Gravity's Rainbow

by Thomas Pynchon

Pirate in the lavatory stands pissing, without a thought in his head.

In staggers Teddy Bloat with Pirate’s blanket over his head, slips on a banana peel and falls on his ass. “Kill myself,” he mumbles. “The Germans will do it for you.

He likes to tell them about fireflies. English girls don’t know about fireflies, which is about all Slothrop knows for sure about English girls.

“A market needed no longer be run by the Invisible Hand, but now could create itself—its own logic, momentum, style, from inside. Putting the control inside was ratifying what de facto had happened—that you had dispensed with God. But you had taken on a greater, and more harmful, illusion. The illusion of control.

They are in love. Fuck the war.

“Here,” hollers the sentry, “you. You idiots. Keep away from that bit of wall, there’s nothing to hold it up.” “Do you have any cigarettes?” asks Jessica. “He’s going to bolt,” Roger screams. “For God’s sake, Mexico, slowly now.”

Will Postwar be nothing but “events,” newly created one moment to the next? No links? Is it the end of history?

How seriously is she playing? In a conquered country, one’s own occupied country, it’s better, she believes, to enter into some formal, rationalized version of what, outside, proceeds without form or decent limit day and night, the summary executions, the roustings, beatings, subterfuge, paranoia, shame . . . though it is never discussed among them openly, it would seem Katje, Gottfried, and Captain Blicero have agreed that this Northern and ancient form, one they all know and are comfortable with—the strayed children, the wood-wife in the edible house, the captivity, the fattening, the Oven—shall be their preserving routine, their shelter, against what outside none of them can bear—the War, the absolute rule of chance, their own pitiable contingency here, in its midst.

Tonight he feels the potency of every word: words are only an eye-twitch away from the things they stand for.

Mirror-metaphysics. Self-enchanted by what he imagined elegance, his bookish symmetries.

Indeed, why did she leave Schußstelle 3? We are never told why. But now and then, players in a game will, lull or crisis, be reminded how it is, after all, really play—and be unable then to continue in the same spirit. . . . Nor need it be anything sudden, spectacular—it may come in gentle—and regardless of the score, the number of watchers, their collective wish, penalties they or the Leagues may impose, the player will, waking deliberately, perhaps with Katje’s own tough, young isolate’s shrug and stride, say fuck it and quit the game, quit it cold. .

The best there is to believe in right now is a Revolution-in-exile-in-residence,

Destiny will betray you, crush your ideals, deliver you into the same detestable Bürgerlichkeit as your father, sucking at his pipe on Sunday strolls after church past the row houses by the river—dress you in the gray uniform of another family man, and without a whimper you will serve out your time, fly from pain to duty, from joy to work, from commitment to neutrality. Destiny does all this to you.

“Of course you do, Gwenhidwy.” “Aren’t we then? What about you?” “I don’t know. I don’t feel Jewish today.”

Mothers and fathers are conditioned into deliberately dying in certain preferred ways: giving themselves cancer and heart attacks, getting into motor accidents, going off to fight in the War—leaving their children alone in the forest. They’ll always tell you fathers are “taken,” but fathers only leave—that’s what it really is. The fathers are all covering for each other, that’s all.

Fires are lit on the beach.

TOO SOON TO KNOW (FOX-TROT) It’s still too soon, It’s not as if we’d kissed and kindled, Or chased the moon Through midnight’s hush, as dancing dwindled Into quiet dawns, Over secret lawns . . . Too soon to know If all that breathless conversation A sigh ago Was more than casual flirtation Doomed to drift away Into misty gray . . . How can we tell, What can we see? Love works its spells in hiding, Quite past our own deciding . . . So who’s to say If joyful love is just beginning, Or if its day Just turned to night, as Earth went spinning? Darling, maybe so— It’s TOO SOON TO KNOW.

“Hey Katje . . .” Making a long arm, hooking a finger on a spoke to stop the wheel. The ball drops in a compartment whose number they never see. Seeing the number is supposed to be the point. But in the game behind the game, it is not the point.

dialectics, matrices, archetypes all need to connect, once in a while, back to some of that proletarian blood, to body odors and senseless screaming across a table, to cheating and last hopes, or else all is dusty Dracularity, the West’s ancient curse.

the Argentine heart, in its perversity and guilt, longs for a return to that first unscribbled serenity . . . that anarchic oneness of pampas and sky. .

