Gravity's Rainbow

by Thomas Pynchon

Bland’s connection was vague. Jamf’s records mention that he had negotiated contracts for supplying tons of private currency known as Notgeld to Stinnes and colleagues, as well as “Mefo bills” to the Weimar Republic—another of Hjalmar Schacht’s many bookkeeping dodges to keep official records clear of any hint of weapons procurement banned under the terms of Versailles. Some of these banknote contracts were let to a certain Massachusetts paper mill, on whose board Lyle Bland happened to sit. The name of this contractor was the Slothrop Paper Company.

His erection hums from a certain distance, like an instrument installed, wired by Them into his body as a colonial outpost here in our raw and clamorous world, another office representing Their white Metropolis far away.

A smell, a forbidden room, at the bottom edge of his memory. He can’t see it, can’t make it out. Doesn’t want to. It is allied with the Worst Thing. He knows what the smell has to be: though according to these papers it would have been too early for it, though he has never come across any of the stuff among the daytime coordinates of his life, still, down here, back here in the warm dark, among early shapes where the clocks and calendars don’t mean too much, he knows that what’s haunting him now will prove to be the smell of Imipolex G.

Nordhausen in the morning: the lea is a green salad, crisp with raindrops.

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

It’s a Sunday-funnies dawn, very blue sky with gaudy pink clouds in it. Mud across the cobblestones is so slick it reflects light, so that you walk not streets but these long streaky cuts of raw meat, hock of werewolf, gammon of Beast.

yes, we’re hanging now down the last limb of our trajectory in to the Raketen-Stadt, a difficult night of magnetic storm behind us, eddy currents still shimmering through all our steel like raindrops that cling to vehicle windows

Rarely a bare bulb will hollow out a region of light. As darkness is mined and transported from place to place like marble, so the light bulb is the chisel that delivers it from its inertia, and has become one of the great secret ikons of the Humility, the multitudes who are passed over by God and History.

But as you swung away, who was the woman alone in the earth, planted up to her shoulders in the aardvark hole, a gazing head rooted to the desert plane, with an upsweep of mountains far behind her, darkly folded, far away in the evening? She can feel the incredible pressure, miles of horizontal sand and clay, against her belly. Down the trail wait the luminous ghosts of her four stillborn children, fat worms lying with no chances of comfort among the wild onions, one by one, crying for milk more sacred than what is tasted and blessed in the village calabashes. In preterite line they have pointed her here, to be in touch with Earth’s gift for genesis. The woman feels power flood in through every gate: a river between her thighs, light leaping at the ends of fingers and toes. It is sure and nourishing as sleep. It is a warmth. The more the daylight fades, the further she submits—to the dark, to the descent of water from the air. She is a seed in the Earth. The holy aardvark has dug her bed.

Colonies are the outhouses of the European soul, where a fellow can let his pants down and relax, enjoy the smell of his own shit. Where he can fall on his slender prey roaring as loud as he feels like, and guzzle her blood with open joy. Eh? Where he can just wallow and rut and let himself go in a softness, a receptive darkness of limbs, of hair as woolly as the hair on his own forbidden genitals. Where the poppy, and cannabis and coca grow full and green, and not to the colors and style of death, as do ergot and agaric, the blight and fungus native to Europe. Christian Europe was always death, Karl, death and repression. Out and down in the colonies, life can be indulged, life and sensuality in all its forms, with no harm done to the Metropolis, nothing to soil those cathedrals, white marble statues, noble thoughts. . . . No word ever gets back. The silences down here are vast enough to absorb all behavior, no matter how dirty, how animal it gets.

Something sinister was moving out in the veld: he was beginning to look at their faces, especially those of the women, lined beyond the thorn fences, and he knew beyond logical proof: there was a tribal mind at work out here, and it had chosen to commit suicide. . . . Puzzling. Perhaps we weren’t as fair as we might have been, perhaps we did take their cattle and their lands away . . . and then the work-camps of course, the barbed wire and the stockades. . . . Perhaps they feel it is a world they no longer want to live in. Typical of them, though, giving up, crawling away to die . . . why won’t they even negotiate? We could work out a solution, some solution.

Though they don’t admit it, the Empty Ones now exiled in the Zone, Europeanized in language and thought, split off from the old tribal unity, have found the why of it just as mysterious. But they’ve seized it, as a sick woman will seize a charm. They calculate no cycles, no returns, they are in love with the glamour of a whole people’s suicide—the pose, the stoicism, and the bravery. These Otukungurua are prophets of masturbating, specialists in abortion and sterilization, pitchmen for acts oral and anal, pedal and digital, sodomistical and zoophiliac—their approach and their game is pleasure: they are spieling earnestly and well, and Erdschweinhöhlers are listening.

