Gravity's Rainbow

by Thomas Pynchon

’em all raht out, sho

The moment of assassination is the moment when power and the ignorance of power come together, with Death as validator. When one speaks to the other then it is not to pass the time of day with et-tu-Brutes. What passes is a truth so terrible that history—at best a conspiracy, not always among gentlemen, to defraud—will never admit it. The truth will be repressed or in ages of particular elegance be disguised as something else. What

RIP CHARLES KIRK 1994-2025

Rathenau—according to the histories—was prophet and architect of the cartelized state. From what began as a tiny bureau at the War Office in Berlin, he had coordinated Germany’s economy during the World War, controlling supplies, quotas and prices, cutting across and demolishing the barriers of secrecy and property that separated firm from firm—a corporate Bismarck, before whose power no account book was too privileged, no agreement too clandestine.

“Herr Rathenau? Could you tell me one thing?” It is Heinz Rippenstoss, the irrepressible Nazi wag and gadabout. The sitters begin to giggle, and Peter Sachsa to return to his room. “Is God really Jewish?”

Lol

Harvard’s there for other reasons. The ‘educating’ part of it is just sort of a front.”

Proverbs for Paranoids, 1: You may never get to touch the Master, but you can tickle his creatures.

Proverbs for Paranoids, 2: The innocence of the creatures is in inverse proportion to the immorality of the Master.

Proverbs for Paranoids, 3: If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don’t have to worry about answers.

Proverbs for Paranoids, 4: You hide, they seek.

Be assured there are ex-young men, here in this very city, faces Slothrop used to pass in the quads, who got initiated at Harvard into the Puritan Mysteries: who took oaths in dead earnest to respect and to act always in the name of Vanitas, Emptiness, their ruler . . . who now according to life-plan such-and-such have come here to Switzerland to work for Allen Dulles and his “intelligence” network, which operates these days under the title “Office of Strategic Services.” But to initiates OSS is also a secret acronym: as a mantra for times of immediate crisis they have

been taught to speak inwardly oss . . . oss, the late, corrupt, Dark-age Latin word for bone.

Paranoids are not paranoids (Proverb 5) because they’re paranoid, but because they keep putting themselves, fucking idiots, deliberately into paranoid situations.

But in the dynamic space of the living Rocket, the double integral has a different meaning. To integrate here is to operate on a rate of change so that time falls away: change is stilled. . . . “Meters per second” will integrate to “meters.” The moving vehicle is frozen, in space, to become architecture, and timeless. It was never launched. It will never fall.

In the guidance, this is what happened: a little pendulum was kept centered by a magnetic field. During launch, pulling gs, the pendulum would swing aft, off center. It had a coil attached to it. When the coil moved through the magnetic field, electric current flowed in the coil. As the pendulum was pushed off center by the acceleration of launch, current would flow—the more acceleration, the more flow. So the Rocket, on its own side of the flight, sensed acceleration first. Men, tracking it, sensed position or distance first. To get to distance from acceleration, the Rocket had to integrate twice—needed a moving coil, transformers, electrolytic cell, bridge of diodes, one tetrode (an extra grid to screen away capacitive coupling inside the tube), an elaborate dance of design precautions to get to what human eyes saw first of all—the distance along the flight path.

There was that backward symmetry again, one that Pointsman missed, but Katje didn’t. “A l...

The double integral

The SS logo

Enzian has grown cold: not so much a fire dying away as a positive coming on of cold, a bitter taste growing across the palate of love’s first hopes. . . . It began when Weissmann brought him to Europe: a discovery that love, among these men, once past the simple feel and orgasming of it, had to do with masculine technologies, with contracts, with winning and losing. Demanded, in his own case, that he enter the service of the Rocket. . . . Beyond simple steel erection, the Rocket was an entire system won, away from the feminine darkness, held against the entropies of lovable but scatterbrained Mother Nature: that was the first thing he was obliged by Weissmann to learn, his first step toward citizenship in the Zone. He was led to believe that by understanding the Rocket, he would come to understand truly his manhood.

here, laid side by side on the pavement, are these enormous loaves of bread dough left to rise under clean white cloths—boy, is everybody hungry: the same thought hits them all at once, wow! Raw dough! loaves of bread for that monster back there . . . oh, no that’s right, that was a building, the Reichstag, so these aren’t bread . . . by now it’s clear that they’re human bodies, dug from beneath today’s rubble, each inside its carefully tagged GI fartsack. But it was more than an optical mistake. They are rising, they are transubstantiated, and who knows, with summer over and hungry winter coming down, what we’ll be feeding on by Xmas?

