Gravity's Rainbow

by Thomas Pynchon

But Felipe’s particular rock embodies also an intellectual system, for he believes (as do M. F. Beal and others) in a form of mineral consciousness not too much different from that of plants and animals, except for the time scale. Rock’s time scale is a lot more stretched out. “We’re talking frames per century,” Felipe like everybody else here lately has been using a bit of movie language, “per millennium!” Colossal.

There are onetime company towns come under the fleet and jittery rule of Mercury, dedicated now to a single industry, mail delivery, eastward and back, in among the Soviets and out, 100 marks a letter.

Clive Mossmoon and Sir Marcus Scammony sit in their club, among discarded back copies of British Plastics, drinking the knight’s favorite, Quimporto—a weird prewar mixture of quinine, beef-tea and port—with a dash of Coca-Cola and a peeled onion.

I’ve got Ginger Groupers jamming my switchboard and my mailbox day and night—” “Mm, I’d like to jam your male box, Clivey—” “—and 1922 Committee coming in the windows.

Even in the chastisement room at Sir Marcus’s estate, “The Birches,” the foreplay is a game about who has the real power, who’s had it all along, chained and corseted though he be, outside these shackled walls.

Homosexuality in high places is just a carnal afterthought now, and the real and only fucking is done on paper. . . .

“I’ve saved you for last. But—goodness, I don’t seem to have any urine left, here. Not even a drop. I’m so sorry. Nothing left for you at all. Do you understand? If it means giving my life,” the words have just come out, and maybe Roger’s exaggerating, but maybe not, “there will be nothing anywhere for you. What you get, I’ll take. If you go higher in this, I’ll come and get you, and take you back down. Wherever you go. Even should you find a spare moment of rest, with an understanding woman in a quiet room, I’ll be at the window. I’ll always be just outside. You will never cancel me. If you come out, I’ll go in, and the room will be defiled for you, haunted, and you’ll have to find another. If you stay inside I’ll come in anyway—I’ll stalk you room to room till I corner you in the last. You’ll have the last room, Pointsman, and you’ll have to live in it the rest of your scum, prostituted life.”

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.

“You are perverting a great discovery to the uses of commerce,” sez Thanatz, stepping ashore. “You ought to be ashamed of yourself.”

a boy and his lemming, out to see the Zone. Mostly what he’s seen is a lot of chewing gum and a lot of foreign cock. How else does a foot-loose kid get by in the Zone these days? Ursula is preserved. Ludwig has fallen into a fate worse than death and found it’s negotiable.

This is magic. Sure—but not necessarily fantasy. Certainly not the first time a man has passed his brother by, at the edge of the evening, often forever, without knowing it.

“Ludwig, a little S and M never hurt anybody.” “Who said that?” “Sigmund Freud. How do I know? But why are we taught to feel reflexive shame whenever the subject comes up? Why will the Structure allow every other kind of sexual behavior but that one? Because submission and dominance are resources it needs for its very survival. They cannot be wasted in private sex. In any kind of sex. It needs our submission so that it may remain in power. It needs our lusts after dominance so that it can co-opt us into its own power game. There is no joy in it, only power. I tell you, if S and M could be established universally, at the family level, the State would wither away.” This is Sado-anarchism and Thanatz is its leading theoretician in the Zone these days.

“the object of life is to make sure you die a weird death. To make sure that however it finds you, it will find you under very weird circumstances. To live that kind of life. . . .”

The fathers have no power today and never did, but because 40 years ago we could not kill them, we are condemned now to the same passivity, the same masochist fantasies they cherished in secret, and worse, we are condemned in our weakness to impersonate men of power our own infant children must hate, and wish to usurp the place of, and fail. . . . So generation after generation of men in love with pain and passivity serve out their time in the Zone, silent, redolent of faded sperm, terrified of dying, desperately addicted to the comforts others sell them, however useless, ugly or shallow, willing to have life defined for them by men whose only talent is for death.

Members of the Order of the Golden Dawn believe The Tower represents victory over splendor, and avenging force.

But each of the Sephiroth is also haunted by its proper demons or Qlippoth. Netzach by the Ghorab Tzerek, the Ravens of Death, and Hod by the Samael, the Poison of God.

(what, a dialectical Tarot? Yes indeedyfoax! A-and if you don’t think there are Marxist-Leninist magicians around, well you better think again!).

The angels at the doorways will try to con you, threaten you, play all manner of cruel practical jokes, to turn you aside.

The ascent to the Merkabah, despite his last feeble vestiges of manhood, last gestures toward the possibility of magic, is irreversibly on route. . . .

The countdown as we know it, 10-9-8-u.s.w., was invented by Fritz Lang in 1929 for the Ufa film Die Frau im Mond. He put it into the launch scene to heighten the suspense. “It is another of my damned ‘touches,’” Fritz Lang said.

To return to God, the soul must negotiate each of the Sephiroth, from ten back to one. Armed with magic and faith, Kabbalists have set out to conquer the Sephiroth. Many Kabbalist secrets have to do with making the trip successfully.

“Now the Sephiroth fall into a pattern, which is called the Tree of Life. It is also the body of God. Drawn among the ten spheres are 22 paths. Each path corresponds to a letter of the Hebrew alphabet, and also to one of the cards called ‘Major Arcana’ in the Tarot. So although the Rocket countdown appears to be serial, it actually conceals the Tree of Life, which must be apprehended all at once, together, in parallel.

When something real is about to happen to you, you go toward it with a transparent surface parallel to your own front that hums and bisects both your ears, making eyes very alert. The light bends toward chalky blue. Your skin aches. At last: something real.

The case he refers to is still pending. Steve Edelman, a Hollywood businessman, accused last year of an 11569 (Attempted Mopery with a Subversive Instrument), is currently in Atascadero under indefinite observation. It is alleged that Edelman, in an unauthorized state of mind, attempted to play a chord progression on the Department of Justice list, out in the street and in the presence of a whole movie-queue of witnesses.

Blicero is a master. He learned quite early to fall into a trance, to wait for the illumination, which always comes. It is nothing he’s ever spoken of aloud.