Rocket-structure, Pattern of the Death of all Myths

[Terrance]

The god, the pope, the one man, like Adam, Noah, Moses,
Jesus, is now the beaucacrat/scientist/mystic, Weissmann. An
like Pointsman &
Co.,  with machines, theories, formulas, books, love of
the Word, arrogance, charisma, etc., he takes over, assumes
absolute power by corrupting, co-opting, perverting 
and otherwise replacing myths, folklore, religion. 

The RC Chruch had absolute power.  over armies, over love,
over 
life and salvation, ritual, sacrement, politics and the
spririt. 

Blicero's use of ritual to act as a "preserving routine "
against war involves the Hansel and Gretel story--myth

Roger and Jessica take children to
see a pantomime of Hansel and Gretel. The rocket crashes
near the theater, the parabola connecting these two
relationships to the pattern of a fairy tale on both sides
of the rocket's trajectory. 
Blicero's perverse rituals do not preserve anyone from war. 
 His violent sex is a part of the War, not a preservation
against it. The fairy
tale as usually told stresses the preservation of the
children form the hostile intent of the witch. 
In GR, the stress is placed on the death romance of
submitting to the oven, the Nazi monument to murder. 
Under the "present dispensation" the freedom of life is 
thwarted by ritual conditioning to death:  

"...mothers and fathers are conditioned
into deliberately dying in certain
preferred ways: giving themselves
cancer and heart attacks...going
off to fight in the war--leaving their
children alone in the forest. " 


This is the one way trip of no return, the rule of war
asserting that "people are meant for work and government,
for austerity", as Roger, who certainly read his Weber,
claims. 

The submission of individuals to the demands of war
creates a situation in which the cycle of life is broken
and, Atropos,  "she who cannot be turned governs the aspect
of action." 

Eddie Pensiero  possessed by the rule of Atropos,
does not simply give haircuts, but performs them with the
attention to detail that Slothrop exhibits in his generating
Black-words and his later fascination with trees. Of course
Slothrop's fascination with trees does not bring him to an
understanding of the role of the Tree of Creation as
archetype and legitimizing pattern for action. Though aware
of the individual integrity of each tree, Slothrop is too
far gone to be able to associate this realization with the
rest of his experience and re-integrate himself. 

Religion or Myth and the relation of myth to deity are
important in the  book for two reasons. First, it is the
concurrent use and
denial of the viability of myth that is one cause of the
violence in the book, and in history. 

Second, the sense of deity in the book is
more "absentee " than the war that carries that epithet: 
Patterns would appear to be the only
expression of order. The denial of myth is the concomitant
of the stress placed on abstraction and mechanical
explanations for human existence and actions. The
dissociation of thinking and feeling that may be associated
with this bias can lead to war which forces Man into the
mythic style of life in its most destructive form. 

This view of the effect of the denial of the power of myth
is related to the cultural
denial of Death that is a central theme we have discussed at
length--Brown etc.. 

The appearance of the Anubis, which is named for "the
dog-headed death of Egypt, and for Wagner's  Flying
Dutchman, with its United or League of Nations, just like
the one here
at Fopple's, floats toward "salvation" but in P's terms, it
sails against
entropy. On this ship of Death, a child must be murdered, a
ritual murder, 
the rocket-structure demands the Death of a child, a
Gottfried, and it is a
political murder that has, as the narrator explains later,
referencing Caesar, JFK, Malcolm X, replaced human
sacrifice.


The social world of the ship includes  Morituri A re-worked
Mondaugen? 
He stoically observes the sadistic orgy of the other
passengers, an "organized anarchy, " where pleasure "becomes
life's only business"--pleasure, however, that is
indistinguishable from rape, murder, unbridled
aggression. 

Slothrop is able to leave the ship of death, but he has lost
her. Here is a mock
Orpheus, he has simply lost her, she is not in the
underworld. His second appearance on the boat forces him to
see what has happened. He didn't look back. Oh the Irony! 
But not to worry boys, shortly after leaving the
boat, Slothrop will mostly forget  this tragedy. Nothing is
connected, anti-paranoia. This sounds like a moral position
to me, and not simply a moralist's reading of the novel. 