Slothrop was going into high school when FDR was starting out in the White House. Broderick Slothrop professed to hate the man, but young Tyrone thought he was brave, with that polio and all. Liked his voice on the radio. Almost saw him once too, in Pittsfield, but Lloyd Nipple, the fattest kid in Mingeborough, was standing in the way, and all Slothrop got to see was a couple wheels and the feet of some guys in suits on a running-board. Hoover he’d heard of, dimly—something to do with shack towns or vacuum cleaners—but Roosevelt was his president, the only one he’d known. It seemed he’d just keep getting elected, term after term, forever. But somebody had decided to change that. So he was put to sleep, Slothrop’s president, quiet and neat, while the kid who once imaged his face on Lloyd’s t-shirted shoulderblades was jiving

Above Slothrop, at eye level, is a terrace, and espaliered peach trees in milky blossom. As he crouches, hefting the bag, French windows open and someone steps out on this terrace for some air. Slothrop freezes, thinking invisible, invisible. . . . Footsteps approach, and over the railing leans—well, this may sound odd, but it’s Mickey Rooney. Slothrop recognizes him on sight, Judge Hardy’s freckled madcap son, three-dimensional, flesh, in a tux and am-I-losing-my-mind face. Mickey Rooney stares at Rocketman holding a bag of hashish, a wet apparition in helmet and cape. Nose level with Mickey Rooney’s shiny black shoes, Slothrop looks up into the lit room behind—sees somebody looks a bit like Churchill, lotta dames in evening gowns cut so low that even from this angle you can see more tits than they got at Minsky’s . . . and maybe, maybe he even gets a glimpse of that President Truman. He knows he is seeing Mickey Rooney, though Mickey Rooney, wherever he may go, will repress the fact that he ever saw Slothrop.

“Max Schlepzig,” repeats Slothrop, goggling, “quit fooling. Max Schlepzig?” “It wasn’t his real name. Erdmann wasn’t mine. But anything with Earth in it was politically safe—Earth, Soil, Folk . . . a code. Which they, staring, knew how to decipher. . . . Max had a very Jewish name, Something-sky, and Gerhardt thought it more prudent to give him a new one.”

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.

“Kadavergehorsamkeit,”

German for Cadaverous Obedience

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 negative. Only at moments of great serenity is it possible to find the pure, the informationless state of signal zero. “In the name of the cathode, the anode, and the holy grid?” said

Kekulé dreams the Great Serpent holding its own tail in its mouth, the dreaming Serpent which surrounds the World. But the meanness, the cynicism with which this dream is to be used. The Serpent that announces, “The World is a closed thing, cyclical, resonant, eternally-returning,” is to be delivered into a system whose only aim is to violate the Cycle. Taking and not giving back, demanding that “productivity” and “earnings” keep on increasing with time, the System removing from the rest of the World these vast quantities of energy to keep its own tiny desperate fraction showing a profit: and not only most of humanity—most of the World, animal, vegetable and mineral, is laid waste in the process.

The System may or may not understand that it’s only buying time. And that time is an artificial resource to begin with, of no value to anyone or anything but the System, which sooner or later must crash to its death, when its addiction to energy has become more than the rest of the World can supply, dragging with it innocent souls all along the chain of life.

We all move in an Ellipse of Uncertainty, don’t we?”

there is something comforting—religious, if you want—about paranoia, there is still also anti-paranoia, where nothing is connected to anything, a condition not many of us can bear for long.

papyromancy, the ability to prophesy through contemplating the way people roll reefers—the

the shape, the licking pattern, the wrinkles and folds or absence thereof in the paper.

the Gundlach Turner-Reichs of 1895.

that critical mass cannot be ignored. Once the technical means of control have reached a certain size, a certain degree of being connected one to another, the chances for freedom are over for good.

The word has ceased to have meaning. It’s a potent case Father Rapier makes here, not without great moments of eloquence, moments when he himself is clearly moved . . . no need even to be there, at the office, for visitors may tune in from anywhere in the Convention to his passionate demonstrations, which often come in the midst of celebrating what hep humorists here are already calling “Critical Mass” (get it? not too many did in 1945, the Cosmic Bomb was still trembling in its earliness, not yet revealed to the People, so you heard the term only in the very superhepcat-to-hepcat exchanges).

“To believe that each of Them will personally die is also to believe that Their system will die—that some chance of renewal, some dialectic, is still operating in History. To affirm Their mortality is to affirm Return. I have been pointing out certain obstacles in the way of affirming Return.

WILLST DU V-2, DANN ARBEITE. If you want the V-2, then work.

What the leaflet neglected to mention was that Benjamin Franklin was also a Mason, and given to cosmic forms of practical jokesterism, of which the United States of America may well have been one.

Shoeshine boy Malcolm’s in the toilet slappin’ on the Shinola, working off whiteman’s penance on his sin of being born the color of Shit ’n’ Shinola. It is nice to think that one Saturday night, one floor-shaking Lindyhopping Roseland night, Malcolm looked up from some Harvard kid’s shoes and caught the eye of Jack Kennedy (the Ambassador’s son), then a senior. Nice to think that young Jack may have had one of them Immortal Lightbulbs then go on overhead—did Red suspend his ragpopping just the shadow of a beat, just enough gap in the moiré there to let white Jack see through, not through to but through through the shine on his classmate Tyrone Slothrop’s shoes? Were the three ever lined up that way—sitting, squatting, passing through? Eventually Jack and Malcolm both got murdered. Slothrop’s fate is not so clear. It may be that They have something different in mind for Slothrop.

Bodine has a siren-ring, the kind kids send away cereal boxtops for, cleverly arranged in his asshole so it can be operated at any time by blowing a fart of a certain magnitude. He’s gotten pretty good at punctuating his music with these farted WHEEEEeeee’s, working now at getting them in the right key, a brand-new reflex arc, ear-brain-hands-asshole, and a return toward innocence too.