MB DRO ROSHI

[Dave Monroe]

"Do you suppose something has exploded somewhere?  Really--somewhere
in the East?  Another Krakatoa?  Another name at least that exotic
..." (GR, Pt. IV, p. 642)

  "At the instant it happened, the pale Virgin was rising in the east,
head, shoulders, breasts, 17°, 36' down to her maidenhead at the.
horizon.  A few doomed Japanese knew of her as some Western deity. She
loomed in the eastern sky gazing down at the city about to be
sacrificed.  The sun was in Leo.  The fireburst came roaring and
sovereign ..." (GR, Pt. IV, p. 684)

".. a scrap of newspaper headline, with a wire photo of a giant white
cock, dangling in the sky straight downward out of a white pubic bush.
 The letters

MB DRO
ROSHI

appear above with the logo of some occupation newspaper ..." (GR, Pt.
IV, p. 693)


Enola Gay, Miss

http://www.theenolagay.com/

588; The Enola Gay, a B-29 built by Pynchon's previous employer Boeing
Aircraft, dropped the atom bomb on Hiroshima on August 6, 1945.

http://www.hyperarts.com/pynchon/gravity/alpha/e.html
http://gravitys-rainbow.pynchonwiki.com/wiki/index.php?title=E


Hiroshima

480; "a city on Honshu, the Inland Sea" in Japan, where Ensign
Morituri & family live; "Do you suppose something has exploded
somewhere? Really--somewhere in the East" 642; "MB DRO ROSHI" 693

http://www.hyperarts.com/pynchon/gravity/alpha/h.html
http://gravitys-rainbow.pynchonwiki.com/wiki/index.php?title=H


"Part 3: In the Zone" comprises 32 episodes, a number some speculate
is related to the gravitational acceleration of 32 feet per second per
second and also bearing significance to the Kabbalistic tradition. The
action of Part 3 is set during the summer of 1945 with some analepses
to the time period of Part 2 with most events taking place between May
18 and August 6; the day of the first atomic bomb attack and also the
Feast of the Transfiguration. The epigraph is taken from The Wizard of
Oz, spoken by Dorothy as she arrives in Oz and shows her
disorientation with the new environment: "Toto, I have a feeling we're
not in Kansas any more..."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravity's_Rainbow

August 6 is the Feast of the Transfiguration, the celebration of the
day when Jesus revealed his divinity to Peter, John, and James on the
top of Mount Tabor. (Matthew 17:2 and Mark 9:2.) It has been called
"the culminating point of His public life, as His baptism is its
starting point and His ascension its end." As an actual holiday, the
Feast of the Transfiguration had its origins in the forth century. It
is believed that it was substituted for an early pagan feast called
Vatavarh, or Roseflame, held in honor of Aphrodite. In an ironic
pairing typical of Gravity's Rainbow, this feast coincides with
another event on August 6, 1945: the dropping of the atomic bomb on
Hiroshima.

http://www.themodernword.com/pynchon/pynchon_granalysis.html

Through the clever placement of ironic transformations and satirical
inversions, there are several focal points throughout the work where
two opposing images exist simultaneously, setting up an ironic
dissonance -- the fact that Hiroshima occurs on the Feast of the
Transfiguration, for example, or that Easter Sunday corresponds to
April Fool's Day. Is there a message in such a dissonance? Which image
contains the greater truth, or is the truth to be found in the
juxtaposition itself? Or do we truly dwell in an observer-created
reality, where the only meaning we are allowed is what we create from
the primal chaos, where all connections we see are fictions, imposed
by us upon the universe in order to maintain an illusion of
understanding, a ghost of control....

http://www.themodernword.com/pynchon/pynchon_grintro.html

http://waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l&month=0808&msg=128224 (e.g.)