Gravity's Rainbow

by Thomas Pynchon

No, this is not a disentanglement from, but a progressive knotting into

of cold plaster where all the rats have died, only their ghosts, still as cave-painting, fixed stubborn and luminous in the walls

Each has been hearing a voice, one he thought was talking only to him, say, “You didn’t really believe you’d be saved. Come, we all know who we are by now. No one was ever going to take the trouble to save you, old fellow. . . .” There is no way out. Lie and wait, lie still and be quiet. Screaming holds across the sky. When it comes, will it come in darkness, or will it bring its own light? Will the light come before or after? But it is already light.

It is the dark, hard, tobacco-starved, headachy, sour-stomach middle of the day,

ready to go smash at any indefinite touch in a whining matrix of stresses—

sybilline cries arriving out of the darkness . . . Abreactions of the Lord of the Night.

Imagine a missile one hears approaching only after it explodes. The reversal! A piece of time neatly snipped out . . . a few feet of film run backwards . . . the blast of the rocket, fallen faster than sound—then growing out of it the roar of its own fall, catching up to what’s already death and burning . . . a ghost in the sky. . . .

Silence comes in, sculptured by spoken dreams, by pain-voices of the rocketbombed next door, Lord of the Night’s children, voices hung upon the ward’s stagnant medicinal air. Praying to their Master: sooner or later an abreaction, each one, all over this frost and harrowed city . . . . . . as once again the floor is a giant lift propelling you with no warning toward your ceiling—replaying now as the walls are blown outward, bricks and mortar showering down, your sudden paralysis as death comes to wrap and stun I don’t know guv I must’ve blacked out when I come to she was gone it was burning all around me head was full of smoke . . . and the sight of your blood spurting from the flaccid stub of artery, the snowy roofslates fallen across half your bed, the cinema kiss never completed, you were pinned and stared at a crumpled cigarette pack for two hours in pain, you could hear them crying from the rows either side but couldn’t move . . . the sudden light filling up the room, the awful silence, brighter than any morning through blankets turned to gauze no shadows at all, only unutterable two-o’clock dawn . . . and . . . . . . this transmarginal leap, this surrender. Where ideas of the opposite have come together, and lost their oppositeness. (And is it really the rocket explosion that Slothrop’s keying on, or is it exactly this depolarizing, this neurotic “confusion” that fills the wards tonight?)

What finally irritated him out of all tolerance was that the dog didn’t know how to reverse its behavior. It could open doors to the rain and the spring insects, but not close them . . . knock over garbage, vomit on the floor, but not clean it up—how could anyone live with such a creature?

“Every square is just as likely to get hit again. The hits aren’t clustering. Mean density is constant.” Nothing on the map to the contrary. Only a classical Poisson distribution, quietly neatly sifting among the squares exactly as it should . . . growing to its predicted shape. . . . “But squares that have already had several hits, I mean—” “I’m sorry. That’s the Monte Carlo Fallacy. No matter how many have fallen inside a particular square, the odds remain the same as they always were. Each hit is independent of all the others. Bombs are not dogs. No link. No memory. No conditioning.” Nice thing to tell a Pavlovian. Is it Mexico’s usual priggish insensitivity, or does he know what he’s saying? If there is nothing to link the rocket strikes—no reflex arc, no Law of Negative Induction . . . then . . . He goes in to Mexico each morning as to painful surgery. Spooked more and more by the choirboy look, the college pleasantries. But it’s a visit he must make. How can Mexico play, so at his ease, with these symbols of randomness and fright? Innocent as a child, perhaps unaware—perhaps—that in his play he wrecks the elegant rooms of history, threatens the idea of cause and effect itself. What if Mexico’s whole generation have turned out like this? Will Postwar be nothing but “events,” newly created one moment to the next? No links? Is it the end of history?

or of songs so funny, so lovely or true, that they can’t be remembered on waking . . . dreams of peacetime. . . .

