The dead have few exegetes.

[Glenn Scheper]

Since your such a warm response to my introduction,
I got _Gravity's Rainbow_ to be less the barbarian.
 
The first thing that hit me, in few pages, was the
bomb that explodes before it is known to be coming.
 
A similar thought occurred in my youthful psychosis,
when I believed a huge candle on my parents' coffee
table was in fact a bomb, and that if I lit it, the
whole universe would explode. I was telling this to
my father, a practical man, who handed me his Zippo
and made me light it. I did, and sped to my bedroom
as if that might let me avoid a universal cataclysm.

Well, actually, that would be the opposite thought;
That same day's psychosis contained an idea the two
atomic explosions over Japan were crystallizing the
whole world, and that crystallization wave front was
just now (1976) reaching me. It could rather be that
the collapse of my own wave function as it traveled
out to the ends of the universe passed those events.

But it is a good metaphor for the coming of metanoia.
It comes with one's own ineffable word whose content
can never be known until after it has been performed,
although some might have been instructed in its form.

Over the next few years, I made several half-hearted
suicide attempts. It was as if I were really already
dead, and merely needed to discard and leave my body.
This existential dread may be caused by a pilot wave,
a shadow cast backwards in time, of one's own death.
I imagine it may be described briefly by the soldier
who has heard a click of a Bouncing Betty under foot.
 
Individuals suffering it individually throughout all
ages have created such records as _The Metamorphosis_
by Kafka, and, I presume, Ovid's _Metamorphosis_ too.
It is the dread of Dickinson, who told how her terror
causes her to sing as does a boy in a burying ground.
 
Recently we have suffered the same thing collectively
through our watching a world-wide real-time spectacle,
the airplane bombing of the World Trade Center towers.
I think it may be a sign that private interpretations
known to occasional mages are ready to be revealed by
the scientific method: conjectures using well-defined
referents, opening themselves to possible refutation.
 
I anticipate I shall spew forth my conjectures out of
my being an experiencer, and some of you will subsume
and psychologize them, while others may treasure them.
Well-defined referents will allow discussions even by
non-experiencers; move that-which-is-described-as-God
(not the extrapolations of non-experiencers) from the
transcendent to the real register.
 
Yours truly,
Glenn Scheper
scheper at antelecom.net <mailto:scheper at antelecom.net> 
http://www.antelecom.net/~scheper/ <http://www.antelecom.net/~scheper/> 
Copyleft(!) Forward freely.
 
ps. On noticing the WTC as prophesied in literature:
http://www.antelecom.net/~scheper/wtc.htm
<http://www.antelecom.net/~scheper/wtc.htm> 

pps. Why G.E.?
Maybe Pynchon had one of those "G.E.nius" metal buttons.
I was quite taken with mine. That might be the sixties.