And yet, and yet: there is Murphy’s Law to consider, that brash Irish proletarian restatement of Gödel’s Theorem—when everything has been taken care of, when nothing can go wrong, or even surprise us . . . something will.

“Tell me about this, this ‘Schwarzgerät.’” “I thought you weren’t interested.” “How can I know if I’m interested or not if I don’t even know what I’m supposed or not supposed to be interested in?”

One of the sweetest fruits of victory, after sleep and looting, must be the chance to ignore no-parking signs.

into the green deep open,

Slothrop lies in the space where sunlight visits his cellar for half an hour before going on to others with mean puddles of warmth—sorry, got to go now, schedule to keep, see you tomorrow if it doesn’t rain, heh heh. . .

you know that in some irreducible way it’s an evil game. You play because you have nothing better to do, but that doesn’t make it right.

Abruptly Säure stands up to go, shaking hands, slipping Rocketman another reefer for later, or for

“Hmm,” opines Slothrop,

A soft night, smeared full of golden stars, the kind of night back on the pampas that Leopoldo Lugones liked to write about.

El Ñato back on the fantail with his guitar, playing Buenos Aires tristes and milongas. Beláustegui is down working on the generator. Luz and Felipe are asleep.

Borges is said to have dedicated a poem to her (“El laberinto de tu incertidumbre/Me trama con la disquietante luna . . .”).

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. . . .

begins to strum his three lowest strings, the bordona, and sing: Aquí me pongo a cantar al compás de la vigüela, que el hombre que lo desvela una pena estrordinaria, como la ave solitaria con el cantar se consuela. So, as the Gaucho sings, his story unfolds—a

“Fickt nicht mit dem Raketemensch!”

“It is gone where the woodbine twineth.” Exactly what Jubilee Jim Fisk told the Congressional committee investigating his and Jay Gould’s scheme to corner gold in 1869. The words are a reminder of Berkshire.

Gustav is a composer. For months he has been carrying on a raging debate with Säure over who is better, Beethoven or Rossini. Säure is for Rossini. “I’m not so much for Beethoven qua Beethoven,” Gustav argues, “but as he represents the German dialectic, the incorporation of more and more notes into the scale, culminating with dodecaphonic democracy, where all notes get an equal hearing. Beethoven was one of the architects of musical freedom—he submitted to the demands of history, despite his deafness. While Rossini was retiring at the age of 36, womanizing and getting fat, Beethoven was living a life filled with tragedy and grandeur.”

Presently he lights up an army cigarette, and stays still then for a long while, as the fog moves white through the riverbank houses, and up above the warplanes go droning somewhere invisible, and the dogs run barking in the back-streets.

Wars have a way of overriding the days just before them. In the looking back, there is such noise and gravity. But we are conditioned to forget. So that the war may have more importance, yes, but still . . . isn’t the hidden machinery easier to see in the days leading up to the event? There are arrangements, things to be expedited . . . and often the edges are apt to lift, briefly, and we see things we were not meant to.

out-of-date music, and yet, when bits of it found Morituri years later in the street, over the radio, they never failed to bring back the unwritten taste of that night, the three of them at the edge of a deepness none could sound . . . some

Inexplicably, the afternoon has been going on for longer than it should. Daylight has been declining for too many hours.

“Ach, she’s fantastic. She knows by instinct—exactly how to insult anybody. Doesn’t matter, animal, vegetable—I even saw her insult a rock once.”

Felix is eating a banana, and living for the moment.

It means this War was never political at all, the politics was all theatre, all just to keep the people distracted . . . secretly, it was being dictated instead by the needs of technology . . . by a conspiracy between human beings and techniques, by something that needed the energy-burst of war, crying, “Money be damned, the very life of [insert name of Nation] is at stake,” but meaning, most likely, dawn is nearly here, I need my night’s blood, my funding, funding, ahh more, more. . . . The real crises were crises of allocation and priority, not among firms—it was only staged to look that way—but among the different Technologies, Plastics, Electronics, Aircraft, and their needs which are understood only by the ruling elite .

pantechnicons:

Ah, they do bother him, these free women in their teens, their spirits are so contagious,

Slothrop’s family actually made its money killing trees, amputating them from their roots, chopping them up, grinding them to pulp, bleaching that to paper and getting paid for this with more paper. “That’s really insane.” He shakes his head. “There’s insanity in my family.” He looks up. The trees are still. They know he’s there. They probably also know what he’s thinking. “I’m sorry,” he tells them.