Gravity's Rainbow

by Thomas Pynchon

It’s another bit of propaganda.

There’s something still on, don’t call it a “war” if it makes you nervous, maybe the death rate’s gone down a point or two, beer in cans is back at last and there were a lot of people in Trafalgar Square one night not so long ago . . . but Their enterprise goes on.

The real War is always there. The dying tapers off now and then, but the War is still killing lots and lots of people. Only right now it is killing them in more subtle ways. Often in ways that are too complicated, even for us, at this level, to trace. But the right people are dying, just as they do when armies fight. The ones who stand up, in Basic, in the middle of the machine-gun pattern. The ones who do not have faith in their Sergeants. The ones who slip and show a moment’s weakness to the Enemy. These are the ones the War cannot use, and so they die.

Most people’s lives have ups and downs that are relatively gradual, a sinuous curve with first derivatives at every point. They’re the ones who never get struck by lightning. No real idea of cataclysm at all. But the ones who do get hit experience a singular point, a discontinuity in the curve of life—do you know what the time rate of change is at a cusp? Infinity, that’s what! A-and right across the point, it’s minus infinity! How’s that for sudden change, eh?

Which is why Slothrop now observes his coalition with hopes for success and hopes for disaster about equally high (and no, that doesn’t cancel out to apathy—it makes a loud dissonance that dovetails inside you sharp as knives).

What’s this? What’re the antagonists doing here—infiltrating their own audience? Well, they’re not, really. It’s somebody else’s audience at the moment, and these nightly spectacles are an appreciable part of the darkside-hours life of the Rocket-capital. The chances for any paradox here, really, are less than you think.

Sometimes things aren’t very clear, that’s all. Things look like they’re going against us, and though it always turns out fine at the end, and we can always look back and say oh of course it had to happen that way, otherwise so-and-so wouldn’t have happened—still, while it’s happening, in my heart I keep getting this terrible fear, this empty place, and it’s very hard at such times really to believe in a Plan with a shape bigger than I can see. . .

“Why do you speak of certain reversals—machinery connected wrong, for instance, as being ‘ass backwards’? I can’t understand that. Ass usually is backwards, right? You ought to be saying ‘ass forwards,’ if backwards is what you mean.”

Clergymen, working for the army, stood up and talked to the men who were going to die about God, death, nothingness, redemption, salvation. It really happened. It was quite common.

At least one moment of passage, one it will hurt to lose, ought to be found for every street now indifferently gray with commerce, with war, with repression . . . finding it, learning to cherish what was lost, mightn’t we find some way back?

What if there is no Vacuum? Or if there is—what if They’re using it on you? What if They find it convenient to preach an island of life surrounded by a void? Not just the Earth in space, but your own individual life in time? What if it’s in Their interest to have you believing that?

—I mean it was always understood that this would still be here when you got back, just the same, exactly the same, right? —Well ha-ha guess that’s why we called ’em vacations, son! Cause you always do come back to old Realityland, don’t you. —You always did. —Listen Tyrone, you don’t know how dangerous that stuff is. Suppose someday you just plug in and go away and never come back? Eh?

What are the stars but points in the body of God where we insert the healing needles of our terror and longing?

The sacrament of the Eucharist is really drinking the blood of the enemy. The Grail, the Sangraal, is the bloody vehicle. Why else guard it so sacredly? Why should the black honor-guard ride half a continent, half a splintering Empire, stone night and winter day, if it’s only for the touch of sweet lips on a humble bowl? No, it’s mortal sin they’re carrying: to swallow the enemy, down into the slick juicery to be taken in by all the cells.

It is the dope that finds you, apparently. Part of a reverse world whose agents run around with guns which are like vacuum cleaners operating in the direction of life—pull the trigger and bullets are sucked back out of the recently dead into the barrel, and the Great Irreversible is actually reversed as the corpse comes to life to the accompaniment of a backwards gunshot

It is a puzzling card, and everybody has a different story on it. It shows a bolt of lightning striking a tall phallic structure, and two figures, one wearing a crown, falling from it. Some read ejaculation, and leave it at that. Others see a Gnostic or Cathar symbol for the Church of Rome, and this is generalized to mean any System which cannot tolerate heresy: a system which, by its nature, must sooner or later fall. We know by now that it is also the Rocket.