AtDDtA1: Here It Is in a Nutshell

[Dave Monroe]

   "'Here it is in a nutshell,' Randolph confided later.  'Going up is
like going north.'  He stood blinking, as if expected comment.
   "'But,' it occurred to Chick, 'if you keep going far enough north,
eventually you pass over the Pole, and then you're heading south
again.'
   "'Yes.'  The skyship commander shrugged uncomfortably.
   "'So ... if you went up high enough, you'd be going down again?'
   "'Shh!' warned Randolph St. Cosmo." (AtD, Pt. I, Ch. 1, p. 9)


Cf. ...

   "'Incoming mail.'  Did he whisper that, or only think it? He
tightens the ragged belt of his robe. Well, the range of these things
is supposed to be over 200 miles. You can't see a vapor trail 200
miles, now, can you.  Oh. Oh, yes: around the curve of the Earth,
farther east, the sun over there, just risen over in Holland, is
striking the rocket's exhaust, drops and crystals, making them blaze
clear across the sea...  The white line, abruptly, has stopped its
climb. That would be fuel cutoff,
end of burning, what's their word ... Brennschluss. We don't have one.
Or else it's classified. The bottom of the line, the original star,
has already begun to vanish in red daybreak. But the rocket will be
here before Pirate sees the sun rise.  The trail, smudged, slightly
torn in two or three directions, hangs in the sky. Already the rocket,
gone pure ballistic, has risen higher. But invisible now." (GR, Pt. I,
pp. 6-7)

( "A fascinating image: the missile's vapor trail would bend the rays
of sunlight into a rainbow, not arch-shaped, as one initially
suspects, but perfectly circular" --Steven C. Wesienburger, A
Gravity's Rainbow Companion: Sources And Contexts for Pynchon's Novel,
2nd ed. [Athens: U of Georgia P, 2006], p. 17)

   "Katje has understood the great airless arc as a clear allusion to
certain secret lusts that drive the planet and herself, and Those who
use her--over its peak and down, plunging, burning, toward a terminal
orgasm ..." (GR, Pt. I, p. 223)

"But remember if you loved it. If you did, how you loved it. And how
much--after all you're used to asking 'how much,' used to measuring,
to comparing measurements, putting them into equations to find out how
much more, how much of, how much when . . . and here in your common
drive to
the sea feel as much as you wish of that dark double-minded love which
is also shame, bravado, engineers' geopolitics--'spheres of influence'
modified to toruses of Rocket range that are parabolic in section ...
    ... not, as we might imagine, bounded below by the line of the
Earth it 'rises from' and the Earth it' 'strikes' No But Then You
Never Really Thought It Was Did You Of Course It Begins Infinitely
Below The Earth And Goes On Infinitely Back Into The Earth it's only
the peak that we are allowed to see, the break up through the surface,
out of the other silent world, violently (a jet airplane crashing into
faster-than-sound, some years later a spaceship crashing into
faster-than-light) Remember The Password In The Zone This Week Is
FASTER—THAN, THE-SPEEDOFLIGHT Speeding Up Your Voice
Exponentially—Linear Exceptions Made Only In Case of Upper Respiratory
Complaints, at each 'end,' understand, a very large transfer of
energy: breaking upward into this world, a controlled burning—breaking
downward again, an uncontrolled explosion ... this lack of symmetry
leads to speculating that a presence, analogous to the Aether, flows
through time, as the Aether flows through space. The assumption of a
Vacuum in time tended to cut us off one from another. But an Aether
sea to bear us world-to-world might bring us back a continuity, show
us a kinder universe, more easygoing...." (GR, Pt. IV, p. 726)

http://www.ottosell.de/pynchon/gr71.htm

Thanks, Ya Sam!


"Going up is like going north."

Air gets cooler as the ship ascends into higher altitudes, and
therefore like travelling northward. This page also suggests some
further mystery of the Chums may be revealed to Chick and the reader
in time.

North is not a positive place in Pynchon's world. It is associated
with anti-life---coldness as here---compared to the South, a place of
light and warmth, such as the tropics. See GR.

[...]

"Another 'surface'"
In ancient conics the cone is formed by taking a line through a point
(the vertex) at a particular angle to a plane and then inscribing a
circle on the plane. Two conic surfaces are made by the motion of this
line, one below this point and one above. The three conic sections
(hyperbola, parabola, and ellipse) are created by slicing the conic
surface(s) at different angles.

http://against-the-day.pynchonwiki.com/wiki/index.php?title=ATD_1-25

Cont'd ...

   "'Approaching the surface of another planet, maybe?' Chick persisted.
   "'Not exactly.  No.  Another 'surface,' but an earthly one.  Often
to our regret, all too earthly.  More than that, I am reluctant--'
   "'These are mysteries of the profession,' Chick supposed.
   "You'll see.  In time, of course.'" (AtD, Pt. I, Ch. 1, p. 9)

SPOILER ALERT

See AtD, Pt. I, pp. 114ff. ...

At any rate, is it, is the novel, is the Pynchonian ouevre, really
"here is a nutshell"?  "Going up is like going north"?  How so?  Let
me know ...