“Just . . . just damned silly, that’s all. Worrying about things that don’t—Jess, can’t you really remember?” Games, pinafores, girl friends, a black alley kitten with white little feet, holidays all the family by the sea, brine, frying fish, donkey rides, peach taffeta, a boy named Robin . . . “Nothing that’s really gone, that I can’t ever find again.” “Oh. Whereas my memories—” “Yes?” They both smile. “One took lots of aspirin. One was drinking or drunk much of the time. One was concerned about getting one’s lounge suits to fit properly. One despised the upper classes but tried desperately to behave like them. . . .” “And one cried wee, wee, wee, all the way—” Jessica breaking down in a giggle as he reaches for the spot along her sweatered flank he knows she can’t bear to be tickled in. She hunches, squirming, out of the way as he rolls past, bouncing off the back of the sofa but making a nice recovery, and by now she’s ticklish all over, he can grab an ankle, elbow— But a rocket has suddenly struck. A terrific blast quite close beyond the village: the entire fabric of the air, the time, is changed—the casement window blown inward, rebounding with a wood squeak to slam again as all the house still shudders. Their hearts pound. Eardrums brushed taut by the overpressure ring in pain. The invisible train rushes away close over the rooftop. . . . They sit still as the painted dogs now, silent, oddly unable to touch. Death has come in the pantry door: stands watching them, ir...

Now every loose stone, every piece of tinfoil, billet of wood, scrap of kindling or cloth is moving up and down: rising ten feet then dropping again to hit the pavement with a sharp clap. The light is thick and water-green. All down the streets, debris rises and falls in unison, as if at the mercy of some deep, regular wave. It’s difficult to see any distance through the vertical dance. The drumming on the pavement goes for eleven beats, skips a twelfth, begins the cycle over . . . it is the rhythm of some traditional American tune. . . . The streets are all empty of people. It’s either dawn or twilight. Parts of the debris that are metal shine with a hard, nearly blue persistence.

“Pavlov believed that the ideal, the end we all struggle toward in science, is the true mechanical explanation. He was realistic enough not to expect it in his lifetime. Or in several lifetimes more. But his hope was for a long chain of better and better approximations. His faith ultimately lay in a pure physiological basis for the life of the psyche. No effect without cause, and a clear train of linkages.” “It’s not my forte, of course,” Mexico honestly wishing not to offend the man, but really, “but there’s a feeling about that cause-and-effect may have been taken as far as it will go. That for science to carry on at all, it must look for a less narrow, a less . . . sterile set of assumptions. The next great breakthrough may come when we have the courage to junk cause-and-effect entirely, and strike off at some other angle.”

Pointsman has turned now, and . . . oh, God. He is smiling. There is something so ancient in its assumption of brotherhood that—not now, but a few months from now, with spring prevailing and the War in Europe ended—Roger will remember the smile—it will haunt him—as the most evil look he has ever had from a human face.

The scores show it clearly: he’s psychopathically deviant, obsessive, a latent paranoiac—well, Pavlov believed that obsessions and paranoid delusions were a result of certain—call them cells, neurons, on the mosaic of the brain, being excited to the level where, through reciprocal induction, all the area around becomes inhibited. One bright, burning point, surrounded by darkness. Darkness it has, in a way, called up. Cut off, this bright point, perhaps to the end of the patient’s life, from all other ideas, sensations, self-criticisms that might temper its flame, restore it to normalcy. He called it a ‘point of pathological inertia.’ We’re working right now with a dog . . . he’s been through the ‘equivalent’ phase, where any stimulus, strong or weak, calls up exactly the same number of saliva drops . . . and on through the ‘paradoxical’ phase—strong stimuli getting weak responses and vice versa. Yesterday we got him to go ultraparadoxical. Beyond. When we turn on the metronome that used to stand for food—that once made Dog Vanya drool like a fountain—now he turns away. When we shut off the metronome, oh then he’ll turn to it, sniff, try to lick it, bite it—seek, in the silence, for the stimulus that is not there. Pavlov thought that all the diseases of the mind could be explained, eventually, by the ultraparadoxical phase, the pathologically inert points on the cortex, the confusion of ideas of the opposite. He died at the very threshold of putting these things on an exper...

