Discuss

[David Morris]

http://www.e-reading-lib.org/chapter.php/1002432/84/Pynchon_-_Gravity_rainbow.html

Crosses, swastikas, Zone-mandalas, how can they not speak to Slothrop? He's
sat in Saure Bummer's kitchen, the air streaming with kif moires, reading
soup recipes and finding in every bone and cabbage leaf paraphrases of
himself… news flashes, names of wheelhorses that will pay him off enough
for a certain getaway… He used to pick and shovel at the spring roads of
Berkshire, April afternoons he's lost, "Chapter 81 work," they called it,
following the scraper that clears the winter's crystal attack-from-within,
its white necropolizing… picking up rusted beer cans, rubbers yellow with
preterite seed, Kleenex wadded to brain shapes hiding preterite snot,
preterite tears, newspapers, broken glass, pieces of automobile, days when
in superstition and fright he could *make it all fit, *seeing clearly in
each an entry in a record, a history: his own, his winter's, his country's…
instructing him, dunce and drifter, in ways deeper than he can explain,
have been faces of children out the train windows, two bars of dance music
somewhere, in some other street at night, needles and branches of a pine
tree shaken clear and luminous against night clouds, one circuit diagram
out of hundreds in a smudged yellowing sheaf, laughter out of a cornfield
in the early morning as he was walking to school, the idling of a
motorcycle at one dusk-heavy hour of the summer… and now, in the Zone,
later in the day he became a crossroad, after a heavy rain he doesn't
recall, Slothrop sees a very thick rainbow here, a stout rainbow cock
driven down out of pubic clouds into Earth, green wet valleyed Earth, and
his chest fills and he stands crying, not a thing in his head, just feeling
natural…


On Thu, Feb 14, 2013 at 3:13 PM, David Morris <fqmorris at gmail.com> wrote:

> And has crossroads has many mythical and psychological connections:
>
> 1.  It is the cross-hairs of a weapon's viewfinder, related to a
> four-fin-tailed rocket seen straight-on from its top. It is also our globe
> seen from atop one of its poles.
>
> 2. That shape of cross with a circle is a mandala, a very prominent GR
> image:  a Holy Center w/ a fourfold outer division.  The Center is
> unreachable, God.  If Slothrop *becomes* a crossroads, that is a very
> powerful thing to be.
>
> GR 533.
>
> ROCKETMAN WAS HERE
>
> His first thought was that he'd written it himself and forgot. Odd that
> that should've been his first thought, but it was. Might be he was starting
> to implicate himself, some yesterday version of himself, in the Combination
> against who he was right then. In its sluggish coma, the albatross stirred.
>
> Past Slothrops, say averaging one a day, ten thousand of them, some more
> powerful than others, had been going over every sundown to the furious
> host. They were the fifth-columnists, well inside his head, waiting the
> moment to deliver him to the four other divisions outside, closing in…
>
>
> So, next to the other graffiti, with a piece of rock, he scratches this
> sign:
> [image: Gravity's rainbow]
>
> Slothrop besieged. Only after he'd left it half a dozen more places did it
> dawn on him that *what he -was really drawing was the A4 rocket, *seen
> from below. By which time he had become tuned to other fourfold
> expressions-variations on Frans Van der Groov's cosmic windmill-swastikas,
> gymnastic symbols FFFF in a circle symmetrically upside down and backward,
> Frisch Fromm Frolich Frei over neat doorways in quiet streets, and
> crossroads, where you can sit and listen in to traffic from the Other Side,
> hearing about the future (no serial time over there: events are all there
> in the same eternal moment and so certain messages don't always "make
> sense" back here: they lack historical structure, they sound fanciful, or
> insane).
>
>
>
>
> On Thu, Feb 14, 2013 at 6:35 AM, David Morris <fqmorris at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> That's how I see it.
>>
>>
>> On Thursday, February 14, 2013, alice wellintown wrote:
>>
>>> Formalist Criticism or a close reading supports the traditional and
>>> pluralistic reading, so Slothrop may be an Everyman, or an alegorical
>>> figure, an Invisible Man, who, ironically, once his white-washing is
>>> wasted, becomes a crossroads and, other things too, but Invisible
>>> nonetheless. Formalist will not insist that Slothrop is a character in
>>> an Object, a book, at the exclusion of the Psychological, Historical,
>>> Biographical Etc...readings. So, both/and here. No?
>>>
>>> On Wed, Feb 13, 2013 at 10:04 PM, Keith Davis <kbob42 at gmail.com> wrote:
>>> > Isn't an experiment something intentional?
>>> > On Wed, Feb 13, 2013 at 6:00 PM, <malignd at aol.com> wrote:
>>> >>
>>> >> In which case, none of us is a Slothrop in that none of us is a
>>> singular
>>> >> case.  We are all victims of the same experiment.
>>> >>
>>> >> -----Original Message-----
>>> >> From: Ian Livingston <igrlivingston at gmail.com>
>>> >> To: Paul Mackin <mackin.paul at verizon.net>
>>> >> Cc: pynchon-l <pynchon-l at waste.org>
>>> >> Sent: Wed, Feb 13, 2013 11:42 am
>>> >> Subject: Re: Discuss
>>> >>
>>> >> Ours is the first generation in human history to be raised consuming
>>> >> petrochemicals in the midst of almost uninterrupted nuclear fallout.
>>> What
>>> >> makes you think you haven't been experimented upon is called denial
>>> in the
>>> >> psychoanalytic parlance.
>>> >>
>>> >> On Wed, Feb 13, 2013 at 7:58 AM, Paul Mackin <mackin.paul at verizon.net
>>> >
>>> >> wrote:
>>> >>>
>>> >>> On 2/12/2013 11:14 PM, Michael Bailey wrote:
>>> >>>>
>>> >>>> On Tue, Feb 12, 2013 at 5:47 PM,  <malignd at aol.com> wrote:
>>> >>>>>
>>> >>>>> We are not all the semi-famous Baby Tyrone who was handed over to
>>> be
>>> >>>>> the
>>> >>>>> subject of experimentation.  Certanly I wasn't.  You, I don 't
>>> know ...
>>> >>>>>
>>> >>>>> We are all experimented on as children.
>>> >>>>>
>>> >>>> well, as a lad, my cousin experimented on me by putting my finger
>>> in a
>>> >>>> vise and tightening it until I got a blood blister.  Setting a
>>> >>>> lifelong pattern, I stood there amiably and bemusedly, almost
>>> savoring
>>> >>>> the feeling, until he tired of the experiment and opened the vise.
>>> >>>>
>>> >>>> Somehow our parents got word of it - I don't remember making a fuss
>>> -
>>> >>>> and he was administered gentle verbal correction -- another
>>> >>>> experiment, nobody knows how that sort of thing will turn out, but
>>> he
>>> >>>> grew up to be a kindly adult with whom I converse fearlessly.
>>> >>>>
>>> >>>
>>> >>> My younger sister once rendered me semiconscious swinging a stringed
>>> >>> pupet around in the air.  Hard ceramic material of some sort. I
>>> never told
>>> >>> on her of course.
>>> >>>
>>> >>> P
>>> >>
>>> >>
>>> >
>>> >
>>> >
>>> > --
>>> > www.innergroovemusic.com
>>>
>>
>
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