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With their nights’ growths of beard, matted hair, bloodshot eyes, miasmata of foul breath, DeCoverley and Joaquin are wasted gods urging on a tardy glacier.
search cabinets or bookcases for the hair of the dog that not without provocation and much prior conditioning bit them last night.
is the dark, hard, tobacco-starved, headachy, sour-stomach middle of the day,
It’s nothing he can see or lay hands on—sudden gases, a violence upon the air and no trace afterward . . . a Word, spoken with no warning into your ear, and then silence forever. Beyond its invisibility, beyond hammerfall and doomcrack, here is its real horror, mocking, promising him death with German and precise confidence,
Shit, money, and the Word, the three American truths,
“My mother is the war,”
I’m sorry: sooner or later . . . And past the exhaustion with it there is also this. If they have not quite seceded from war’s state, at least they’ve found the beginnings of gentle withdrawal . . . there’s never been the space or time to talk about it, and perhaps no need—but both know, clearly, it’s better together, snuggled in, than back out in the paper, fires, khaki, steel of the Home Front. That, indeed, the Home Front is something of a fiction and lie, designed, not too subtly, to draw them apart, to subvert love in favor of work, abstraction, required pain, bitter death.
And those who do let go at last: out of each catharsis rise new children, painless, egoless for one pulse of the Between . . . tablet erased, new writing about to begin, hand and chalk poised in winter gloom over these poor human palimpsests shivering under their government blankets, drugged, drowning in tears and snot of grief so real, torn from so deep that it surprises, seems more than their own. . .
A thousand children are shuffling out these doors tonight, but only rare nights will even one come in, home to your sprung, spermy bed, the wind over the gasworks, closer smells of mold on wet coffee grounds, cat shit, pale sweaters with the pits heaped in a corner, in some accidental gesture, slink or embrace. This wordless ratcheting queue . . . thousands going away . . . only the stray freak particle, by accident, drifting against the major flow. . . .
Roger really wants other people to know what he’s talking about. Jessica understands that. When they don’t, his face often grows chalky and clouded, as behind the smudged glass of a railway carriage window as vaguely silvered barriers come down, spaces slide in to separate him that much more, thinning further his loneliness.
stuffed, dim little parlor, hung about with rigid portraits of favorite gun dogs at point in fields that never existed save in certain fantasies about death,
yes, there is something sadistic about recipes with “Surprise” in the title, chap who’s hungry wants to just eat you know, not be Surprised really,
Can a conditioned reflex survive in a man, dormant, over 20 or 30 years?
Odd, odd, odd—think of the word: such white finality in its closing clap of tongue. It implies moving past the tongue-stop—beyond the zero—and into the other realm.
But the stimulus, somehow, must be the rocket, some precursor wraith, some rocket’s double present for Slothrop in the percentage of smiles on a bus, menstrual cycles being operated upon in some mysterious way—what does make the little doxies do it for free? Are there fluctuations in the sexual market, in pornography or prostitutes, perhaps tying in to prices on the Stock Exchange itself, that we clean-living lot know nothing about? Does news from the front affect the itch between their pretty thighs, does desire grow directly or inversely as the real chance of sudden death—damn it, what cue,
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Pavlov believed that obsessions and paranoid delusions were a result of certain—call them cells, neurons, on the mosaic of the brain, being excited to the level where, through reciprocal induction, all the area around becomes inhibited. One bright, burning point, surrounded by darkness. Darkness it has, in a way, called up. Cut off, this bright point, perhaps to the end of the patient’s life, from all other ideas, sensations, self-criticisms that might temper its flame, restore it to normalcy.
Tonight he feels the potency of every word: words are only an eye-twitch away from the things they stand for.
