GR excerpts right on target.

[Samuel Moyer]

What edition is this.  Mine has page numbers up to 760 (Penguin).  I don't
recall that last paragraph you quote at all.

Thanks,
Sam

----- Original Message -----
From: <barbara100 at jps.net>
To: <pynchon-l at waste.org>
Sent: Thursday, September 13, 2001 11:12 PM
Subject: GR excerpts right on target.


Readings from Gravity's Rainbow today on the afternoon train:

"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
chambers of the Rocket-throne...Kabbalists who study the Rocket as Torah,
letter by letter--rivets, burner cap 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 to the stars, an evil Rocket for the World's suicide, the
two perpetually in struggle.
"But these two heretics will be sought and the dominion of silence will
enlarge as each one goes down...they will all be sought out.  Each will have
his personal Rocket. Stored in its target-seeker will be the heretic's EEG,
the spikes and susurrations of heartbeat, the ghost-blossoming of personal
infrared, each Rocket will know its intended and hunt him, ride him a
green-doped and silent hound, through our World, shining and pointed in the
sky at his back, his guardian, executioner rushing in, rushing closer...."
(GR 848)

"He [Enzian] must tell Christian everything he knows, everything he suspects
or has dreamed.  Proclaiming none of it for truth.  But he must keep nothing
back for himself .  Nothing is his to keep.  'They have lied to us. They
can't keep us from dying, so They lie to us about death.  A cooperative
structure of lies.  What have They ever  given us in return for the trust,
the love--They actually say 'love'--we're supposed to owe Them? Can they
keep us from even catching cold? from lice, from being alone? from anything?
Before the Rocket we went on believing, because we wanted to.  But the
Rocket can penetrate, from the sky, at any given point.  Nowhere is safe.
We can't believe Them any more.  Not if we are still sane, and love the
truth.'" (GR 849)

"Between two station marks, yellow crayon through the years of grease and
passage, 1966 and 1971, I tasted my first blood. Do you want to put this
part in?] We drank the blood of our enemies.  That's why you see Gnostics so
hunted.  The sacrament of the Eucharist is really drinking the blood of the
enemy.  The Grail, the Sangraal, is the bloody vehicle.  Why else guard it
so sacredly? Why should the black honor-guard ride half a continent, half a
splintering Empire, stone night and winter day, if it's only for the touch
of sweet lips on a humble bowl?  No, it's mortal sin they're carrying: to
swallow the enemy, down into the slick juicery to be taken in by all the
cells.  Your officially defined 'mortal sin,' that is.  A sin against you.
A section of your penal code, that's all. [ The true sin was yours: to
interdict that union.  To draw that line.  To keep us worse than enemies,
who are after all caught in the same field of shit--to keep us strangers."
(GR 862)



I LOVE THOMAS PYNCHON !!!