mindful pleasures , rainbows, gravity

[Genevieve Dufour Allen]

Long-time lurker: first reply-all: greetings!

I don't wish to dismiss the connection to fossil fuels out of hand
entirely. While the V-2/A-4 were indeed fueled by ethanol and O2, there was
still an integral part supplied by petroleum byproducts (plastics),
particularly in relation to 00000: Imipolex G. IG, ICI, and AG had
connections to Shell, Dutch Shell, and Shell Mex House in the patent and
production of Imipolex, including a certain test firing of a propulsion
system related to Imipolex from the roof of a Dutch Shell office. This
comes up when Slothrop has found the papers detailing Jamf's work for
Psychochemie AG.

Crude oil and the extraction industry are treated more subtly in GR, but
it's there. The rainbow that is always reflected in the slippery black gold
that is now infused in nearly every aspect of the modern world was not
something that was passed by. So not fueling the rockets, but still
involved in nearly every weapon and transportation in some manner.

There is another part I can't quite remember/find that was a beautiful
sentence about ancient fossils below the ground being disturbed or
fractured, in GR.

On Fri, Sep 1, 2017 at 12:32 PM, Joseph Tracy <brook7 at sover.net> wrote:

>    Good point. But I still like my thesis espite that sizeable dent. At
> the time of the writing weren’t there kerosene derived fuels that made the
> orange flames?
>
> > On Sep 1, 2017, at 12:25 PM, Monte Davis <montedavis49 at gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > Remember the drinking of fuel in the Mittelwerke, and the mention of the
> SS harvesting potatoes for fermentation and distillation (a la vodka) into
> fuel? The A4/V-2 was propelled by 75% ethanol (ethyl alcohol) and liquid
> oxygen, neither from or derived from oil or gas or anything else
> underground or "fossil."
> >
> > Other than that, agreement abounds.
> >
> > On Fri, Sep 1, 2017 at 12:04 PM, Joseph Tracy <brook7 at sover.net> wrote:
> > I love this thread title and want to come back to it and  also to the
> final title of Pynchon’s  masterwork - Gravity’s Rainbow.  In my own
> approach to Pynchon’s body of work I see 4 Masterworks- GR, M&D and ATD
> and V. These all take on major aspects of American History and myth within
> the larger context of western history and myth and open up vistas into non
> western thought: Pythagoras ( one of several paths not taken), Tibetan,
> Chinese,  Shamanic, Japanese.
> >
> > The shorter works  all seem to take on critical  cultural turning points
> occurring within P’s life often with a detective/investigative structure:
> rise of Nixon, Reagan, police authoritarianism…transition to paper money
> and banker/oligarchy economic debt supremacy over labor/ real goods base…
> great failure  and lesser successes of 60s cultural revolution…. 9/11
> revival of authoritaian militarism.  All of these have a powerful but
> usually understated subtext of wars and war paradigms:  Vietnam and war
> with communism… Internal war against nonconformity, against the antiwar
> movement, against organized  labor,  and against actual  human freedom as
> opposed to theoretical patriotic freedom… war on terror .
> >
> > I want to concede to Mark K that the evidence that Mindless Pleasures
> was more than a working title seems persuasive. I have not studied P’s life
> as others have and have read less of the body of Pynchon criticism,
> preferring to rely on my own thoughts and research and interaction with the
> list. This seems to have advantages and disadvantages.
> >
> > BUT…… Gravity’s Rainbow is a better title. I rarely make this kind of
> absolute comparitive judgement and wonder if anyone prefers Mindless
> Pleasures? Why do I think it’s a better Title and why did Pynchon use it
> and does all this have any relation to the labor issues which I am
> persuaded by Ish, after some discussion, is a more central theme of P’s
> work than I had really focused on.
> >
> > Mindless Pleasures is awkwardly misleading and general.  The book is not
> about mindless pleasures  and the phrase is not that useful a phrase even
> as a satiric induction to deeper thought. It would have swallowed a lot of
> response time to the novel with little benefit.
> >
> > Gravity’s Rainbow is almost the opposite- poetic and unique, not
> obvious, general, or loaded with cultural baggage. It draws you in and
> forces you to deal with the specifictity and metaphoric suggestion of
> language. It is also multi-valent which is one of the consistent qualities
> of P’s literary genius; It can refer to a natural rainbow or one of many
> human-made rainbows which are thematic. Gravity is one of the great
> mysteries of science remaining a challenge after Einstein. It refers to
> death but also implies the complementary life force and birth, the rise and
> fall of a rocket( or the rise and fall of a civilization, a life, all life,
> the force that shapes stars, planets, bends the path of light.. )
> >
> > One of my few original thoughts on the title is the idea of a reference
> to oil/rocket fuel/ coal tar extracts - in short  fossil fuels which are
> the accumulated remains of organic life under the pressures of time and
> gravity. For me this gave a broader scope than the traditional reference to
> the rocket's arc. In GR we are looking at the 2nd of 2 world wars driven
> by  and attempting to control fossil fuels as the energy source of modern
> civilization and culminating in the delivery of atomic weapons  via the
> mastery of fossil fuel powered flight. We see gravity’s rainbows in IG
> Farben’s dyes derived from coal tars, in color coded maps, in chemical
> candies, in rocket trails at dawn, in the actual rainbow that marks the
> restoration of nature and transcendent disapearance  of Slothrop. This
> rainbow spectrum is set a against the black and white movie tone of the war
> which dominates the book- a spectrum emphasized by White Visitation,
> Schwarzcommandos, race war references, and the black and white movies it
> refers to, perhaps even to some degree by black print on a white page.
> >
> >  Is it possibe that we are being asked to observe and consider a mindful
> choice between the powerful and useful role of binary thinking in human
> history and the promise and potential of something more akin to the octaval
> range of the periodic table, the light spectrum, the musical scale. Is
> evolution, or perhaps the mindful organization of the universe( must these
> 2 ways of thinking  be arranged as an opposition?) fundamentally wedded to
> an expansion of consciousness, or is that just a carbon life form  bias? It
> is my sense that humans have expanded their cosciousness into tools, into
> language, and via thes into larger dimensions of time and space, but have
> failed to transcend a primitive addiction to the war paradigm.  How long
> can we sit on the DNA fence organizing everything around an agonistic
> internal  binary war without blowing everything back  to silky black goo?-
> > Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?listpynchon-l
> >
>
> -
> Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?listpynchon-l
>
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