“And no fair squeezing it, Tyrone.” Under its tamarind glaze, the Mills bomb turns out to be luscious pepsin-flavored nougat, chock-full of tangy candied cubeb berries, and a chewy camphor-gum center. It is unspeakably awful. Slothrop’s head begins to reel with camphor fumes, his eyes are running, his tongue’s a hopeless holocaust. Cubeb? He used to smoke that stuff. “Poisoned . . .” he is able to croak.
charts and maps (and the chief one, red pockmarks on the pure white skin of lady London, watching over all . . . wait . . . disease on skin . . . does she carry the fatal infection inside herself? are the sites predestined, and does the flight of the rocket actually follow from the fated eruption latent in the city
each tube wrinkled or embossed by the unconscious hands of London, written over in interference-patterns,
Is that who you are, that vaguely criminal face on your ID card, its soul snatched by the government camera as the guillotine shutter fell—or
messenger from the Kingdom, arriving at the last moment. But I tell you there is no such message, no such home—only the millions of last moments . . . no more. Our history is an aggregate of last moments.
thousand rooms, gives, resonates, shifting stresses along
returns the unstiffening hawk to its cold bachelor nest
Oh Italian gin is a mother’s curse, And the beer of France is septic, Drinking Bourbon in Spain is the lonely domain Of the saint and the epileptic. White lightning has fueled up many a hearse In the mountains where ridge-runners dwell— It’s a brew begot in a poison pot, And mulled with the hammers of Hell!
“Am I ignoring you?” She’s at her window, the sea below and behind her, the midnight sea, its individual waveflows impossible at this distance to follow, all integrated into the hung stillness of an old painting seen across the deserted gallery where you wait in the shadow, forgetting why you are here, frightened by the level of illumination, which is from the same blanched scar of moon that wipes the sea tonight. .
tightening rectal fear belatedly taking hold now, neck and face beading in a surge of sweat,
Why should the rainbow edges of what is almost on him be rippling most intense here in this amply coded room?
They proceed outside to a eucalyptus grove, where Jean-Claude Gongue, notorious white slaver of Marseilles, is busy white-slaving. “Hey you,” hollering into the trees, “you wanna be a white slave, huh?” “Shit no,” answers some invisible girl, “I wanna be a green slave!” “Magenta!” yells somebody from up in an olive tree. “Vermilion!” “Think I’ll take up dealing dope,” sez Jean-Claude.
The story here tonight is a typical WW II romantic intrigue, just another evening at Raoul’s place, involving a future opium shipment’s being used by Tamara as security against a loan from Italo, who in turn owes Waxwing for a Sherman tank his friend Theophile is trying to smuggle into Palestine but must raise a few thousand pounds for purposes of bribing across the border, and so has put the tank up as collateral to borrow from Tamara, who is using part of her loan from Italo to pay him.
Imipolex G is the company albatross, Yank. They have vice-presidents whose only job is to observe the ritual of going out every Sunday to spit on old Jamf’s grave.
Swiss francs. Slothrop hasn’t got 500 anything, unless it’s worries.
He finds that he has drifted as far as the Odeon, one of the great world cafés, whose specialty is not listed anywhere—indeed has never been pinned down. Lenin, Trotsky, James Joyce, Dr. Einstein all sat out at these tables. Whatever it was they all had in common: whatever they’d come to this vantage to score . . . perhaps it had to do with the people somehow, with pedestrian mortality, restless crisscrossing of needs or desperations in one fateful piece of street . . . dialectics, matrices, archetypes all need to connect, once in a while, back to some of that proletarian blood, to body odors
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Ombindi has preached this in the name of the old Tribal Unity, and it’s a weakness in his pitch all right—it looks bad, looks like Ombindi’s trying to make believe the Christian sickness never touched us, when everyone knows it has infected us all, some to death. Yes it is a little bit jive of Ombindi here to look back toward an innocence he’s really only heard about, can’t himself believe in—the gathered purity of opposites, the village built like a mandala. . . . Still he will profess and proclaim it, as an image of a grail slipping through the room, radiant, though the jokers around the
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Enzian would like to be more out of the process than he is—to be able to see where it’s going, to know, in real time, at each splitting of the pathway of decision, which would have been right and which wrong.
