GR translation: Reminders of impotence and abstraction

[jochen stremmel]

The technicians at Peenemünde, they are peering at films of Rocket flights,
frame by frame, like voyeurs (Peeping Toms?), but they are flightless
themselves – impotent, a bit like the mathematicians 300 years ago breaking
down the cannonball's rise and fall (because they didn't fly with the
cannonball like the Baron of the Lies). And the Treppengiebel shapes –
rising and falling stairsteps – are reminders of that.


2015-02-01 8:52 GMT+01:00 Mike Jing <gravitys.rainbow.cn at gmail.com>:

> 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"?
>
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