The people will find the Center again, the Center without time, the journey without hysteresis, where every departure is a return to the same place, the only place.

Both know by now that what’s under discussion is the act of suicide, which also includes bestiality (“Think how sweet,” runs the pitch, “to show mercy, sexual mercy to that hurt and crying animal”), pedophilia (“It is widely reported that just at the edge you grow glaringly younger”), lesbianism (“Yes, for as the wind blows through all the emptying compartments the two shadow-women at last can creep out of their chambers in the dying shell, at the last ashen shoreline, to meet and embrace . . .”), coprophilia and urolagnia (“The final convulsions . . .”), fetishism (“A wide choice of death-fetishes, naturally . . .”). Naturally. The two of them sit there, passing a cigarette back and forth, till it’s smoked down to a very small stub. Is it idle talk, or is Ombindi really trying to hustle Enzian here? Enzian’s got to be sure before he moves. If he comes out sez, “This is a hustle, right?” and turns out it isn’t, well— But the alternative is so strange, that Enzian is, in some way, being SOLD ON SUICIDE

Why should Weissmann want to survive the war? Surely he’d have found something splendid enough to match his thirst. It could not have ended for him rationalized and meek as his hundred glass bureaus about the SS circuit—located in time and space always just to miss grandeur, only to be in its vacuum, to be tugged slightly along by its slipstream but finally left to lie still again in a few tarnished sequins of wake.

At night down here, very often lately, Enzian will wake for no reason. Was it really Him, pierced Jesus, who came to lean over you? The white faggot’s-dream body, the slender legs and soft gold European eyes . . . did you catch a glimpse of olive cock under the ragged loincloth, did you want to reach to lick at the sweat of his rough, his wooden bondage? Where is he, what part of our Zone tonight, damn him to the knob of that nervous imperial staff. .

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.

He has dreamed of being held in the pitiless emprise of something from which he cannot wake . . . he is often aboard a ship on a broad river, leading a rebellion which must fail. For reasons of policy, the rebellion is being allowed to go on for a bit. He is being hunted, his days are full of narrow escapes which he finds exciting, physically graceful . . . and the Plot itself! it has a stern, an intense beauty, it is music, a symphony of the North, of an Arctic voyage, past headlands of very green ice, to the feet of icebergs, kneeling in the grip of this incredible music, washed in seas blue as blue dye, an endless North, vast country settled by people whose old culture and history are walled off by a great silence from the rest of the world . . . the names of their peninsulas and seas, their long and powerful rivers are unknown down in the temperate world . . . it is a return, this voyage: he has grown old inside his name, the sweeping music of the voyage is music he wrote himself, so long ago that he has forgotten it completely . . . but now it is finding him again.

who knows what waits out here for the head held too high?

his hair blown like holidays of hay,

The sunset is red and yellow, like the balloon. On the horizon the mild sphere goes warping down, a peach on a china plate.

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. Cows—big lummoxes splotched black and white, harnessed now for the plowing because German horses in the Zone are all but extinct—will drudge with straight faces right on into minefields, sown back in the winter. The godawful blasts go drumming over the farmland, horns, hide and hamburger come showering down all over the place, and the dented bells lie quiet in the clover.

The ground shudders just below his hearing. It might be the end of the world, except that it is a fairly average day, for Central Asia. Pulse after heavenwide pulse. Clouds, some in very clear profile, black and jagged, sail in armadas toward the Asian arctic, above the sweeping dessiatinas of grasses, of mullein stalks, rippling out of sight, green and gray in the wind.

He is constant back there, westward, the African half-brother and his poetry books furrowed and sown with Teutonic lettering burntwood-black—he waits, smudging the pages one by one, out across the unnumbered versts of lowland and of zonal light that slants as their autumns come around again each year, that leans along the planet’s withers like an old circus rider,

By his first action, Tchitcherine will have gained his reputation as a suicidal maniac. German field commanders from Finland to the Black Sea will develop for him a gentlemanly distaste. It will be seriously wondered if the man has any sense of military decency at all. They will capture him and lose him, wound him, take him for killed in action, and he will go on, headlong, a raving snowman over the winter marshes—there’ll be no wind adjustment, no field-change to the bottleneck fairing or deadly ogive of their Parabellum rounds that can ever bring him down.

