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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.
Gravity's Rainbow on quitting a game.
Whereupon Bloat leaps from the bed and seeks to enlighten Slothrop with a song: THE ENGLISHMAN’S VERY SHY (FOX-TROT) (Bloat): The Englishman’s very shy, He’s none of your Ca-sa-no-va, At bowling the ladies o-ver, A-mericans lead the pack— (Tantivy): —You see, your Englishman tends to lack That recklessness transatlantic, That women find so romantic Though frankly I can’t see why . . . (Bloat): The polygamous Yank with his girls galore Gives your Brit-ish rake or carouser fits, (Tantivy): Though he’s secretly held in re-ve-rent awe As a sort of e-rot-ic Clausewitz. . . . (Together):
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In their brief time together Slothrop forms the impression that this octopus is not in good mental health, though where’s his basis for comparing?
PAVLOVIA (BEGUINE) It was spring in Pavlovia-a-a, I was lost, in a maze . . . Lysol breezes perfumed the air, I’d been searching for days. I found you, in a cul-de-sac, As bewildered as I— We touched noses, and suddenly My heart learned how to fly! So, together, we found our way, Shared a pellet, or two . . . Like an evening in some café, Wanting nothing, but you . . . Autumn’s come, to Pavlovia-a-a, Once again, I’m alone— Finding sorrow by millivolts, Back to neurons and bone. And I think of our moments then, Never knowing your name— Nothing’s left in Pavlovia, But the maze, and the
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But tonight he lies humped on the floor at her feet, his withered ass elevated for the cane, bound by nothing but his need for pain, for something real, something pure.
his true body: undisguised by uniform, uncluttered by drugs to keep from him her communiqués of vertigo, nausea and pain. . . . Above all, pain. The clearest poetry, the endearment of greatest worth. . . .
American voices, country voices, high-pitched and without mercy. He lies freezing, wondering if the bedsprings will give him away. For possibly the first time he is hearing America as it must sound to a non-American. Later he will recall that what surprised him most was the fanaticism, the reliance not just on flat force but
on the rightness of what they planned to do . . . he’d been told long ago to expect this sort of thing from Nazis, and especially from Japs—we were the ones who always played fair—but this pair outside the door now are as demoralizing as a close-up of John Wayne (the angle emphasizing how slanted his eyes are, funny you never noticed before) screaming “BANZAI!”
“It’ll get easier. Someday it’ll all be done by machine. Information machines. You are the wave of the future.”
It’s difficult for him to sort out the first wave of corporate spies from the LOONIES ON LEAVE!
Just freaks on a fur-lough,
Third N. or K.: Transmogrify common air into diamonds through Cataclysmic Carbon Dioxide Reducti-o-o-o-o-n-n-n. . . .
You haven’t spent much time with the indole crowd. They’re very elitist. They see themselves at the end of a long European dialectic, generations of blighted grain, ergotism, witches on broomsticks, community orgies, cantons lost up there in folds of mountain that haven’t known an unhallucinated day in the last 500 years—keepers of a tradition, aristocrats—”
Goose bumps crowd her bare little breasts. “I posed once for a rocket insignia. Perhaps you’ve seen it. A pretty young witch straddling an A4. Carrying her obsolete broom over her shoulder. I was voted the Sweetheart of 3/Art. Abt. (mot) 485.” “Are you a real witch?” “I think I have tendencies.
One of the sweetest fruits of victory, after sleep and looting, must be the chance to ignore no-parking signs.
“Tibet is a special case. Tibet was deliberately set aside by the Empire as free and neutral territory, a Switzerland for the spirit where there is no extradition, and Alp-Himalayas to draw the soul upward, and danger rare enough to tolerate. . . . Switzerland and Tibet are linked along one of the true meridians of Earth, true as the Chinese have drawn meridians of the body. . . . We will have to learn such new maps of Earth: and as travel in the Interior becomes more common, as the maps grow another dimension, so must we. . . .”
The boy and girl stand in the eye of the village carrying on a mocking well-I-sort-of-like-you-even-if-there’s-one-or-two-weird-things-about-you-for-instance—kind of game while the tune darts in and out of qobyz and dombra strummed and plucked.
If there is such a thing as the City Sacramental, the city as outward and visible sign of inward and spiritual illness or
Felipe is a difficult young poet with any number of unpleasant enthusiasms,
“He’s right,” El Ñato raising a large fist. “Let women do their thinking, their analyzing. A man must always go forward, looking Life directly in the face.” “You’re disgusting,” said Graciela Imago Portales. “You’re not a man, you’re a sweaty horse.” “Thank you,” El Ñato bowing, in all gaucho dignity.
It’s sad, though. Tchitcherine likes Slothrop. 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
People who dress up in bizarre costumes have a savoir-vivre—not to mention the sort of personality disorder—that he admires.
“Are you very cruel?” “Don’t know.” “Could you be? Please. Find something to whip me with. Just a little. Just for the warmth.”
How the penises of Western men have leapt, for a century, to the sight of this singular point at the top of a lady’s stocking, this transition from silk to bare skin and suspender! It’s easy for non-fetishists to sneer about Pavlovian conditioning and let it go at that, but any underwear enthusiast worth his unwholesome giggle can tell you there is much more here—there is a cosmology: of nodes and cusps and points of osculation, mathematical kisses . . . singularities!
No: what the Serpent means is—how’s this—that the six carbon atoms of benzene are in fact curled around into a closed ring, just like that snake with its tail in its mouth, GET IT?
