Multi-column

Gravity’s Rainbow

Thoughts

Highlights

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Nature does not know extinction; all it knows is transformation. Everything science has taught me, and continues to teach me, strengthens my belief in the continuity of our spiritual existence after death. 🔗

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

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The sun is still below the horizon. The day feels like rain, but for now the air is uncommonly clear. The great power station, and the gasworks beyond, stand precisely: crystals grown in morning’s beaker, stacks, vents, towers, plumbing, gnarled emissions of steam and smoke… 🔗

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Oh. Oh, yes: around the curve of the Earth, farther east, the sun over there, just risen over in Holland, is striking the rocket’s exhaust, drops and crystals, making them blaze clear across the sea… 🔗

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Bartley Gobbitch, DeCoverley Pox, and Maurice (“Saxophone”) Reed 🔗

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As a spell, against falling objects… 🔗

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C’est magnifique, mais ce n’est pas la guerre 🔗

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your sound will be the sizzling night 🔗

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the Adenoid is blasted, electric-shocked, poisoned, changes color and shape here and there, yellow fat-nodes appear high over the trees… before the flash-powder cameras of the Press, a hideous green pseudopod crawls toward the cordon of troops and suddenly sshhlop! wipes out an entire observation post with a deluge of some disgusting orange mucus in which the unfortunate men are digested—not screaming but actually laughing, enjoying themselves 🔗

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spies with foreign hybrid names lurked in all the stations of the Ottoman rump, code messages in a dozen Slavic tongues were being tattooed on bare upper lips over which the operatives then grew mustaches, to be shaved off only by authorized crypto officers and skin then grafted over the messages by the Firm’s plastic surgeons… their lips were palimpsests of secret flesh, scarred and unnaturally white, by which they all knew each other. 🔗

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Lord Blatherard Osmo 🔗

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

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bureaucratic smegma 🔗

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But then last September the rockets came. Them fucking rockets. You couldn’t adjust to the bastards. No way. For the first time, he was surprised to find that he was really scared. Began drinking heavier, sleeping less, chain-smoking, feeling in some way he’d been taken for a sucker. Christ, it wasn’t supposed to keep on like this… 🔗

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he can save a moment here or there, the days again growing colder, frost in the morning, the feeling of Jennifer’s breasts inside cold sweater’s wool held to warm a bit in a coal-smoke hallway he’ll never know the daytime despondency of 🔗

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Which is how Slothrop got into investigating V-bomb “incidents.” Aftermaths. 🔗

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the powdery wipe of Nothing’s hand across wallpaper awhisper with peacocks spreading their fans down deep lawns to Georgian houses long ago 🔗

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He hangs at the bottom of his blood’s avalanche, 300 years of western swamp-Yankees, and can’t manage but some nervous truce with their Providence. A détente. 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 🔗

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This smoke is more than the day’s breath, more than dark strength—it is an imperial presence that lives and moves. 🔗

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The Moment was 6:43:16 British Double Summer Time: the sky, beaten like Death’s drum, still humming, and Slothrop’s cock—say what? yes lookit inside his GI undershorts here’s a sneaky hardon stirring, ready to jump—well great God where’d that come from? 🔗

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Death is a debt to nature due,
Which I have paid, and so must you. 🔗

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what stayed at home in Berkshire went into timberland whose diminishing green reaches were converted acres at a clip into paper—toilet paper, banknote stock, newsprint—a medium or ground for shit, money, and the Word. 🔗

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Shit, money, and the Word, the three American truths, powering the American mobility, claimed the Slothrops, clasped them for good to the country’s fate.
But they did not prosper… about all they did was persist 🔗

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with each film delivery, Roger’s enthusiasm grows. Unhealthy, unhealthy: he has the sense of witnessing an addiction. He feels that his friend, his provisional wartime friend, is being used for something not quite decent. 🔗

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He spots her immediately, the clarity around her, the absence of smoke and noise… is he seeing auras now? 🔗

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Scorpia Mossmoon 🔗

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drinking beer watered with his own falling sweat in the perpetual stink of crude oil 🔗

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He left her at Waterloo Station. A gala crowd was there, to see Fred Roper’s Company of Wonder Midgets off to an imperial fair in Johannesburg, South Africa. Midgets in their dark winter clothes, exquisite little frocks and nip-waisted overcoats, were running all over the station, gobbling their bonvoyage chocolates and lining up for news photos. Scorpia’s talc-white face, through the last window, across the last gate, was a blow to his heart. A flurry of giggles and best wishes arose from the Wonder Midgets and their admirers. Well, thought Pirate, guess I’ll go back in the Army 🔗

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She uses her silences like stroking hands to divert him and hush their corners of rooms, bedcovers, tabletops—accidental spaces… 🔗

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That, indeed, the Home Front is something of a fiction and lie, designed, not too subtly, to draw them apart, to subvert love in favor of work, abstraction, required pain, bitter death. 🔗

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There’s never much talk but touches and looks, smiles together, curses for parting. It is marginal, hungry, chilly—most times they’re too paranoid to risk a fire—but it’s something they want to keep, so much that to keep it they will take on more than propaganda has ever asked them for. They are in love. Fuck the war. 🔗

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She knows she must not cry: that the vague eyes in the knitted window won’t seek their Beast any more earnestly for her tears. 🔗

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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… 🔗

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But when, somehow—starve them, traumatize, shock, castrate them, send them over into one of the transmarginal phases, past borders of their waking selves, past “equivalent” and “paradoxical” phases—you weaken this idea of the opposite, and here all at once is the paranoid patient who would be master, yet now feels himself a slave… who would be loved, but suffers his world’s indifference, and, “I think,” Pavlov writing to Janet, “it is precisely the ultraparadoxical phase which is the base of the weakening of the idea of the opposite in our patients.” Our madmen, our paranoid, maniac, schizoid, morally imbecile 🔗

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He’s out there, and he can feel them coming, days in advance. But it’s a reflex. A reflex to something that’s in the air right now. Something we’re too coarsely put together to sense—but Slothrop can.” 🔗

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‘a sensory cue we just aren’t paying attention to.’ 🔗

