Gravity's Rainbow

by Thomas Pynchon

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...