GR translation: Reminders of impotence and abstraction

[Mike Jing]

Got it.  Thanks a lot.

On Sun, Feb 1, 2015 at 8:48 AM, David Morris <fqmorris at gmail.com> wrote:

>
> 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>:
>>
>>> 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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