it has been fired (GR 96) or over its target, it
disintegrates entropically. 

And the Rocket is the NASA rocket, the Cold War Rocket, an
attempt at overcoming "Gravity" (GR 4O4). 
But the OOOOO ascent is "betrayed to Gravity. (GR 758)

One could paint the absence of the Rocket or the blast of
the rocket only heard after it has crashed (GR 7, 23, 139) 

The Rocket is out of control, one is sceaming from
1940-1970, scientists in fact merely "superimpose their
secret lusts  and bickering on something that had its own
vitality, on a techne  they'd never begin to understand"
(GR401).

Wind, the Rocket creates "its own great wind ..." (GR 454)
or spontaneously generates "items" (GR 275) .Attempts to
bring its trajectory or yaw under control (GR 239, 3Ol)
require ever more sophisticated systems that fail, however,
because maybe they increase the Rocket's vulnerability to
"small things" (GR 362).

The Rocket's independence of the "paranoid" teche is made a
joke, as the safest place to be after it has been fired is
the target itself since the chances of a "perfect hit"
are small (GR 425).