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the act merely of bringing the dog into the laboratory—especially in our experimental neurosis work… the first sight of the test stand, of the technician, a stray shadow, the touch of a draft of air, some cue we might never pin down would be enough to send him over, send him transmarginal. 🔗

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(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?) 🔗

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And those who do let go at last: out of each catharsis rise new children, painless, egoless for one pulse of the Between… tablet erased, new writing about to begin, hand and chalk poised in winter gloom over these poor human palimpsests shivering under their government blankets, drugged, drowning in tears and snot of grief so real, torn from so deep that it surprises, seems more than their own… 🔗

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Behind you, long, night-long queues of men in uniform move away slowly, kicking AWOL bags along, mostly silent, toward exit doors painted beige, but with edges smudged browner in bell-curves of farewell by the generation of hands. 🔗

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This wordless ratcheting queue… thousands going away… only the stray freak particle, by accident, drifting against the major flow… 🔗

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“It’s control. All these things arise from one difficulty: control. For the first time it was inside, do you see. The control is put inside. No more need to suffer passively under ‘outside forces’—to veer into any wind. As if…
“A market needed no longer be run by the Invisible Hand, but now could create itself—its own logic, momentum, style, from inside. Putting the control inside was ratifying what de facto had happened—that you had dispensed with God. But you had taken on a greater, and more harmful, illusion. The illusion of control. That A could do B. But that was false. Completely. No one can do. Things only happen, A and B are unreal, are names for parts that ought to be inseparable…” 🔗

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“Automatic texts,” girl-nervous Gloaming frowns, nods, “one or two Ouija-board episodes, yes yes… we-we’re trying to develop a vocabulary of curves—certain pathologies, certain characteristic shapes you see—”
“I’m not sure that I—”
“Well. Recall Zipf’s Principle of Least Effort: if we plot the frequency of a word P sub n against its rank-order n on logarithmic axes,” babbling into her silence, even her bewilderment graceful, “we should of course get something like a straight line… however we’ve data that suggest the curves for certain—conditions, well they’re actually quite different—schizophrenics for example tend to run a bit flatter in the upper part then progressively steeper—a sort of bow shape… I think with this chap, this Roland, that we’re on to a classical paranoiac—”
“Ha.” That’s a word she knows. “Thought I saw you brighten up there when he said ‘turned against.’”
“‘Against,’ ‘opposite,’ yes you’d be amazed at the frequency with this one.”
“What’s the most frequent word?” asks Jessica. “Your number one.”
“The same as it’s always been at these affairs,” replies the statistician, as if everyone knew: “death.” 🔗

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“It’s control. All these things arise from one difficulty: control. For the first time it was inside, do you see. The control is put inside. No more need to suffer passively under ‘outside forces’—to veer into any wind. As if…
“A market needed no longer be run by the Invisible Hand, but now could create itself—its own logic, momentum, style, from inside. Putting the control inside was ratifying what de facto had happened—that you had dispensed with God. But you had taken on a greater, and more harmful, illusion. The illusion of control. That A could do B. But that was false. Completely. No one can do. Things only happen, A and B are unreal, are names for parts that ought to be inseparable…” 🔗

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“You are a pirate,” she’d whispered the last day—neither of them knew it was the last day—“you’ve come and taken me off on your pirate ship. A girl of good family and the usual repressions. You’ve raped me. And I’m the Red Bitch of the High Seas…” A lovely game. Pirate wished she’d thought it up sooner. Fucking the last (already the last) day’s light away down afternoon to dusk, hours of fucking, too in love with it to uncouple, they noticed how the borrowed room rocked gently, the ceiling obligingly came down a foot, lamps swayed from their fittings, some fraction of the Thameside traffic provided salty cries over the water, and nautical bells… 🔗

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even the explosions in the distances might stay as long as they were to no purpose… as long as no one had to die… couldn’t it be that way? only excitement, sound and light, a storm approaching in the summer 🔗

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The young statistician is devoted to number and to method, not table-rapping or wishful thinking. But in the domain of zero to one, not-something to something, Pointsman can only possess the zero and the one. He cannot, like Mexico, survive anyplace in between. 🔗

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Poisson equation 🔗

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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.” 🔗

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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? 🔗

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How will you use the things that grow in your network of death?” 🔗

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“Everyone’s equal. Same chances of getting hit. Equal in the eyes of the rocket.” 🔗

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“it’s the damned Calvinist insanity again. Payment. Why must they always put it in terms of exchange? 🔗

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the good dog alerted by the eternal scent, the explosion over his head always just about to come 🔗

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a hairbrush for the tangled brain 🔗

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white goes twisting peppermint-stick down thousands of feet of night. 🔗

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They sit still as the painted dogs now, silent, oddly unable to touch. Death has come in the pantry door: stands watching them, iron and patient, with a look that says try to tickle me. 🔗

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to break up the melody into have mercy what is it a fucking machine gun or something man he must be out of his mind 32nd notes demisemiquavers 🔗

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patterns thick with meaning, Burma-Shave signs of the toilet world, icky and sticky, cryptic and glyptic 🔗

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a jam-packed wavefront of shit, vomit, toilet paper and dingleberries in mind-boggling mosaic, rushing down on panicky Slothrop like an MTA subway train on its own hapless victim. 🔗

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“You knew I’d show up, you little rascal,” shit that Whappo is such a caution. Always baiting his master in hopes of getting a leather-keen stripe or two across those dusky Afro-Scandinavian buttocks 🔗

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The snow in this slum darkness has the appearance of soot in a negative… it flows in and out of the night 🔗

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where the front each day or hour changes like a noose, like the gold-lit borders of consciousness 🔗

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and that is the really peculiar thing about these transmarginal events. It no longer matters now how loudly the metronome ticks. A stronger stimulus no longer gets a stronger response. The same number of drops flow or fall. 🔗

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Dr. Rózsavölgyi tends to favor a powerful program over a powerful leader. Maybe because this is 1945. It was widely believed in those days that behind the War—all the death, savagery, and destruction—lay the Führer-principle. But if personalities could be replaced by abstractions of power, if techniques developed by the corporations could be brought to bear, might not nations live rationally? One of the dearest Postwar hopes: that there should be no room for a terrible disease like charisma… that its rationalization should proceed while we had the time and resources… 🔗