NRC is synthesizing new molecules every day, most of them from pieces of the morphine molecule. Du Pont is stringing together groups such as amides into long chains. The two programs seem to be complementary, don’t they? The American vice of modular repetition, combined with what is perhaps our basic search: to find something that can kill intense pain without causing addiction. “Results have not been encouraging. We seem up against a dilemma built into Nature, much like the Heisenberg situation. There is nearly complete parallelism between analgesia and addiction. The more pain it takes away, the more we desire it. It appears we can’t have one property without the other, any more than a particle physicist can specify position without suffering an uncertainty as to the particle’s velocity—”

A demand like ‘addiction,’ having nothing to do with real pain, real economic needs, unrelated to production or labor . . . we need fewer of these unknowns, not more. We know how to produce real pain. Wars, obviously . . . machines in the factories, industrial accidents, automobiles built to be unsafe, poisons in food, water, and even air—these are quantities tied directly to the economy. We know them, and we can control them. But ‘addiction’? What do we know of that? Fog and phantoms. No two experts will even agree on how to define the word. ‘Compulsion’? Who is not compelled? ‘Tolerance’? ‘Dependence’? What do they mean? All we have are the thousand dim, academic theories. A rational economy cannot depend on psychological quirks. We could not plan. . . .”

“Are you really this evil, or is it just an act? Are you really trafficking in pain?” “Doctors traffick in pain and no one would dream of criticizing their noble calling. Yet let the Verbindungsmann but reach for the latch on his case, and you all start to scream and run. Well—you won’t find many addicts among us. The medical profession is full of them, but we salesmen believe in real pain, real deliverance—we are knights in the service of that Ideal. It must all be real, for the purposes of our market. Otherwise my employer—and our little chemical cartel is the model for the very structure of nations—becomes lost in illusion and dream, and one day vanishes into chaos.

politics between wars demands symmetry and a more elegant idea of justice, even to the point of masquerading, a bit decadently, as mercy.

seems to be a kind of G, a voiced uvular plosive. The distinction between it and your ordinary G is one Tchitcherine will never learn to appreciate. Come to find out, all the Weird Letter Assignments have been reserved for ne’er-do-wells like himself. Shatsk, the notorious Leningrad nose-fetishist, who carries a black satin handkerchief to Party congresses and yes, more than once has been unable to refrain from reaching out and actually stroking the noses of powerful officials, is here—banished to the θ Committee, where he keeps forgetting that θ, in the NTA, is Œ, not Russian F, thus retarding progress and sowing confusion at every working session. Most of his time is taken up with trying to hustle himself a transfer to the Committee, “Or actually,” sidling closer, breathing heavily, “just a plain, N, or even an M, will, do. . . .” 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 . . . not unusual considering his record of impersonations and dummy resolutions, and a brilliant but doomed conspiracy to hit Stalin in the face with a grape chiffon pie, in which he was implicated only enough to get him Baku instead of worse.

The oil towers stand sentinel, bone-empty, in the dark. Hunchbacks, lepers, hebephrenics and amputees of all descriptions have come popping out of their secret spaces to watch the fun. They loll back against the rusting metal flanks of refinery hardware, their whole common sky in a tessellation of primary colors.

How alphabetic is the nature of molecules. One grows aware of it down here: one finds Committees on molecular structure which are very similar to those back at the NTA plenary session. “See: how they are taken out from the coarse flow—shaped, cleaned, rectified, just as you once redeemed your letters from the lawless, the mortal streaming of human speech. . . . These are our letters, our words: they too can be modulated, broken, recoupled, redefined, co-polymerized one to the other in worldwide chains that will surface now and then over long molecular silences, like the seen parts of a tapestry.”

A cry from down in the marsh. Birds swirl upward, round and black, grains of coarse-cut pepper on this bouillabaisse sky.

Toward dusk, the black birds descend, millions of them, to sit in the branches of trees nearby. The trees grow heavy with black birds, branches like dendrites of the Nervous System fattening, deep in twittering nerve-dusk, in preparation for some important message.

His voice is arriving from some quite peculiar direction, let us say from directly underneath, as the wide necropolis begins now to draw inward, to neck down and stretch out into a Corridor, one known to Slothrop though not by name, a deformation of space that lurks inside his life, latent as a hereditary disease.

Someone here is cleverly allowing for parallax, scaling, shadows all going the right way and lengthening with the day—but no, Säure can’t be real, no more than these dark-clothed extras waiting in queues for some hypothetical tram, some two slices of sausage (sure, sure), the dozen half-naked kids racing in and out of this burned tenement so amazingly detailed—They sure must have the budget, all right. Look at this desolation, all built then hammered back into pieces, ranging body-size down to powder (please order by Gauge Number), as that well-remembered fragrance Noon in Berlin, essence of human decay, is puffed on the set by a hand, lying big as a flabby horse up some alley, pumping its giant atomizer.

