MB DRO ROSHI

[Dave Monroe]

http://books.google.com/books?id=GGPm4I3BbxAC&pg=PT518#v=onepage&q&f=false

On 8/6/13, Dave Monroe <against.the.dave at gmail.com> wrote:

> "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)
>
> The Enola Gay
>
> 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
>
> MB DRO ROSHI
>
> When discussing GR, the writer Alan Moore recalled this sequence as
> "the whole point of the novel... It’s just this bit of burnt paper
> that, if you put it together, talks about America dropping the atom
> bomb on Hiroshima. Which is of course, the end of the V bomb, which
> has been made obsolete. Gravity’s got a new rainbow."
>
> http://gravitys-rainbow.pynchonwiki.com/wiki/index.php?title=Pages_674-700#Page_693
> http://www.wired.com/underwire/2009/12/alan-moore-dodgem-logic/3/
>
> "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
> May18 and August 6; the day of the first atomic bomb attack and also
> the Feast of the Transfiguration.
>
> 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
>