O, O, O, To-tus flore-o!

[Robin Landseadel]

	The great cusp-green equinox and turning, dreaming fishes to
	young ram, watersleep to firewaking, bears down on us. Across
	the Western Front, up in the Harz in Bleicherode, Wernher von
	Braun, lately wrecked arm in a plaster cast, prepares to
	celebrate his 23rd birthday.  Artillery thunders through the
	afternoon. Russian tanks raise dust phantoms far away over the
	German leas. The storks are home, and the first violets have
	appeared.

	At "The White Visitation," days along the chalk piece of
	seacoast now are fine and clear. The office girls are bundling
	into fewer sweaters, and breasts peaking through into visibility
	again. March has come in like a lamb. Lloyd George is dying.
	Stray visitors are observed now along the still-forbidden beach,
	sitting among obsolescent networks of steel rod and cable,
	trousers rolled to the knee or hair unsnooded, chilly gray toes
	stirring the shingle. Just offshore, underwater, run miles of
	secret piping, oil ready at a valve-twist to be released and roast
	German invaders who belong back in dreams already old ...
	fuel waiting hypergolic ignition that will not come unless now as
	some junior-bureaucratic rag or May uprising of the spirit, to
	Bavarian tunesmith Carl Orff's lively

	0,0,0, To-tus flore-o!

	lam amore virginali Totus ardeo ...

	all this fortress coast alight, Portsmouth to Dungeness, blazing
	for the love of spring.
	GR, pgs. 239/240 [Penguin Ed.]

Dr. Wernher von Braun's birthday is March 23, for what it's worth.

Steven Weisenburger has many intelligent and useful things to say  
about the sequence of holy days and holidays in Gravity's Rainbow. In  
his introduction to "A Gravity's Rainbow Companion" Weisenburger notes  
how the structure of Gravity's Rainbow is aligned to Christian  
holidays. Great weigh is given to Easter falling on April Fools in 1945 
—a false resurrection.

> I do believe the Vernal equinox is of some importance to OBA.
> Especially as regards the matter of precession and the Ages and so on.
> If he used the specific phrase, I'm not sure where, but I know a fair
> share of other folks who use it annually -- mostly neo-pagans, but
> some other folks also like to keep resonant with the macrocosm.
>
> -i
  I usually make some note of the Ides of March, seeing as that's my  
birthday.

> On Fri, Mar 20, 2009 at 4:24 PM, Bekah <Bekah0176 at sbcglobal.net>  
> wrote:
>> Happy Vernal Equinox everybody -  (didn't Pynchon use that  
>> somewhere?  -
>>  eeks)
>>
>> Bekah

Haven't found a citation so specific so far, but I'm sure it's  
somewhere—likely in Mason & Dixon.