Anyway, it is this ability to forget that constitutes the
tragedy of Slothrop. The one way trip, or the false return,
are the usual possibilities under the "present
dispensation", which can be associated with patterns 
and their effect on the lives of
the characters. Springer, in his rollicking way, refers to
the patterns when Anton Webern's tragic death is brought
up; 

Slothrop remarks,  

 "It was a mistake. He was innocent."
"Ha. Of course he was.   But mistakes
are part of it too--everything fits.
One sees how it fits, ja? learns patterns,
adjusts to rhythms, one day you are no
longer an actor, but free now, over on
the other side of the camera. No dramatic 
call to the front office--just waking
up one day and knowing that Queen, Bishop,
and King are only splendid cripples, and
pawns, even those that reach the final
row, are condemned to creep in two dimensions, 
and no tower will ever rise or descend--no: 
flight has been given only to the Springer!"

Only to the Springer! Only? The Springer reminds me of 
Humpty Dumpty at times. I have noted here in the margin,
that  Spriger seems to be in the habit of ending these
eccentric
proclamation with ONLY I. 

He claims he is the only one that knows, as in the ultimate
"those that know", and whatsmore he is the only one who
understands it All. Why does he, like H. Adams, Stencil,
others, refer to himself in the third person? This seems to
corrupt his credibility. 

He seems to be performing the role of the fool, who can
pithily comment on the narrative action in the book and in
so doing Springer does point to the way that even seemingly
random events are part of an overall determined structure of
causality.


The Zone-Hereros are mystically oriented, believing that
There may be no
gods, but there is a pattern: names by themselves may have
no magic, but the act of naming, the physical utterance,
obeys the pattern.


Nordhausen means dwellings in the north. They associate the
north with the rocket. 
Zone-Hereros are aware that the act of naming is
significant.
Names can create patterns of association and meaning. Thus,
Enzian is able
through name and association of Bleicherode and Blicker to
provide Weissman (white man) with his SS code
name, Blicero, associated with the death and the whiteness
of the cathedrals of death-dealing Europe, the color
of the hostile rooms of Slothrop's conditioning, and most
particularly with Gottfried's experience as he approaches
death:

Brenschluss, when was Brenschluss
it can't be this soon. ..but the
burnt out tail opening is swinging
across the sun and through the blonde
hair of the victim here's a Brocken
specter, someone's, something's shadow
projected from out here in the bright
sun and darkening sky into the region
of gold, of whitening, of growing
still as underwater as Gravity dips
away briefly. ..what is this death
but a whitening, a carrying of white-
ness to ultrawhite, what is it but
bleaches, detergents, oxidizers, abra-
sives--Streckefuss he's been today to
the boy's tormented muscles, but more
appropriately he is Blicker, Bleicherode,
Bleacher, Blicero, extending, rarefying
the Caucasian pallor to an abolition of
pigment...


In this passage Gottfried brings together whiteness, death,
and the chemistry of control that has figured prominently in
the novel. 
The Hereros also have a rocket and a rocket mandala which is
a technological reference for the launch steps as well as
the essential symbolic components of Herero culture and
cosmogony, as Andreas tells Slothrop:

Andreas set [the mandala] on the ground,
turns it till the K points northwest. Klar, touching each
letter, Entluftung, these are the female letters. North
letters. In our villages
the women lived in huts on the northern half of the circle,
the men on the
south. The village itself was a mandala. Klar is
fertilization and birth,
Entluftung is the breath, the soul. ZUndung and Vorstufe are
the male signs, the
activities, fire and preparation or building. And in the
center, here, Hauptstufe. It
is the pen where we keep the sacred cattle. The souls of the
ancestors. All
the same here. Birth, soul, fire, building. Male and female,
together...Opposites
together.

The opposites are controlled by their mythic association
within the mandala which is the containment of polarities
and represents that paradox  which is able to contain
these opposites.  The preserving effect of the harmony of
opposites is one that Slothrop senses immediately in the
mandala which he hands back to Andreas,
hoping that it will permit trouble to pass over:
"mba-kayere...a spell against Marvy tonight, against
Tchitcherine. A mezuzah. A situation of possible threat is
turned into a rare moment of his feeling that there can be
the kind preterition that preserves life. 