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We, are in control. He, cannot help, himself.” 🔗

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“we are now proposing, to give, Sloth-rop a completely different sort, of test. We are now design-ing for him, a so-called, ‘projec-tive’ test. The most famil-iar exam-ple of the type, is the Rorschach ink-blot. 🔗

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We want to expose Slothrop to the German rocket…” 🔗

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from a distance no two observers, no matter how close they stand, see quite the same building in that orgy of self-expression 🔗

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patterns thick with meaning, Burma-Shave signs of the toilet world, icky and sticky, cryptic and glyptic 🔗

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“Sometimes…” but what does she want to say? That he must always be lovable, in need of her and never, as now, the hovering statistical cherub who’s never quite been to hell but speaks as if he’s one of the most fallen…
“Cheap nihilism” is Captain Prentice’s name for that. It was one day by the frozen pond near “The White Visitation,” Roger off sucking icicles, lying flat and waving his arms to make angels in the snow, larking. 🔗

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Whappo is wearing chaps of imported gazelle hide that Crutchfield bought for him in Eagle Pass from a faro dealer with a laudanum habit who was crossing the great Rio forever 🔗

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PUDDING: Do we have to do it because the Americans do it? Must we allow them to corrupt us? 🔗

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But a hardon, that’s either there, or it isn’t. Binary, elegant. The job of observing it can even be done by a student.
Unconditioned stimulus = stroking penis with antiseptic cotton swab.
Unconditioned response = hardon.
Conditioned stimulus = x.
Conditioned response = hardon whenever x is present, stroking is no longer necessary, all you need is that x.
Uh, x? well, what’s x? Why, it’s the famous “Mystery Stimulus” that’s fascinated generations of behavioral-psychology students, is what it is. 🔗

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But as Ivan Petrovich himself said, “Not only must we speak of partial or of complete extinction of a conditioned reflex, but we must also realize that extinction can proceed beyond the point of reducing a reflex to zero. We cannot therefore judge the degree of extinction only by the magnitude of the reflex or its absence, since there can still be a silent extinction beyond the zero.” Italics are Mr. Pointsman’s. 🔗

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Roger Mexico thinks it’s a statistical oddity. But he feels the foundations of that discipline trembling a bit now, deeper than oddity ought to drive. Odd, odd, odd—think of the word: such white finality in its closing clap of tongue. It implies moving past the tongue-stop—beyond the zero—and into the other realm. Of course you don’t move past. But you do realize, intellectually, that’s how you ought to be moving. 🔗

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Rollo Groast thinks it’s precognition. 🔗

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But Edwin Treacle, that most Freudian of psychical researchers, thinks Slothrop’s gift is psychokinesis. 🔗

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sex does come into Dr. Treacle’s theory. “He subconsciously needs to abolish all trace of the sexual Other, whom he symbolizes on his map, most significantly, as a star, that anal-sadistic emblem of classroom success which so permeates elementary education in America…” 🔗

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A star always comes before its corresponding rocket strike. The strike can come as quickly as two days, or as slowly as ten. The mean lag is about 4½ days. 🔗

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Slothrop instead only gets erections when this sequence happens in reverse. Explosion first, then the sound of approach: the V-2.
But the stimulus, somehow, must be the rocket, some precursor wraith, some rocket’s double present for Slothrop in the percentage of smiles on a bus, menstrual cycles being operated upon in some mysterious way—what does make the little doxies do it for free? Are there fluctuations in the sexual market, in pornography or prostitutes, perhaps tying in to prices on the Stock Exchange itself, that we clean-living lot know nothing about? Does news from the front affect the itch between their pretty thighs, does desire grow directly or inversely as the real chance of sudden death—damn it, what cue, right in front of our eyes, that we haven’t the subtlety of heart to see? 🔗

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When we find it, we’ll have shown again the stone determinacy of everything, of every soul. There will be precious little room for any hope at all. 🔗

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Pointsman has been talking about paranoia and the “idea of the opposite.” 🔗

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into a labyrinth of conditioned-reflex work in which only now, thirteen years along the clew, he’s beginning to circle back, trip across old evidence of having come that path before, here and there to confront consequences of his younger, total embrace 🔗

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He had no real grasp of the opposites. ‘The act of injuring and the act of being injured are joined in the behavior of the whole injury.’ Speaker and spoken-of, master and slave, virgin and seducer, each pair most conveniently coupled and inseparable—The last refuge of the incorrigibly lazy, Mexico, is just this sort of yang-yin rubbish. One avoids all manner of unpleasant lab work that way, but what has one said?” 🔗

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“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.” 🔗

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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.” 🔗

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There are no ‘other angles.’ There is only forward—into it—or backward.” 🔗

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They’ve paused in their walking. Roger stares back at the man. The Antimexico. “Ideas of the opposite” themselves, but on what cortex, what winter hemisphere? What ruinous mosaic, facing outward into the Waste… outward from the sheltering city… readable only to those who journey outside… eyes in the distance… barbarians… riders… 🔗

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“I have set myself limitations in this. I have only the reversal of rocket sounds to go on… his clinical history of sexual conditioning, perhaps to auditory stimuli, and what appears to be a reversal of cause-and-effect. I’m not as ready as you to junk cause-and-effect, but if it does need modifying—so be it.” 🔗

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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.’ 🔗

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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. 🔗

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What about the girls? It may be his loneliness in Psi Section, in a persuasion he can’t in his heart share, nor quite abandon… their faith, even smileless Gloaming’s, that there must be more, beyond the senses, beyond death, beyond the Probabilities that are all Roger has to believe in… Oh Jessie, 🔗

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We have lost them. No one listened to those early conversations—not even an idle snapshot survives. They walked till that winter hid them and it seemed the cruel Channel itself would freeze over, and no one, none of us, could ever completely find them again. Their footprints filled with ice, and a little later were taken out to sea. 🔗

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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 🔗

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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 🔗

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The cameraman is pleased at the unexpected effect of so much flowing crepe, particularly when Katje passes before a window and the rainlight coming through changes it for a few brief unshutterings to murky glass, charcoal-saturated, antique and weather-worn, frock, face, hair, hands, slender calves all gone to glass and glazing, for the celluloid instant poised—the translucent guardian of a rainfall shaken through all day by rocket blasts near and far, downward, dark and ruinous behind her the ground which, for the frames’ passage, defines her. 🔗