But she happens to’ve glanced in just at the instant Osbie opened the echoing oven. The camera records no change in her face, but why does she stand now so immobile at the door? as if the frame were to be stopped and prolonged into just such a lengthwise moment of gold fresh and tarnished, innocence microscopically masked, her elbow slightly bent, hand resting against the wall, fingers fanned on the pale orange paper as if she touches her own skin, a pensive touch. . . . Outside, the long rain in silicon and freezing descent smacks, desolate, slowly corrosive against the mediaeval windows, curtaining like smoke the river’s far shore. This city, in all its bomb-pierced miles: this inexhaustibly knotted victim . . . skin of glistening roofslates, sooted brick flooded high about each window dark or lit, each of a million openings vulnerable to the gloom of this winter day. The rain washes, drenches, fills the gutters singing, the city receives it, lifting, in a perpetual shrug. . . . With a squeak and metal slam the oven is closed again, but for Katje it will never close. She has posed before the mirrors too often today, knows her hair and make-up are perfect, admires the frock they have brought her from Harvey Nicholls, a sheer crepe that flows in from padded shoulders down to a deep point between her breasts, a rich cocoa shade known as “nigger” in this country, yards and yards of this delicious silk spun and thrown, tied loosely at the waist, soft pleats falling to her kne...

rumblings under their feet as deep as the bats’ voices were high,

Frans could not know that except for a few others on the island of Reunion, these were the only dodoes in the Creation, and that he was helping exterminate a race. But at times the scale and frenzy of the hunting did come through to trouble his heart. “If the species were not such a perversion,” he wrote, “it might be profitably husbanded to feed our generations. I cannot hate them quite so violently as do some here. But what now can mitigate this slaughter? It is too late. . . . Perhaps a more comely beak, fuller feathering, a capacity for flight, however brief . . . details of Design. Or, had we but found savages on this island, the bird’s appearance might have then seemed to us no stranger than that of the wild turkey of North America. Alas, their tragedy is to be the dominant form of Life on Mauritius, but incapable of speech.”

white ungloved hand bending like a butterfly to touch the hollow of Mrs. Quoad’s throat, the miracle touch, gently . . . touch . . . The lightning— And Slothrop is yawning “What time is it?” and Darlene is swimming up from sleep. When, with no warning, the room is full of noon, blinding white, every hair flowing up from her nape clear as day, as the concussion drives in on them, rattling the building to its poor bones, beating in the windowshade, gone all to white and black lattice of mourning-cards. Overhead, catching up, the rocket’s rush comes swelling, elevated express down, away into ringing silence. Outside glass has been breaking, long, dissonant cymbals up the street. The floor has twitched like a shaken carpet, and the bed with it. Slothrop’s penis has sprung erect, aching. To Darlene, suddenly awake, heart pounding very fast, palms and fingers in fear’s pain, this hardon has seemed reasonably part of the white light, the loud blast. By the time the explosion has died to red strong flickering on the shade, she’s begun to wonder . . . about the two together . . . but they’re fucking now, and what does it matter, but God’s sake why shouldn’t this stupid Blitz be good for something? And who’s that, through the crack in the orange shade, breathing carefully? Watching? And where, keepers of maps, specialists at surveillance, would you say the next one will fall? •

Dum de dum, de dum.

Slothrop wakes to morning sunlight off of that Mediterranean, filtered through a palm outside the window, then red through the tablecloth, birds, water running upstairs. For a minute he lies coming awake, no hangover, still belonging Slothropless to some teeming cycle of departure and return. Katje lies, quick and warm, S’d against the S of himself, beginning to stir.

He gets back to the Casino just as big globular raindrops, thick as honey, begin to splat into giant asterisks on the pavement, inviting him to look down at the bottom of the text of the day, where footnotes will explain all. He isn’t about to look. Nobody ever said a day has to be juggled into any kind of sense at day’s end.

an innocence, maybe a try at being friendly in the only way he has available, sharing what engages and runs him, a love for the Word.

Bland was always picking young Tyrone up and swinging him around by his feet. That was O.K.—Slothrop had no special commitment at the time to right side up.