The Rocket with a capital R, is now the Logos. It is the
ultimate rationale and the argument itself. It is like a
mirror too. It is a reflection
of the connectedness (in the positive sense of paranoid)  of
the cosmos. So if kabbalists  can interpret it correctly
they will understand the purpose, the rational, source of
power that moves the stars, the very mystery of the All, the
power and the mystery of creation, the Word incarnate. They 
will know the objective of or the purpose towards which
history is on the move. So kinda like a corruption of the 
Torah, the Rocket both sets forth the objective and is the
objective of the quest.   

The rocket is an alternative to the natural process, it is
pornographic, a surrogate system that replaces cyclical
nature with irreversible artifice. It is Enzian,  who
discovers
that "the Rocket was an entire system won, away
from the feminine darkness, held against the
entropies of lovable but scatterbrained Mother Nature"
[GR.324]. 

 "Weissmann brought him to Europe and he madea discovery
there: 

"a discovery that love, among these men, once past the
simple feel and orgasming of it, 
had to do with masculine technologies, with contracts, with
winning and losing. Demanded in his own case that he enter
the service of the Rocket...."  

TRP's "Feminine Nature" carries the great American tradition
of the  "feminine" Earth. 

She is "scatterbrained" because she is
progenitive and is permeated by randomness, qualities
celebrated by GR because they are not only unacceptable but
transgressive to those whose "religion" (Weissmann/Blicero
being the gnostic high priest and god of this cult) is the
consciously  sterile Discipline of Control and Service to
the Rocket. The
text makes explicit, that the  desire of the Cartel
scientist/priests is to defeat nature's entropies. They
practice and preach absolutism, "absolute power," their
gnosis is of a
determinism that seeks a "divine" stasis beyond entropy. 

So while  particular rockets are ultimately defeated by
gravity, or by the humor, irony, the faustian arrogance that
TRP ridicules, THE ROCKET symbolizes
a constant metaphysical rebellion against such natural
defeat. 


So if we look at the Zone-Hereros, we find one of the groups
that have identified the Rocket as both "Destiny" and
"Torah." They have a sacred mission,  they
are the Kabbalists or the scholar-magicians of the Zone"
[GR. 520]. 

What they do is to  explicate to exhaustion its
"symmetries" and its "latencies." Why? Well, the  goal of
this task is to attain the Holy Center.


For Enzian, this holy center "will never need a design
change. Time, as it is known to the other nations will
wither away inside of this new one. The Erdschweinhohle will
not be bound, like the Rocket, to time. The people will find
the Center again, the Center without time, the journey
without hysteresis, where every departure
is a return to the same place, the only place...." [GR.319]. 

As Weisenburger and others have noted (see pages 164-65 ) 
both the North and the
Moon have characteristics of this Center for the
tribe and the Zone-Hereros believe that firing the
Rocket targeted to these  will lead them back into this
perfect, timeless center or realm. 

So, this is very sad stuff, (the story of the hare and the
moon will of course return at GR.730.4-6) in fact like all
the cultures/religions of GR it is very, very sad stuff,
lost and perverted.   
How poignant indeed is the white scholar's reading of Rilke
to the Herero boy, here we find the same, a tortured
conflation of tribal myth and the white Rocket technology,
fatal contact with the white man. In GR this history
functions as nothing less than a gnostic perversion of the
original Herero religion. That religion
with its own ideas about the North and the Moon was
Earth-centered. TRP gives us a beautiful and poignant
description of the woman literally planted in the aardvark
hole (compare the aardvark with the pigs and other animals
in the text). Here we see that in the Herero tradition the
Earth has the fecund regenerative powers to  redeem the
preterite.


The Erdschweinhohle is a sacred womb, the woman is quite
literally "in touch with Earth's gift for genesis."
Beautiful, right? This woman in the womb of the earth brings
together all of the fecund powers which go  flooding
"through every gate" of her body [GR.316]. This was of
course before the rocket, when ceremonies and rituals of
renewal were beautifully structured  and whole and defined
by their opposites, the  antithesis inherent in the Herero
concept of the
netherworld--the moon. 


"The moon is  a fallen world in which preterition is the
result of a false message from the moon, and a paradisal
netherworld where the tree of life ( a fig tree! btw,) grows
and makes its power partially and sporadically available to
preterite humanity. [See Eddins GP.139].  

This lunar netherworld can be entered, however, only after
death, with the result that everyday life retains the
fertilizing
tension of the Earth system.

P's religion was once Catholic, it was surely a blessing.