The clouded afternoon is mellowed to windsoftened edges, children kneeling beside the water with fishing lines, two birds in a chase across the canal soaring down and up in a loop into the suspended storm of a green treetop, where they sit and begin to sing. With distance the light gathers a slow ecru haze, girls’ flesh no longer bleached by the zenith sun now in gentler light reawakening to warmer colors, faint shadows of thigh-muscles, stretched filaments of skin cells saying touch . . . stay. . . . Slothrop walks on—past eyes opening, smiles breaking like kind dawns.

He is the invisible youth, the armored changeling. Providence’s little pal. Their preoccupation is with forms of danger the War has taught them—phantoms they may be doomed now, some of them, to carry for the rest of their lives. Fine for Slothrop, though—it’s a set of threats he doesn’t belong to. They are still back in geographical space, drawing deadlines and authorizing personnel, and the only beings who can violate their space are safely caught and paralyzed in comic books. They think. They don’t know about Rocketman here. They keep passing him and he remains alone, blotted to evening by velvet and buckskin—if they do see him his image is shunted immediately out to the boondocks of the brain where it remains in exile with other critters of the night.

Before his throat can stir, he’s away, on the Wheel, clutching in terror to the dwindling white point of himself, in the first windrush of anaesthesia, hovering coyly over the pit of Death.

For this crew, nostalgia is like seasickness: only the hope of dying from it is keeping them alive.

Nobody was yelling. The conversation in the steel space that night was full of quiet damped ss and palatal ys, the peculiar, reluctant poignancy of Argentine Spanish, brought along through years of frustrations, self-censorship, long roundabout evasions of political truth—of bringing the State to live in the muscles of your tongue, in the humid intimacy just inside your lips . . . pero ché, no sós argentino.

The filmlight flickered blue across empty windows as if it were breath trying to produce a note.

Above and beyond her the Zodiac glides, a north-hemisphere array she never saw in Argentina, smooth as an hour-hand.

That man is one unhappy loner. He’s got problems. He’s more useful running around the Zone thinking he’s free, but he’d be better off locked up somewhere. He doesn’t even know what his freedom is, much less what it’s worth. So I get to fix the price, which doesn’t matter to begin with.”

He feels that, in any normal period of history, they could easily be friends. People who dress up in bizarre costumes have a savoir-vivre—not to mention the sort of personality disorder—that he admires. When he was a little boy, back in Leningrad, Tchitcherine’s mother sewed by hand a costume for him to wear in a school entertainment. Tchitcherine was the wolf. The minute he put on the head, in front of the mirror by the ikon, he knew himself. He was the wolf.

Black runs all through the transcript: the recurring color black. Slothrop never mentioned Enzian by name, nor the Schwarzkommando. But he did talk about the Schwarzgerät. And he also coupled “schwarz-” with some strange nouns, in the German fragments that came through. Blackwoman, Blackrocket, Blackdream. . . . The new coinages seem to be made unconsciously. Is there a single root, deeper than anyone has probed, from which Slothrop’s Blackwords only appear to flower separately? Or has he by way of the language caught the German mania for name-giving, dividing the Creation finer and finer, analyzing, setting namer more hopelessly apart from named, even to bringing in the mathematics of combination, tacking together established nouns to get new ones, the insanely, endlessly diddling play of a chemist whose molecules are words.

Slothrop finds himself in a dilapidated old studio, dark except where yellow sunlight comes through small holes in the overhead. Rusted catwalks, creaking under his weight, black burned-out klieg lights, the fine netting of spider webs struck to graphwork by the thin beams of sun. . . . Dust has drifted into corners, and over the remains of other sets: phony-gemütlich love nests, slant-walled and palm-crowded nightclubs, papier-mâché Wagnerian battlements, tenement courtyards in stark Expressionist white/black, built to no human scale, all tapered away in perspective for the rigid lenses that stared here once. Highlights are painted on to the sets, which is disturbing to Slothrop, who keeps finding these feeble yellow streaks, looking up sharply, then all around, for sources of light that were never there, getting more agitated as he prowls the old shell, the girders 50 feet overhead almost lost in shadows, tripping over his own echoes, sneezing from the dust he stirs.

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.

If there is music for this it’s windy strings and reed sections standing in bright shirt fronts and black ties all along the beach, a robed organist by the breakwater—itself broken, crusted with tides—whose languets and flues gather and shape the resonant spooks here, the candleflame memories, all trace, particle and wave, of the sixty thousand who passed, already listed for taking, once or twice this way.

They used firehoses to break up the crowd, finally. Women slid like dolls along the slick cobbles and on tram rails, the thick gush catching them by belly and head, its brute white vector dominating them.