Then there’s this recent dream he is afraid of having again. He was in his old room, back home. A summer afternoon of lilacs and bees, and warm air through an open window. Slothrop had found a very old dictionary of technical German. It fell open to a certain page prickling with black-face type. Reading down the page, he would come to JAMF. The definition would read: I. He woke begging It no—but even after waking, he was sure, he would remain sure, that It could visit him again, any time It wanted. Perhaps you know that dream too. Perhaps It has warned you never to speak Its name. If so, you know about how Slothrop’ll be feeling now.

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

They call themselves Otukungurua. Yes, old Africa hands, it ought to be “Omakungurua,” but they are always careful—perhaps it’s less healthy than care—to point out that oma- applies only to the living and human. Otu- is for the inanimate and the rising, and this is how they imagine themselves. Revolutionaries of the Zero, they mean to carry on what began among the old Hereros after the 1904 rebellion failed. They want a negative birth rate. The program is racial suicide. They would finish the extermination the Germans began in 1904. A generation earlier, the declining number of live Herero births was a topic of medical interest throughout southern Africa. The whites looked on as anxiously as they would have at an outbreak of rinderpest among the cattle. How provoking, to watch one’s subject population dwindling like this, year after year. What’s a colony without its dusky natives? Where’s the fun if they’re all going to die off? Just a big hunk of desert, no more maids, no field-hands, no laborers for the construction or the mining—wait, wait a minute there, yes it’s Karl Marx, that sly old racist skipping away with his teeth together and his eyebrows up trying to make believe it’s nothing but Cheap Labor and Overseas Markets. . . . Oh, no. Colonies are much, much more. 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...

“I’ll show you something,” she sez, which is why they are now awake at this ungodly hour, side by side, holding hands, very still as the sun begins to clear the horizon. “Now watch,” Geli whispers: “out there.” As the sunlight strikes their backs, coming in nearly flat on, it begins developing on the pearl cloudbank: two gigantic shadows, thrown miles overland, past Clausthal-Zelterfeld, past Seesen and Goslar, across where the river Leine would be, and reaching toward Weser. . . . “By golly,” Slothrop a little bit nervous, “it’s the Specter.” You got it up around Greylock in the Berkshires too. Around these parts it is known as the Brockengespenst. God-shadows. Slothrop raises an arm. His fingers are cities, his biceps is a province—of course he raises an arm. Isn’t it expected of him? The arm-shadow trails rainbows behind as it moves reaching eastward for a grab at Göttingen. Not ordinary shadows, either—three-dimensional ones, cast out on the German dawn, yes and Titans had to live in these mountains, or under them. . . . Impossibly out of scale. Never to be carried by a river. Never to look to a horizon and think that it might go on forever. No trees to climb, no long journeys to take . . . only their deep images are left, haloed shells lying prone above the fogs men move in. . . .

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.

And the Light will never find you, And your heart will grow heavy with age, And your eyes will shut only to sleep.

Mare’s-tails are out seething across the blue sky, but down here the Berliner Luft hangs still, with the odor of death inescapable. Thousands of corpses fallen back in the spring still lie underneath these mountains of debris, yellow mountains, red and yellow and pale. Where’s the city Slothrop used to see back in those newsreels and that National Geographic? Parabolas weren’t all that New German Architecture went in for—there were the spaces—the necropolism of blank alabaster in the staring sun, meant to be filled with human harvests rippling out of sight, making no sense without them. If there is such a thing as the City Sacramental, the city as outward and visible sign of inward and spiritual illness or health, then there may have been, even here, some continuity of sacrament, through the terrible surface of May. The emptiness of Berlin this morning is an inverse mapping of the white and geometric capital before the destruction—the fallow and long-strewn fields of rubble, the same weight of too much featureless concrete . . . except that here everything’s been turned inside out. The straight-ruled boulevards built to be marched along are now winding pathways through the waste-piles, their shapes organic now, responding, like goat trails, to laws of least discomfort. The civilians are outside now, the uniforms inside. Smooth facets of buildings have given way to cobbly insides of concrete blasted apart, all the endless-pebbled rococo just behind the shuttering. Inside is...

“He is the knight who leaps perpetually—” “Wow.” “—across the chessboard of the Zone, is who he is.

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.

unlaid cable pointing hysterical strands to all points of the compass, vibrating below any hearing in the breeze.

the insanely, endlessly diddling play of a chemist whose molecules are words. . .

