GR translation: Reminders of impotence and abstraction

[Mike Jing]

V567.5-25 . . . . So Slothrop is borne, afloat on the water-leas. Like
signals set out for lost travelers, shapes keep repeating for him, Zonal
shapes he will allow to enter but won’t interpret, not any more. Just as
well, probably. The most persistent of these, which seem to show up at the
least real times of day, are the stairstep gables that front so many of
these ancient north-German buildings, rising, backlit, a strangely wet gray
as if risen out of the sea, over these straight and very low horizons. They
hold shape, they endure, like monuments to Analysis. Three hundred years
ago mathematicians were learning to break the cannonball’s rise and fall
into stairsteps of range and height, Δx and Δy, allowing them to grow
smaller and smaller, approaching zero as armies of eternally shrinking
midgets galloped upstairs and down again, the patter of their diminishing
feet growing finer, smoothing out into continuous sound. This analytic
legacy has been handed down intact—it brought the technicians at Peenemünde
to peer at the Askania films of Rocket flights, frame by frame, Δx by Δy,
flightless themselves . . . film and calculus, both pornographies of
flight. Reminders of impotence and abstraction, the stone Treppengiebel
shapes, whole and shattered, appear now over the green plains, and last a
while, and go away. . . .

Why are these stone Treppengiebel shapes "reminders of impotence and
abstraction"?
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://waste.org/pipermail/pynchon-l/attachments/20150201/66c656e6/attachment.html>