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in the dark oven of himself, always the coiled whispers of decay 🔗

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But every true god must be both organizer and destroyer. 🔗

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Tonight he feels the potency of every word: words are only an eye-twitch away from the things they stand for. 🔗

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God is creator and destroyer, sun and darkness, all sets of opposites brought together, including black and white, male and female 🔗

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Those symmetries were all prewar luxury. 🔗

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The danger he thinks he needs is still fictional for him: in what he flirts and teases with, death is not a real outcome, the hero always walks out of the heart of the explosion, sooty-faced but grinning—the blast is noise and change, and diving for cover. 🔗

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He’s ashamed that he enjoys them so much—the word bitch, spoken now in a certain tone of voice, will give him an erection he cannot will down—afraid that, if not actually judged and damned, he’s gone insane. 🔗

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What more do they want? She asks this seriously, as if there’s a real conversion factor between information and lives. Well, strange to say, there is. Written down in the Manual, on file at the War Department. Don’t forget the real business of the War is buying and selling. The murdering and the violence are self-policing, and can be entrusted to non-professionals. The mass nature of wartime death is useful in many ways. It serves as spectacle, as diversion from the real movements of the War. It provides raw material to be recorded into History, so that children may be taught History as sequences of violence, battle after battle, and be more prepared for the adult world. Best of all, mass death’s a stimulus to just ordinary folks, little fellows, to try ’n’ grab a piece of that Pie while they’re still here to gobble it up. The true war is a celebration of markets. Organic markets, carefully styled “black” by the professionals, spring up everywhere. Scrip, Sterling, Reichsmarks continue to move, severe as classical ballet, inside their antiseptic marble chambers. But out here, down here among the people, the truer currencies come into being. So, Jews are negotiable. Every bit as negotiable as cigarettes, cunt, or Hershey bars. 🔗

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“But where will you go?” Both of them hands in pockets, scarves tightly wrapped, stones the water has left behind shining black wait like writing in a dream, about to make sense printed here along the beach, each fragment so amazingly clear yet 🔗

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This furious host were losers, impersonating a race chosen by God. The colony, the venture, was dying—like the ebony trees they were stripping from the island, like the poor species they were removing totally from the earth. 🔗

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But if they were chosen to come to Mauritius, why had they also been chosen to fail, and leave? Is that a choosing, or is it a passing-over? Are they Elect, or are they Preterite, and doomed as dodoes? 🔗

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No language meant no chance of co-opting them in to what their round and flaxen invaders were calling Salvation. 🔗

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Pirate and Osbie Feel are leaning on their roof-ledge, a magnificent sunset across and up the winding river, the imperial serpent 🔗

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She came twice before cock was ever officially put inside cunt, and this is important to both of them though neither has figured out why, exactly. 🔗

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The images go, flowering, in and out, some lovely, some just awful… but she’s snuggled in here with her lamb, her Roger, and how she loves the line of his neck all at once so—why there it is right there, the back of his bumpy head like a boy of ten’s. She kisses him up and down the sour salt reach of skin that’s taken her so, taken her nightlit along this high tendoning, kisses him as if kisses were flowing breath itself, and never ending. 🔗

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Ronald Cherrycoke hawking fine-marbled amber phlegm into the basin—what’s all this, who are all these people… Freaks! Freeeeaks! He’s surrounded! they’ve been out there night and day all the war long tapping his brain, telepaths, witches, Satanic operators of all descriptions tuning in on everything—even when he and Jessica are in bed fucking— 🔗

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He was taken over then, for half a minute, shivering and yawning in his long underwear, soft, nearly invisible in the December-dawn enclosure, among so many sharp edges of books, sheafs and flimsies, charts and maps (and the chief one, red pockmarks on the pure white skin of lady London, watching over all… wait… disease on skin… does she carry the fatal infection inside herself? are the sites predestined, and does the flight of the rocket actually follow from the fated eruption latent in the city… but he can’t hold it, no more than he understands Pointsman’s obsession with the reversal of sound stimuli and please, please can’t we just drop it for a bit…), visited, not knowing till it passed how clearly he was seeing the honest half of his life that Jessica was now, how fanatically his mother the War must disapprove of her beauty, her cheeky indifference to death-institutions he’d not so long ago believed in—her unflappable hope (though she hated to make plans), her exile from childhood (though she refused ever to hold on to memories)… 🔗

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But out of bed, walking talking, his bitterness, his darkness, run deeper than the War, the winter: he hates England so, hates “the System,” gripes endlessly, says he’ll emigrate when the War’s over, stays inside his paper cynic’s cave hating himself… and does she want to bring him out, really? Isn’t it safer with Jeremy? She tries not to allow this question in too often, but it’s there. 🔗

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and if her heart wasn’t ready to take on quite all the stresses of her mortality and theirs, at least there was the fear that she was beginning to lose them 🔗

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thousands of children who pestled foam up out of soft mortars of mouths, who lost easily a thousand times as many words among the chalky bubbles 🔗

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Yet the continuity, flesh to kindred metals, home to hedgeless sea, has persisted. It is not death that separates these incarnations, but paper: paper specialties, paper routines. The War, the Empire, will expedite such barriers between our lives. The War needs to divide this way, and to subdivide, though its propaganda will always stress unity, alliance, pulling together. The War does not appear to want a folk-consciousness, not even of the sort the Germans have engineered, ein Volk ein Führer—it wants a machine of many separate parts, not oneness, but a complexity… Yet who can presume to say what the War wants, so vast and aloof is it… so absentee. Perhaps the War isn’t even an awareness—not a life at all, really. There may only be some cruel, accidental resemblance to life. 🔗

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The true king only dies a mock death. Remember. Any number of young men may be selected to die in his place while the real king, foxy old bastard, goes on. 🔗

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Bring to the serai gifts of tungsten, cordite, high-octane? 🔗

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But they want the nearly postwar luxury this week of buying an electric train set for the kid, trying that way each to light his own set of sleek little faces here, calibrating his strangeness, well-known photographs all, brought to life now, oohs and aahs but not yet, not here in the station, any of the moves most necessary: the War has shunted them, earthed them, those heedless destroying signalings of love. 🔗

