BtZ42Read

Tue Mar 15 12:09:15 CDT 2016

Pynchon's writing sends each reader off on their own tangents (sometimes multiple ones, in a single sentence). But I prefer to read a little closer to the text. "The white line, abruptly, has stopped its climb. That would be fuel cutoff, end of burning, what's their word … Brennschluss. We don't have one. Or else its classified." The zero point is the top of the parabola, the rocket-arc that Pirate sees from his rooftop. At the top of the parabola (symmetrical in theory, at any rate), the slope is zero. 

So there are two "beyond the zero" points. "Their" side - the Nazi rocket-launchers and "our" side (too classified to even name the zero point?). An interesting thing happens at the zero point. The first half (rising) is engineered, man-made; but in the descent, gravity (Nature) takes over. Von Braun: "Nature does not know extinction; all it knows is transformation." Or, as per the Tom Lehrer song: "'Once the rocket goes up, who cares where it comes down? That's not my department,' says Wernher von Braun.

Laura

-----Original Message-----

From: Keith Davis 

Sent: Mar 15, 2016 12:21 PM

To: Joseph Tracy 

Cc: P-list List 

Subject: Re: BtZ42Read

This could link to Slothrop's final scene, or state, as well.

On Tue, Mar 15, 2016 at 12:20 PM, Keith Davis <kbob42 at gmail.com> wrote:
Beyond the Zero...beyond nothing, to everything?

On Tue, Mar 15, 2016 at 12:19 PM, Keith Davis <kbob42 at gmail.com> wrote:
I was thinking of it as beyond this life, as well. The behaviorism angle is also very insightful. Why not both, and possibly more?

On Tue, Mar 15, 2016 at 11:55 AM, Joseph Tracy <brook7 at sover.net> wrote:
I think so. Behaviorism is such a central theme. The screaming also has an echo later in the screaming children in the secret behaviorist experiments, which reinforces this thinking.  There is also a sense in which Beyond the Zero refers to crossing the boundary between life and death. Von Braun describes ’the continuity of “our spiritual existence”after death'. Pynchon seems to me to be asking what kind of spiritual existence comes out of Von Braun’s choices. Is there a sense in which this kind of thinking leads to a lust for self annihilation as a mad alchemical experiment. Bliss Zero.

It is going to be very hard not to leap around here in the text.

> On Mar 15, 2016, at 5:46 AM, Kai Frederik Lorentzen <lorentzen at hotmail.de> wrote:

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> On 15.03.2016 09:39, Ian Livingston wrote:

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>> Then there is this pe-orgasmic pause:

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>> “There is no way out. Lie and wait, lie still and be quiet. Screaming holds across the sky. When it comes, will it come in darkness, or will it bring its own light? Will the light come before ar after?

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>> But it is already light," GR 5.

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>> Are we beyond the zero at this point? What, exactly, is the zero?

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> Could it be that the zero refers to behaviorism? Pavlovian thought is via Pointsman very present in this first part of the novel. In this context, - please correct me if I'm wrong! - the one (1) refers to the successful conditioning, manifest in a concrete behavior. The zero (0) refers to the state where the conditioning is extinguished and the behavior is not shown by the test subject anymore.  The formulation "beyond the zero" then, perhaps, indicates a new phase in human history where the thanatoid forces of society start, metaphorically speaking, to go beneath our skin. Where science becomes "big science" (and data "big data"), and even political mass murder, so very common to history, enters a qualitatively new level with the Holocaust, as well as with Hiroshima. Sentences like "It is too late", or "It has happened before, but there is nothing to compare it to now", would fit such a reading. What do you think?

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>> “Astrologically the beginning of the next aeon, according to the starting-point you select, falls between A.D. 2000 and  2200. Starting from the star “0“ and assuming a Platonic month of 2,145 years, one would arrive at A.D. 2154 for the beginning of the Aquarian Age, and at A.D. 1997 if you start from star “a 113.“ The latter date agrees with the longitude of the stars in Ptolemy’s Almagest“ CGJ, Aion, 1959, 94n.

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