Von Braun in the Rainbow

[Monte Davis]

Kai sez: 
 
>  It's also the whole project  [WvB] stands for. All that
> Leary-like grandiosity madness about colonies in space and such. ..
 
One mighht note that Leary had wigged himself out long before latching onto
space . .. but any stick will do to beat a bad dog, eh? 
 
>Who is providing the rainbow? The earth and its elementary powers. 
 
Live and learn; silly me, all these years I'd been under the impression that

 
(1) the (emblematic, Judeo-Christian) rainbow was a promise from YHWH, Mr.
Sky God and Written Lawgiver par excellence, pretty much the opposite of the
chthonic and intuitive powers that the creators of the Old Testament
rejected and condemned
 
(2) the (scientific, analytic) rainbow is produced by sunlight and airborne
water droplets, not as far as I know by the fecund mud of Bad Karma
 
To me, Gravity's Rainbow is about the *perversion* of transcendent impulses
(Rilke's gone wrong in the "apolitical" wandervogel youth every bit as much
as Oberth's gone wrong at Peenemunde). That's much richer and more
interesting to me than root-and-branch condemnation of the impulse itself. .

 
By the same token, I think there's more to be learned from the von Braun who
enthralled Rotary Club luncheons in New Mexico and Alabama, who fit so
perfectly into the quintessentially American medium of Walt Disney TV, than
from righteous indignation at the War Criminal Among Us.
 
I find it hard to believe that Pynchon has absorbed and pondered all that
science and technology simply to proclaim that it's eeeevil, and we've got
to get ourselves back to the garden. I think he is so eloquent and
provocative about the von Braun "project" in GR (like the Enlightenment
"project" in M&D, the modernist "project" in AtD, etc.) precisely because he
feels and acknowledges their promise as much as he mistrusts it. Why anyone
would want to shoehorn that into a neat little framework of Them (mad
scientists) vs. Us (good humanists) escapes me. 
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