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Now it’s time again. The plaster baby, the oxen frosted with gold leaf and the human-eyed sheep are turning real again, paint quickens to flesh. To believe is not a price they pay—it happens all by itself. He is the New Baby. On the magic night before, the animals will talk, and the sky will be milk. 🔗

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like a thrill, a good time you wanted too much, not a complete loss but still too far short of a miracle 🔗

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The War needs coal. 🔗

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The War needs electricity. 🔗

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It is the Night’s Mad Carnival. There is merriment under the shadows of the minute-hands. Hysteria in the pale faces between the numerals. 🔗

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and the old faces turn to the clock faces, thinking plot, and the numbers go whirling toward the Nativity, a violence, a nova of heart that will turn us all, change us forever to the very forgotten roots of who we are. 🔗

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Is that who you are, that vaguely criminal face on your ID card, its soul snatched by the government camera as the guillotine shutter fell—or maybe just left behind with your heart 🔗

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the lads in Hollywood telling us how grand it all is over here, how much fun, Walt Disney causing Dumbo the elephant to clutch to that feather like how many carcasses under the snow tonight among the white-painted tanks, how many hands each frozen around a Miraculous Medal, lucky piece of worn bone 🔗

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what do you think, it’s a children’s story? There aren’t any. The children are away dreaming, but the Empire has no place for dreams and it’s Adults Only in here tonight 🔗

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So this pickup group, these exiles and horny kids, sullen civilians called up in their middle age, men fattening despite their hunger, flatulent because of it, pre-ulcerous, hoarse, runny-nosed, red-eyed, sore-throated, piss-swollen men suffering from acute lower backs and all-day hangovers 🔗

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you are about to remark to your wife, “This is the most sinister time of evening.” But there’s a better word than “sinister.” You search for it. It is someone’s name. It waits behind the twilight, the clarity, the white flowers. There comes a light tapping at the door. 🔗

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Now ghosts crowd beneath the eaves. Stretched among snowy soot chimneys, booming over air-shafts, too tenuous themselves for sound, dry now forever in this wet gusting, stretched and never breaking, whipped in glassy French-curved chase across the rooftops, along the silver downs, skimming where the sea combs freezing in to shore. 🔗

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One couldn’t be too safe, there was always evil 🔗

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Ronald Cherrycoke, the noted psychometrist 🔗

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Turbulences in the aether, uncertainties out in the winds of karma. 🔗

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Our history is an aggregate of last moments. 🔗

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There’s no memory on his side: no personal record. He has to read about it in the notes of others, listen to discs. Which means he has to trust the others. That’s a complicated social setup. He must base the major part of his life on the probity of men charged with acting as interface between what he is supposed to be and himself. 🔗

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“It’s true,” Vanya now, “look at the forms of capitalist expression. Pornographies: pornographies of love, erotic love, Christian love, boy-and-his-dog, pornographies of sunsets, pornographies of killing, and pornographies of deduction—ahh, that sigh when we guess the murderer—all these novels, these films and songs they lull us with, they’re approaches, more comfortable and less so, to that Absolute Comfort.” A pause to allow Rudi a quick and sour grin. “The self-induced orgasm.” 🔗

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since we ran home along the canal, tripped and fell on the hardest cobblestones in the world, and woke in the mornings to see snow on the spokes of the wagon wheels, steam out the old horse’s nose… 🔗

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Incredible joy at the baths, among the friends. True joy: events in a dialectical process cannot bring this explosion of the heart. Everyone is in love…
AN ARMY OF LOVERS CAN BE BEATEN. 🔗

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She tried to explain to him about the level you reach, with both feet in, when you lose your fear, you lose it all, you’ve penetrated the moment, slipping perfectly into its grooves, metal-gray but soft as latex, and now the figures are dancing, each pre-choreographed exactly where it is, the flash of knees under pearl-colored frock as the girl in the babushka stoops to pick up a cobble, the man in the black suitcoat and brown sleeveless sweater grabbed by policemen one on either arm, trying to keep his head up, showing his teeth, the older liberal in the dirty beige overcoat, stepping back to avoid a careening demonstrator, looking back across his lapel how-dare-you or look-out-not-me, his eyeglasses filled with the glare of the winter sky. There is the moment, and its possibilities. 🔗

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He was the cause-and-effect man: he kept at her astrology without mercy, telling her what she was supposed to believe, then denying it. “Tides, radio interference, damned little else. There is no way for changes out there to produce changes here.”
“Not produce,” she tried, “not cause. It all goes along together. Parallel, not series. Metaphor. Signs and symptoms. Mapping on to different coordinate systems, I don’t know…” She didn’t know, all she was trying to do was reach.
But he said: “Try to design anything that way and have it work.” 🔗

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Leni saw a dream of flight. One of many possible. Real flight and dreams of flight go together. Both are part of the same movement. Not A before B, but all together 🔗

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She has talked to psychiatrists, she knows about the German male at puberty. On their backs in the meadows and mountains, watching the sky, masturbating, yearning. Destiny waits, a darkness latent in the texture of the summer wind. Destiny will betray you, crush your ideals, deliver you into the same detestable Bürgerlichkeit as your father, sucking at his pipe on Sunday strolls after church past the row houses by the river—dress you in the gray uniform of another family man, and without a whimper you will serve out your time, fly from pain to duty, from joy to work, from commitment to neutrality. Destiny does all this to you. 🔗

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Franz loved her neurotically, masochistically, he belonged to her and believed that she would carry him on her back, away to a place where Destiny couldn’t reach. As if it were gravity. 🔗

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The moment of assassination is the moment when power and the ignorance of power come together, with Death as validator. 🔗

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You think you’d rather hear about what you call ‘life’: the growing, organic Kartell. But it’s only another illusion. A very clever robot. The more dynamic it seems to you, the more deep and dead, in reality, it grows. Look at the smokestacks, how they proliferate, fanning the wastes of original waste over greater and greater masses of city. 🔗

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The persistence, then, of structures favoring death. Death converted into more death. Perfecting its reign, just as the buried coal grows denser, and overlaid with more strata—epoch on top of epoch, city on top of ruined city. This is the sign of Death the impersonator. 🔗

