Gravity's Rainbow: 127ff

[lorentzen-nicklaus]

 +  " ... near her battery one night, driving somewhere in kent, roger and 
jessica came upon a church, a hummock in the dark upland, lamplit, growing out 
of the earth. it was sunday evening, and shortly before vespers. men in 
greatcoats, in oilskins, in dark berets they slipped off at the entrance. 
american fliers in leather lined with sheep's wool, a few women in clinking 
boots and wide-shouldered swagger coats, but no children, not a child in sight, 
just grownups, trudging in from their bomber fields, balloon-bivouacs, pillboxes 
over the beach, through the norman doorway shaggy with wintering vines. jessica 
said, 'oh, i remember ...' but didn't go on. she was remembering other advents, 
and hedges snowy as sheep from her window, and the star ready to be pasted up on 
the sky again.
 roger pulled over, and they watched the scuffed and dun military going in to 
evensong. the wind smelled of fresh snow.
 'we ought to be home,' she said, after a bit, 'it's late.'
 'we could just pop in here for a moment.'
 well, THAT surprised her, but def, after weeks of his snide comments?
his unbeliever's annoyance with the others in psi-section he thought were out 
to drive him dotty as they were, and his scroogery growing as shopping days till 
Xmas dwindled--'you're not supposed to be the sort,' she told him. but she did 
want to go in, nostalgia was heavy in tonight's snow-sky, her own voice ready to 
betray her and run to join the waits whose carols we're so apt to hear now in 
the distances, these days of advent dropping one by one, voices piping across 
frozen downs where the sown mines crowd thick as plums in a pudding ... often 
above sound of melting snow, winds that must blow not through christmas air but 
through the substance of time would bring her those child-voices, singing for 
sixpences, and if her heart wasn't ready to take on quite all the stresses of 
her mortality and theirs, at least there was the fear that she was beginning to 
lose them---that one winter she would go running to look, out to the gate to 
find them, run as far as the trees but in vain, their voices fading....
 they walked through the tracks of all the others in the snow, she gravely on 
his arm, wind blowing her hair to snarls, heels slipping once on ice. 'to hear 
the music,' he explained.
 tonight's scratch choir was all male, epauletted shoulders visible under the 
wide necks of the white robes, and many faces nearly as white with the 
exhaustion of soaked and muddy fields, midwatches, cables strummed by the 
nervous balloons sunfishing in the clouds, tents whose lights inside shone 
nuclear at twilight, soullike, through the cross-hatched walls, turning canvas 
to fine gauze, while the wind drummed there. yet there was one black face, the 
counter-tenor, a jamaican corporal, taken from his warm island to this---from 
singing his childhood along the rum-smoky saloons of high holborn street where 
the sailors throw mammoth red firecrackers, quarter of a stick of dynamite man, 
over the swinging doors and run across the street giggling, or come walking out 
with high-skirted girls, girls of the island, chinese and french girls ... 
lemon peels crushed in the gutters of the streets scented the early mornings 
where he used to sing, o have you seen my darlin' lola, with a shape like a 
bottle of coca-cola, sailors running up and down in the brown shadows of alleys, 
flapping at neckerchief and pant-leg, and the girls whispering together and 
laughing ... each morning he counted out half a pocket full of coins of all 
nations. from palmy kingston, the intricate needs of the anglo-american empire 
(1939-1945) had brought him to this cold fieldmouse church, nearly in earshot of 
a northern sea he'd hardly glimpsed in crossing, to a compline service, a 
program tonight of plainsong in english, forays now and then into polyphony: 
thomas tallis, henry purcell, even a german macaronic from the fifteenth 
century, attributed to heinrich suso:

                                       IN DULCI JUBILO
                                       nun singet und seid froh!
                                       unsers herzens wonne
                                       leit in PRAESIPIO,
                                       leuchtet vor die sonne
                                       MATRIS IN GREMIO.
                                       ALPHA ES ET O.

 with the high voice of the black man riding above the others, no head falsetto 
here but complete, out of the honest breast, a baritone voice brought over years 
of woodshedding up to this range ... he was bringing brown girls to sashay among 
these nervous protestants, down the ancient paths the music had set, big and 
little anita, stiletto may, plongette who loves it between her tits and will do 
it that way for free---not to mention the latin, the GERMAN? in an english 
church? these are not heresies so much as imperial outcomes, necessary as the 
black man's presence, from acts of minor surrealism---which, taken in the mass, 
are an act of suicide, but which in its pathology, in its dreamless version of 
the real, the empire commits by the thousands every day, completely unaware of 
what it's doing.... so the pure counter-tenor voice was soaring, finding its way 
in to buoy jessica's heart and even roger's, she guessed, risking glances at his 
face sideways and up through brown ghosts of her hair, during recitatives or 
releases. he wasn't looking nihilistic, not even cheaply so. he was ..."

  FROHES FEST! kai *