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. . .

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 Pökler. “Yes, that’s good,” Mondaugen smiled.

He had spoken to it, listened, probed, and yet it would not dissolve or flee, it persisted, beggar in all the doorways of his life,

The sun is in and out, turning the decks a stark moment’s yellow around everyone’s shadow.

Slothrop, as noted, at least as early as the Anubis era, has begun to thin, to scatter. “Personal density,” Kurt Mondaugen in his Peenemünde office not too many steps away from here, enunciating the Law which will one day bear his name, “is directly proportional to temporal bandwidth.” “Temporal bandwidth” is the width of your present, your now. It is the familiar “Δt” considered as a dependent variable. The more you dwell in the past and in the future, the thicker your bandwidth, the more solid your persona. But the narrower your sense of Now, the more tenuous you are. It may get to where you’re having trouble remembering what you were doing five minutes ago, or even—as Slothrop now—what you’re doing here, at the base of this colossal curved embankment. . . .

No, but even That only flickers now briefly across a bit of Slothropian lobe-terrain, and melts into its surface, vanishing. So here passes for him one more negligence . . . and likewise groweth his Preterition sure. . . . There is no good reason to hope for any turn, any surprise I-see-it, not from Slothrop. Here he is, scaling the walls of an honest ceremonial plexus, set down on a good enough vision of what’s shadowless noon and what isn’t. But oh, Egg the flying Rocket hatched from, navel of the 50-meter radio sky, all proper ghosts of place—forgive him his numbness, his glozing neutrality. Forgive the fist that doesn’t tighten in his chest, the heart that can’t stiffen in any greeting. . . . Forgive him as you forgave Tchitcherine at the Kirghiz Light. . . . Better days are coming.

Separations are proceeding. Each alternative Zone speeds away from all the others, in fated acceleration, red-shifting, fleeing the Center. Each day the mythical return Enzian dreamed of seems less possible. Once it was necessary to know uniforms, insignia, airplane markings, to observe boundaries. But by now too many choices have been made. The single root lost, way back there in the May desolation. Each bird has his branch now, and each one is the Zone. A crowd of DPs is milling by the ruin of an ornamental fountain, a score of them, eyes of ash, smudged into faces white as salt. The Hereros go swerving by them, halfway up a shallow flight of long steps dovetailing into the grade of the street, teeth slamming together upper and lower, cycle frames squeaking shrill, up and down the steps past wordless plosions of Slavic breath. Ashes and salt. A sound-truck appears around a wall a hundred meters away: the voice, University-bred and long tired of the message, recites, “Clear the streets. Go to your homes.” Clear the—go to your what? There must be a mistake, it must be for some other town. . . . Whir underneath an oil pipeline up on trestles running down leftward to the water now, huge bolted flanges overhead softened by rust and oily dirt. Far out in the harbor rides an oil tanker, rocking serene as a web of stars. . . . Zoom uphill slantwise toward a rampart of wasted, knotted, fused, and scorched girderwork, stacks, pipes, ducting, windings, fairings, insulators reconfig...

wakes up in a burned-out locksmith’s shop, under racks of sooty keys whose locks have all been lost.

Let the peace of this day be here tomorrow when I wake up.

on foot across a wide meadow whose color is deepening now as if green dye flowed and seeped into its nap . . . he is aware of each single grassblade’s shadow reaching into the shadows east of it . . . pure milk-colored light sweeps up in a bell-curve above the sun nearly down, transparent white flesh, fading up through many blues, powdery to dark steel at the zenith . .

But Slothrop only wants to lie still with her heartbeat awhile . . . isn’t that every paranoid’s wish? to perfect methods of immobility? But they’re coming,

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.

One village in Mecklenburg has been taken over by army dogs, Dobermans and Shepherds, each one conditioned to kill on sight any human except the one who trained him. But the trainers are dead men now, or lost.

Omens grow clearer, more specific. He watches flights of birds and patterns in the ashes of his fire, he reads the guts of trout he’s caught and cleaned, scraps of lost paper, graffiti on the broken walls where facing has been shot away to reveal the brick underneath—broken in specific shapes that may also be read.