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“You must ask two questions. First, what is the real nature of synthesis? And then: what is the real nature of control? 🔗

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it lies ahead in the dark, defined inversely, by horror 🔗

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“How they persist. 🔗

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But what if the Ci-ty were a growing neo-plasm, across the centuries, always changing, to meet exactly the chang-ing shape of its very worst, se-cret fears? The raggedy pawns, the disgraced bish-op and cowardly knight, all we condemned, we irreversibly lost, are left out here, exposed and wait-ing. 🔗

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If she leaves, then it ceases to matter how the rockets fall. 🔗

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If the rockets don’t get her there’s still her lieutenant. Damned Beaver/Jeremy is the War, he is every assertion the fucking War has ever made—that we are meant for work and government, for austerity: and these shall take priority over love, dreams, the spirit, the senses and the other second-class trivia that are found among the idle and mindless hours of the day… Damn them, they are wrong. They are insane. 🔗

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Oh, he feels a raving fit coming on—how the bloody hell can he survive without her? She is the British warm that protects his stooping shoulders, and the wintering sparrow he holds inside his hands. She is his deepest innocence in spaces of bough and hay before wishes were given a separate name to warn that they might not come true, and his lithe Parisian daughter of joy, beneath the eternal mirror, forswearing perfumes, capeskin to the armpits, all that is too easy, for his impoverishment and more worthy love. 🔗

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You go from dream to dream inside me. You have passage to my last shabby corner, and there, among the debris, you’ve found life. I’m no longer sure which of all the words, images, dreams or ghosts are “yours” and which are “mine.” It’s past sorting out. We’re both being someone new now, someone incredible… 🔗

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The sun, not very high yet, will catch a bird by the ends of his wings, turning the feathers brightly there to curls of shaved ice. 🔗

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He takes back his hands into ribbed cuffs of a sweatshirt, crosses his arms, watches the amazing foreign morning, the ghosts of his breathing into it, feeling first sunwarmth, wanting a first cigarette—and perversely he waits for a sudden noise to begin his day, a first rocket. 🔗

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They go as far as the first rocks, finding there an inlet partly secluded from the rest of the beach, and from the looming Casino. Breakfast is wine, bread, smiling, sun diffracting through the fine gratings of long dancers’ hair, swung, flipped, never still, a dazzle of violet, sorrel, saffron, emerald… For a moment you can let the world go, solid forms gone a-fracturing, warm inside of bread waiting at your fingertips, flowery wine in long, easy passage streaming downward around the root of your tongue 🔗

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and who was to know that among her last things would be vulgar-faced hula girls, ukuleles, and surfriders all in comic-book colors… oh God God please, 🔗

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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? 🔗

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He can see her face now, soft nose of a doe, eyes behind blonde lashes full of acid green. 🔗

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Oh, that was no “found” crab, Ace—no random octopus or girl, uh-uh. Structure and detail come later, but the conniving around him now he feels instantly, in his heart. 🔗

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Katje squeezes Slothrop’s arm and tells him just what he wants to hear about now: “Perhaps, after all, we were meant to meet…” 🔗

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sea colored the soft inside of a black olive 🔗

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Now, the sky stretches to admit a single first star. But Porkyevitch makes no wish. Policy. Signs of arrival do not interest him, nor even signs of departure 🔗

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Chandeliers shaggy with crystal needles flare overhead 🔗

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“Listen,” Slothrop talking into his highball glass, bouncing words off of ice cubes so they’ll have a proper chill, “either I’m coming down with a little psychosis here, or something funny is going on, right?” 🔗

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“Sure. In that America, it’s the first thing they tell you. Harvard’s there for other reasons. The ‘educating’ part of it is just sort of a front.” 🔗

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“Am I ignoring you?” She’s at her window, the sea below and behind her, the midnight sea, its individual waveflows impossible at this distance to follow, all integrated into the hung stillness of an old painting seen across the deserted gallery where you wait in the shadow, forgetting why you are here, frightened by the level of illumination, which is from the same blanched scar of moon that wipes the sea tonight 🔗

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Spice odors from the candle reach like nerves through the room. 🔗

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For some reason now, she who never laughs has become the top surface of a deep, rising balloon of laughter. Later as she’s about to go to sleep, she will also whisper, “Laughing,” laughing again.
He will want to say, “Oh, They let you,” but then again maybe They don’t. But the Katje he’s talking to is already gone, and presently his own eyes have closed. 🔗

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This time it is a good-natured coordinated quickie, both kind of drowsy, covered with sticky feathers… after coming they lie close together, too liquefied to move, mm, damask and pile, it’s so cozy and just as red as a womb in here 🔗

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But Slothrop’s looking around, tightening rectal fear belatedly taking hold now, neck and face beading in a surge of sweat, trying to find in this room Tantivy shares with Bloat some trace of his friend. Bristly Norfolk jacket, pinstripe suit, anything… 🔗

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Around the tables, Empire chairs are lined up precise and playerless. But some are taller than the rest. These are no longer quite outward and visible signs of a game of chance. There is another enterprise here, more real than that, less merciful, and systematically hidden from the likes of Slothrop. Who sits in the taller chairs? Do They have names? What lies on Their smooth baize surfaces? 🔗

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But Slothrop isn’t to be let off quite so easy. Shortly, unpleasantly so, it will come to him that everything in this room is really being used for something different. Meaning things to Them it has never meant to us. Never. Two orders of being, looking identical… but, but 🔗

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rooms full of dust that will cloud the shapes of inhabitants around the corners or deeper inside, that will settle on their black formal lapels, that will soften to sugar the white faces, white shirt fronts, gems and gowns, white hands that move too quickly to be seen… what game do They deal? What passes are these, so blurred, so old and perfect? 🔗

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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. He just runs. 🔗

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it’s here that saturation hits him, it’s all this playing games, too much of it, too many games: the nasal, obsessive voice of a croupier he can’t see—messieurs, mesdames, les jeux sont faits—is suddenly speaking out of the Forbidden Wing directly to him, and about what Slothrop has been playing against the invisible House, perhaps after all for his soul, all day 🔗

