Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon
I finally purchased a copy, paperback, $17, Penguin. They have a more expensive edition also, a heavier book, $24. I prefered lighter and cheaper.
Then, I asked myself
"Self, how is one to read such a ponderous book?"
Self takes my hand, leads me to the river bank, beneath a tree, explaining: "How should we climb the Empire State?"
"Well," I reply, "you certainly don't stare at the spire atop. Oh no. You kiss every brick. Yes! That's it! Kiss every brick, one by one, and eventually you shall be at the spire, Fay Wray in hand."
"A brick is not a building, but a building is bricks." This is our koan as we pucker.
"But, what are you going to do with Fay Rae, you big, silly ape?"
"Dante had Beatrice, as he heaven-ward aspired, and I have Fay."
"Less straw and more bricks!" Pharaoh grumbles, "and no goldbricking!"
"Gold bricks! That's it! Most of the bricks are clay, but a few are golden. Fay, keep your eyes pealed."
Fay screams, "You filthy beast, hugging this building, kissing bricks, furtively peeking up my skirt."
Bricks said:
They are approachng now a lengthy brick improvisation, a Victorian paraphrase of what once, long ago, resulted in Gothic Cathedrals - but which, in its own time, arose not from any need to climb through the fashioning of suitable confusions toward any apical God, but more in a derangement of aim, a doubt as to the God's actual locus (or, in some, as to its very existence), out of a cruel network of sensuous moments that could not be transcended and so bent the intentions of the builders not on any zenith, but back to fright, to simple escape, in whatever direction, from what the industrial smoke, street excrement, windowless warrens, shrugging leather forests of drive belts, flowing and patient shadow states of the rats and flies, were saying about the chances for mercy that year."
- Page 46
Here comes another brick, pucker up!
Dodoes said:
... they have waddled in awkward pilgrimage to this assembly: to be sanctified, taken in... 'For as much as they are the creatures of God, and have the gift of rational discourse, acknowledging that only in His Word is eternal life to be found' ... And there are tears of happiness in the eyes of the dodoes. They are all brothers now, they and the humans who
used to hunt them, brothers in Christ,
....
Sanctified now they will feed us, sanctified their remains and droppings fertilize our crops. Did we tell them 'Salvation'? Did we mean a dwelling forever in the City? Everlasting life? An earthly paradise restored, their island as it used to be given them back? Probably. Thinking all the time of the little brothers numbered among our own blessings. Indeed, if they save us from hunger in this world, then beyond, in Christ's kingdom, our salvations must be, in like measure, inextricable. Otherwise the dodoes would be only what they appear as in the world's illusory light - - only our prey. God could not be that cruel.
- Page 111
Surrender said:
... like light at the edge of the evening when, for perhaps a perilous ten minutes, nothing helps: put on your glasses and light lamps, sit by the west window and still it keeps going away, you keep losing the light and perhaps it is forever this time ... a good time of day for learning surrender, learning to diminish like the light, or like certain music. This surrender is his only gift. Afterward he can recall nothing. Sometimes, rarely, there may be tantalizing - not words, but halos of meaning around words his mouth evidently spoke, that only stay behind -- if they do -- for a moment, like dreams, can't be held or developed, and, presently, go away.
- Page 145
Sparks said:
Fallen sparks. Fragments of vessels broken at the Creation. And someday, somehow, before the end, a gathering back to home. A messsenger from the Kingdom, arriving at the last moment, But I tell you there is no such message, no such home --- only the millions of last moments ... no more. Our history is an aggregate of last moments.
- Page 149
Gum said:
Yesterday happened to be a good day. They found a child, alive, a little girl, half-suffocated under a Morrison shelter. Waiting for the stretcher, Slothrop held her small hand, gone purple with the cold. Dogs barked in the street. When she opened her eyes and saw him her first words were, "Any gum, chum?"
- from page 24
Death said:
Ruins he goes daily to look in are each a sermon on vanity. That he finds, as weeks wear on, no least fragment of any rocket, preaches how indivisible is the act of death...
- from page 25
Rain + Halos = Rainbows
I am studying these passages this morning, as I sip my coffee.
"Chances of mercy" - page 46
"Halos of meaning" - page 145
One farmer will say to another "what is the chance of rain?"
The phrase "chances of mercy" has a halo of sorts in a native speaker's mind.
But, when is mercy like rain?
And what is rain's halo?
I have some suspicions.
The mysterious woman
The Woman said:
... who was the woman alone in the earth, planted up to her shoulders in the aardvark hole, a gazing head rooted to the desert plane, with an upsweep of mountains far behind her, darkly folded, far away in the evening? She can feel the incredible pressure, miles of horizontal sand and clay, against her belly. Down the trail wait the luminous ghosts of her four stillborn children, fat worms lying with no chances of comfort among the wild onions, one by one, crying for milk more sacred than what is tasted and blessed in the village calabashes. In preterite line they have pointed her here, to be in touch with the Earth's gift for genesis. The woman feels power flood through her every gate: a river between her thighs, light leaping at the ends of finers and toes. It is sure and nourishing as sleep. It is warmth. The more the daylight fades, the further she submits -- to the dark, to the descent of water from the air. She is a seed in the Earth.
- pg 316
Colonialism said:
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 away 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 of 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 waste. Where he can fall on his slender prey roaring as loud as he feels like, and guzzle her blood with open joy. Eh? Where he can just wallow and rut and let himself go in a softness, a receptive darkness of limbs, of hair as woolly as the hair on his own forbidden groin. Where the poppy, and cannabis and coca grow full and green, and not to the colors and style of death, as do ergot and agaric, the blight and fungus native to Europe. Christian Europe was always death, Karl, death and repression. Out and down in the colonies, life can be indulged, life and sensuality in all its forms, with no harm done to the Metropolis, nothing to soil those cathedrals, white marble statues, noble thoughts . . . . No word ever gets back. The silences down here are vast enought to absorb all behavior, no matter how dirty, how animal it gets . . . . "
- Page 317
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Byron the Light Bulb said:
Either you LOVE this novel or you don't get it. There's no middle ground.
Like many great books, Gravity's Rainbow provides a reading experience a bit similar to taking an LSD trip (or living appx. 1 day with Attention Deficit Disorder): you suddenly discover dimensions of everything that weren't visible before, and for that matter, you suddenly discover that everything has more dimensions than you thought were possible... in fact, more dimensions than you can imagine.
Byron the Bulb's story can be taken as...
* a treatise on planned obsolescence, but with the bizarre element of the product planned for obsolescence being an individual, a ghost in the machine. But it's more poignant (chilling?) than that: the Bulb is, despite its immortality, powerless -- this kind of reminds me of Terry Gilliam's Brazil.
* a reflection of the anthropomorphized bulbs appearing in head comics of the period (this is not as ludicrous as it sounds when you consider the eery resemblance between "The Counterforce" and hero teams like the Fantastic Four... hell, the Counterforce even had a Plastic Man.)
* the symbology of light bulbs as ideas (keep in mind that Byron hovers over the heads of several characters in the book). There could even be a hint of guardian angels or of halos, though considering that BtB hovers over a deadly amphetamine-addled barber, this would take some explaining.
I will leave the discovery of other connotations and connections as an exercise for the reader.
