GR translation: Reminders of impotence and abstraction

[Mike Jing]

V567.8-25, P577.3-19   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. . . .

The published translation interpreted "impotence" as erectile dysfunction,
and "abstraction" as extraction. That can't possibly be correct, can it?