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He is almost sure that whatever They want, it won’t mean risking his life, or even too much of his comfort. 🔗

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an unlucky, an unaccountably futureless look 🔗

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The ball drops in a compartment whose number they never see. Seeing the number is supposed to be the point. But in the game behind the game, it is not the point. 🔗

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The odds They played here belonged to the past, the past only. Their odds were never probabilities, but frequencies already observed. It’s the past that makes demands here. It whispers, and reaches after, and, sneering disagreeably, gooses its victims.
When They chose numbers, red, black, odd, even, what did They mean by it? What Wheel did They set in motion? 🔗

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Back in a room, early in Slothrop’s life, a room forbidden to him now, is something very bad. Something was done to him, and it may be that Katje knows what. Hasn’t he, in her “futureless look,” found some link to his own past, something that connects them closely as lovers? He sees her standing at the end of a passage in her life, without any next step to take—all her bets are in, she has only the tedium now of being knocked from one room to the next, a sequence of numbered rooms whose numbers do not matter, till inertia brings her to the last. That’s all. 🔗

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he’s been snuggling up, masturbatorily scared-elated, to the disagreeable chance that exactly such Control might already have been put over him. 🔗

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all in his life of what has looked free or random, is discovered to’ve been under some Control, all the time, the same as a fixed roulette wheel—where only destinations are important, attention is to long-term statistics, not individuals: and where the House always does, of course, keep turning a profit 🔗

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Between you and me is not only a rocket trajectory, but also a life. You will come to understand that between the two points, in the five minutes, it lives an entire life. You haven’t even learned the data on our side of the flight profile, the visible or trackable. Beyond them there’s so much more, so much none of us know…”
But it is a curve each of them feels, unmistakably. It is the parabola. They must have guessed, once or twice—guessed and refused to believe—that everything, always, collectively, had been moving toward that purified shape latent in the sky, that shape of no surprise, no second chances, no return. Yet they do move forever under it, reserved for its own black-and-white bad news certainly as if it were the Rainbow, and they its children… 🔗

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other conspirators, like a chorus line, will show up off and on behind Katje and Sir Stephen, dancing in, all with identical Corporate Smiles, the multiplication of whose glittering choppers is to dazzle him, they think, distract him from what they’re taking away, his ID, his service dossier, his past. Well, fuck… you know. He lets it happen. He’s more interested, and sometimes a little anxious, about what they seem to be adding on. 🔗

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For some odd reason he finds himself with hardons right after study sessions. 🔗

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Waiters and off-duty dealers sit like birds along the bar, staring. Noise in the place is incredible. A Welshman with an accordion stands on a table playing “Lady of Spain,” in C, just zooming up and down that wheezebox like a maniac. Smoke hangs thick and swirling. Pipes glow in the murk. At least three fist-fights are in progress. The Prince game is difficult to locate any more. Girls crowd at the door, giggling and pointing. The light in the room has gone bear-brown with swarming uniforms. 🔗

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Here it thunders now over the Mediterranean, high and lonely, this anachronism in primal red, in yellow purer than can be found anywhere today, a purity begging to be polluted… of course Empire took its way westward, what other way was there but into those virgin sunsets to penetrate and to foul? 🔗

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The spaces between the shadows are washed a very warm sunset-red now, across grainy chocolate beach. 🔗

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“My ‘function’ is to observe you. That’s my function. You like my function? You like it? Your ‘function’ … is, learn the rocket, inch by inch. I have… to send in a daily log of your progress. And that’s all I know.” 🔗

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They’d agreed beforehand to try and keep together. But there are two sorts of movement out here—as often as the chance displacements of strangers, across a clear skirmish-line from the Force, will bring together people who’ll remain that way for a time, in love that can even make the oppression seem a failure, so too love, here in the street, can be taken centrifugally apart again: faces seen for the last time here, words spoken idly, over your shoulder, taking for granted she’s there, already last words—“ 🔗

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the Rocket’s purely feminine counterpart, the zero point at the center of its target, has submitted. All the rest will happen according to laws of ballistics. The Rocket is helpless in it. Something else has taken over. Something beyond what was designed in. 🔗

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Katje has understood the great airless arc as a clear allusion to certain secret lusts that drive the planet and herself, and Those who use her—over its peak and down, plunging, burning, toward a terminal orgasm… which is certainly nothing she can tell Slothrop. 🔗

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“Oh, Slothrop. No. You don’t want me. What they’re after may, but you don’t. No more than A4 wants London. But I don’t think they know… about other selves… yours or the Rocket’s… no. No more than you do. If you can’t understand it now, at least remember. That’s all I can do for you.” 🔗

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Their breaths are torn into phantoms out to sea. 🔗

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memory will dance for you, and you can even make it my voice saying what I couldn’t say then. Or now.” Oh what is it she smiles here to him, only for that second? already gone. Back to the mask of no luck, no future—her face’s rest state, preferred, easiest 🔗

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She has moved her thighs and the points of her hips up to touch him, through her coat—it might still, after all, be to help bring him back—her breath a white scarf, her tear-trails, winter-lit, ice. She feels warm. But it’s not enough. Never was—nope, he understands all right, she’s been meaning to go for a long time. 🔗

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“Katje.”
“Sshh,” raking dreamy fingernails down the morning, over the Côte d’Azur toward Italy. Slothrop wants to sing, decides to, but then can’t think of anything that’d work. He reaches an arm, without wetting his fingers snuffs the candles. She kisses the pain. It hurts even more. He falls asleep in her arms. When he wakes she is gone, completely, most of her never-worn clothes still in the closet, blisters and a little wax on his fingers, and one cigarette, stubbed out before its time in an exasperated fishhook… She never wasted cigarettes. She must have sat, smoking, watching him while he slept… until something, he’ll never be asking her what, triggered her, made it impossible to stay till cigarette’s end. He straightens it out, finishes it, no point wasting smokes is there, with a war on… 🔗

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id785760091

1: Beyond the Zero
Nature does not know extinction; all it knows is transformation. Everything science has taught me, and continues to teach me, strengthens my belief in the continuity of our spiritual existence after death.
—WERNHER VON BRAUN 🔗