(All together now, all you masochists out there, specially those of you don’t have a partner tonight, alone with those fantasies that don’t look like they’ll ever come true—want you just to join in here with your brothers and sisters, let each other know you’re alive and sincere, try to break through the silences, try to reach through and connect. . . . )
He cried some. The walls did not dissolve—no prison wall ever did, not from tears,
Slothrop surmises to be a sidearm, so him Slothrop kicks in the balls, and screaming “Fickt nicht mit dem Raketemensch!” so they’ll remember, kind of a hiyo Silver here, he flees into shadows, among the heaps of lumber, stone and earth.
“a person feels good listening to Rossini. All you feel like listening to Beethoven is going out and invading Poland. Ode to Joy indeed. The man didn’t even have a sense of humor. I tell you,”
With Rossini, the whole point is that lovers always get together, isolation is overcome, and like it or not that is the one great centripetal movement of the World. Through the machineries of greed, pettiness, and the abuse of power, love occurs. All the shit is transmuted to gold. The walls are breached, the balconies are scaled—listen!”
Behavior as shameless as eating a whole jar of peanut butter at one sitting.
“You will show me your papers!” hollers the leader of the raid. Säure smiles and holds up a pack of Zig-Zags, just in from Paris.
Guilt gets a minus sign around Achtfaden though, even if it is becoming quite a commodity in the Zone. Remittance men from all over the world will come to Heidelberg before long, to major in guilt. There will be bars and nightclubs catering especially to guilt enthusiasts. Extermination camps will be turned into tourist attractions, foreigners with cameras will come piling through in droves, tickled and shivering with guilt.
There is a general withdrawing from orifices after a while, drinking, doping and gabbing resume, and many begin to drift away to catch some sleep. Here and there a couple or threesome linger. A C-melody saxophone player has the bell of his instrument snuggled between the widespread thighs of a pretty matron in sunglasses, yes sunglasses at night, this is some degenerate company Slothrop has fallen in with all right—the saxman is playing “Chattanooga Choo Choo,” and those vibrations are just driving her wild. A girl with an enormous glass dildo inside which baby piranhas are swimming in some
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SEA CHANTY I’m the Pirate Queen of the Baltic Run, and nobody fucks with me— And those who’ve tried are bones and skulls, and lie beneath the sea. And the little fish like messengers swim in and out their eyes, Singing, “Fuck ye not with Gory Gnahb and her desperate enterprise!” I’ll tangle with a battleship, I’ll massacre a sloop, I’ve sent a hundred souls to hell in one relentless swoop— I’ve seen the Flying Dutchman, and each time we pass, he cries, “Oh, steer me clear of Gory Gnahb, and her desperate enterprise!”
“Well excuse me, got to go vomit now,” a klassic komeback among charm-school washouts like our Tactful Tyrone here, and pretty advanced stuff on dry land, but not out here, where the Baltic is making it impossible not to be seasick.
Finally there is only one Mother left on stage. They put the traditional flowered hat on her head, and hand her the orb and scepter, which in this case are a gilded pot roast and a whip, and the orchestra plays Tristan und Isolde.”
They don’t want my patriarchy, they don’t want my love, they don’t want my information, or my work, or my energy, or what I own . . . I don’t own anything. There’s no money any more—nobody’s seen any out here for months, no it can’t be money . . . cigarettes? I never have enough cigarettes. . . .
Great misty heaps of rock, steep cliffs, streams in deep gorges, gray and green and spires of white chalk in the rain, go passing—the Stubbenkammer, the King’s Seat, and presently, off to port, Cape Arkona where waves crash at the base of the cliffs and on top the groves of white-trunked trees are blowing. . . . The ancient Slavs put up a temple here, to Svetovid, their god of fertility and war: Old Svetovid did business under quite a number of aliases! Three-headed Triglav, five-headed Porevit, SEVEN-faced Rugevit! Tell that to your boss next time he talks about “wearing two hats!” Now, as
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“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. “I can’t do anything about those people, they’re all out of my reach. What can I do?” A medium-size pine nearby nods its top and suggests, “Next time you come across a logging operation out here, find one of their tractors that isn’t being guarded, and take its oil filter with you. That’s what you can do.”
William felt that what Jesus was for the elect, Judas Iscariot was for the Preterite.
Could he have been the fork in the road America never took, the singular point she jumped the wrong way from? Suppose the Slothropite heresy had had the time to consolidate and prosper? Might there have been fewer crimes in the name of Jesus, and more mercy in the name of Judas Iscariot?
long—it was a good union. They kept the German Wobbly traditions, they didn’t go along with Hitler though all the other unions were falling into line.
No way to tell if someplace in the wood file cabinets exists a set of real blueprints telling exactly how all these pinball machines were rewired—a randomness deliberately simulated—or if it has happened at real random, preserving at least our faith in Malfunction as still something beyond Their grasp
You can bet there’s a lotta happy Masons in Mouthorgan, Missouri.
The magic in these Masonic rituals is very, very old. And way back in those days, it worked.
As time went on, and it started being used for spectacle, to consolidate what were only secular appearances of power, it began to lose its zip. But the words, moves, and machinery have been more or less faithfully carried down over the millennia, through the grim rationalizing of the World, and so the magic is still there, though latent, needing only to touch the right sensitive head to reassert itself.
She watches Marvy’s face as he pays Monika, watches him in this primal American act, paying, more deeply himself than when coming, or asleep, or maybe even dying.
There is of course a perfectly rational explanation, but Tchitcherine has never read Martín Fierro.
