GR translation: Reminders of impotence and abstraction

[David Morris]

http://commons.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Ensemble_alle_9_Treppengiebel-H%C3%A4user_Am_Markt_Westseite_Friedrichstadt_Foto_2012_Wolfgang_Pehlemann_IMG_2717.jpg

Step-gabled.

On Sunday, February 1, 2015, jochen stremmel <jstremmel at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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
> <javascript:_e(%7B%7D,'cvml','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"?
>>
>
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://waste.org/pipermail/pynchon-l/attachments/20150201/a874dd6b/attachment.html>