As the sunlight strikes their backs, coming in nearly flat on, it begins developing on the pearl cloudbank: two gigantic shadows, thrown miles overland, past Clausthal-Zelterfeld, past Seesen and Goslar, across where the river Leine would be, and reaching toward Weser. . . . “By golly,” Slothrop a little bit nervous, “it’s the Specter.” You got it up around Greylock in the Berkshires too. Around these parts it is known as the Brockengespenst. God-shadows. Slothrop raises an arm. His fingers are cities, his biceps is a province—of course he raises an arm. Isn’t it expected of him? The
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The Zone is in full summer: souls are found quiescent behind the pieces of wall, fast asleep down curled in shell-craters, out screwing under the culverts with gray shirttails hoisted, adrift dreaming in the middles of fields. Dreaming of food, oblivion, alternate histories. . . . The silences here are retreats of sound, like the retreat of the surf before a tidal wave: sound draining away, down slopes of acoustic passage, to gather, someplace else, to a great surge of noise.
dessiatinas
wie spurlos zerträte ein Engel den Trostmarkt.
The impetuous and unstable practical joker Radnichny has pulled the Committee, being a schwa or neutral uh, where he has set out on a megalomaniac project to replace every spoken vowel in Central Asia—and why stop there, why not even a consonant or two? with these schwas here
“They’re deciding how to cut up Germany,” sez Säure. “All the Powers. They should call in the Germans, Kerl, we’ve been doing that for centuries.”
Well. What happens when paranoid meets paranoid? A crossing of solipsisms. Clearly. The two patterns create a third: a moiré, a new world of flowing shadows, interferences.
Kurt Mondaugen took it as a sign. One of these German mystics who grew up reading Hesse, Stefan George, and Richard Wilhelm, ready to accept Hitler on the basis of Demian-metaphysics, he seemed to look at fuel and oxidizer as paired opposites, male and female principles uniting in the mystical egg of the combustion chamber: creation and destruction, fire and water, chemical plus and chemical minus—
The Rocket for this Fahringer was a fat Japanese arrow. It was necessary in some way to become one with Rocket, trajectory, and target—“not to will it, but to surrender, to step out of the role of firer. The act is undivided. You are both aggressor and victim, rocket and parabolic path and
thought of himself, there and here, as a radio transmitter of some kind, and believed that whatever he was broadcasting at the time was at least no threat to them. In his electro-mysticism, the triode was as basic as the cross in Christianity. Think of the ego, the self that suffers a personal history bound to time, as the grid. The deeper and true Self is the flow between cathode and plate. The constant, pure flow. Signals—sense-data, feelings, memories relocating—are put onto the grid, and modulate the flow. We live lives that are waveforms constantly changing with time, now positive, now
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what Grandmother called “a crime of passion” has become, in the absence of much passion over anything today, the technique of preference in resolving interpersonal disputes.
He called me Katje. ‘You’ll see that your little trick won’t work again. Not now, Katje.’ I wasn’t frightened. It was madness I could understand, or else the hallucinating of the very old. The
But nowadays, some kind of space he cannot go against has opened behind Slothrop, bridges that might have led back are down now for good. He is growing less anxious about betraying those who trust him. He feels obligations less immediately. There is, in fact, a general loss of emotion, a numbness he ought to be alarmed at, but can’t quite . . .
Mothers get together once a year, in secret, at these giant conventions, and exchange information. Recipes, games, key phrases to use on their children. “What did yours use to say when she wanted to make you feel guilty?” “‘I’ve worked my fingers to the bone!’” sez the girl. “Right! And she used to cook those horrible casseroles, w-with the potatoes, and onions—” “And ham! Little pieces of ham—” “You see, you see? That can’t be accidental! They have a contest, for Mother of the Year, breast-feeding, diaper-changing, they time them, casserole competitions, ja—then, toward the end, they actually
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“Springer, this ain’t the fuckin’ movies now, come on.” “Not yet. Maybe not quite yet. You’d better enjoy it while you can. Someday, when the film is fast enough, the equipment pocket-size and burdenless and selling at people’s prices, the lights and booms no longer necessary, then . . . then