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that if there is a life force operating in Nature, still there is nothing so analogous in a bureaucracy. Nothing so mystical. It all comes down, as it must, to the desires of individual men. Oh, and women too of course, bless their empty little heads. But survival depends on having strong enough desires—on knowing the System better than the other chap, and how to use it. It’s work, that’s all it is, and there’s no room for any extrahuman anxieties—they only weaken, effeminize the will: a man either indulges them, or fights to win, und so weiter. 🔗

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Watch dis, chuckles Mouse Alexei, when he picks me up I’m gonna shit, right’n his hand! Better not hey, ya know what happened ta Slug, don’tcha? Dey fried him when he did dat, man, da foist time he fucked up runnin’ dat maze. A hundrit volts. Dey said it wuz a “accident.” Yeah… sure it wuz! 🔗

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Now it’s back to the cages and the rationalized forms of death—death in the service of the one species cursed with the knowledge that it will die 🔗

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Above all, pain. The clearest poetry, the endearment of greatest worth 🔗

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Proverbs for Paranoids, 1: You may never get to touch the Master, but you can tickle his creatures. 🔗

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which was being used in those days to blow up various sorts of people at the rate of oodles ’n’ oodles of tons an hour 🔗

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Proverbs for Paranoids, 2: The innocence of the creatures is in inverse proportion to the immorality of the Master. 🔗

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“But now,” she screams, “I have you all! One coup de foudre!” The hatch drops—oh, Jesus—there’s the sound of a 3-inch shell being loaded into its breech. Girls start to scream and make for the exits. Dopers are looking around, blinking, smiling, saying yes in a number of ways. 🔗

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Slothrop has just disengaged himself and is wiping the Jell-o off of his suit when there is a heavy touch on his shoulder.
“You were right. You are the man.” 🔗

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Proverbs for Paranoids, 3: If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don’t have to worry about answers. 🔗

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They did it. Took his friend out to some deathtrap, probably let him fake an “honourable” death… and then just closed up his file…
It will occur to him later that maybe the whole story was a lie. They could’ve planted it easy enough in that London Times, couldn’t they? Left the paper for Slothrop to find? But by the time he figures that one out, there’ll be no turning around. 🔗

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Just for the knife-edge, here in the Rue Rossini, there comes to Slothrop the best feeling dusk in a foreign city can bring: just where the sky’s light balances the electric lamplight in the street, just before the first star, some promise of events without cause, surprises, a direction at right angles to every direction his life has been able to find up till now. 🔗

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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!” 🔗

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The War has been reconfiguring time and space into its own image. The track runs in different networks now. What appears to be destruction is really the shaping of railroad spaces to other purposes, intentions he can only, riding through it for the first time, begin to feel the leading edges of 🔗

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A tragic sigh. “Information. What’s wrong with dope and women? Is it any wonder the world’s gone insane, with information come to be the only real medium of exchange?” 🔗

id790651319

Begins a period of shuttling among the three cafés, sitting a few hours over coffee at each one, eating once a day, Zürich baloney and rösti at the People’s Kitchens… watching crowds of businessmen in blue suits, sun-black skiers who’ve spent the duration schussing miles of glacier and snow hearing nothing of campaigns or politics, reading nothing but thermometers and weathervanes, finding their atrocities in avalanches or toppling séracs, their victories in layers of good powder… ragged foreigners in oil-stained leather jackets and tattered fatigues, South Americans bundled in fur coats and shivering in the clear sunlight, elderly hypochondriacs who were caught out lounging at some spa when the War began and have been here since, women in long black dresses who don’t smile, men in soiled overcoats who do… and the mad, down from their fancy asylums on weekend furlough—oh, the mental cases of Switzerland: Slothrop is known to them, all right, among all the somber street faces and colors only he is wearing white, shoes zoot ’n’ hat, white as the cemetery mountains here… He’s also the New Mark In Town. It’s difficult for him to sort out the first wave of corporate spies from the
LOONIES ON LEAVE 🔗

id790653392

Second Nut or Keeper: Now you’ve heard about the two-hundred-mile-per-gallon carburetor, the razor edge that never gets dull, the eternal bootsole, the mange pill that’s good to your glands, engine that’ll run on sand, ornithopters and robobopsters—you heard me, got a little goatee made out of steel wool—jivey, that’s fine, but here’s one for yo’ mind! Are you ready? It’s Lightning-Latch, The Door That Opens You! 🔗

id790653466

suddenly from noplace appears one Mario Schweitar in a green frogged waistcoat, just popped out of the echoing cuckoo clock of Dubya Dubya Two here 🔗

id790653855

Proverbs for Paranoids, 4: You hide, they seek. 🔗

id790654390

he knows the sound of Their calculated innocence by now, it’s part of Their style 🔗

id790654538

He finds that he has drifted as far as the Odeon, one of the great world cafés, whose specialty is not listed anywhere—indeed has never been pinned down. Lenin, Trotsky, James Joyce, Dr. Einstein all sat out at these tables. Whatever it was they all had in common: whatever they’d come to this vantage to score… perhaps it had to do with the people somehow, with pedestrian mortality, restless crisscrossing of needs or desperations in one fateful piece of street… dialectics, matrices, archetypes all need to connect, once in a while, back to some of that proletarian blood, to body odors and senseless screaming across a table, to cheating and last hopes, or else all is dusty Dracularity, the West’s ancient curse 🔗

id790999172

We are obsessed with building labyrinths, where before there was open plain and sky. To draw ever more complex patterns on the blank sheet. We cannot abide that openness: it is terror to us. 🔗

id791000806

“No. Taking land is building more fences. We want to leave it open. We want it to grow, to change. In the openness of the German Zone, our hope is limitless.” 🔗

id791003309

Its great clock hangs over him and empty acres of streets in what he now reads as dumb malignity. 🔗

id791009515

Slothrops in those days were not yet so much involved with paper, and the wholesale slaughtering of trees. They were still for the living green, against the dead white. Later they lost, or traded away, knowledge of which side they’d been on. Tyrone here has inherited most of their bland ignorance on the subject. 🔗

id791046515

Her grin, her red, maniacally good-morning-and-I-mean-good! grin 🔗

id791047710

The donkeys hee-haw and shit, the children walk in it and their parents scream. 🔗

id791048895

grinning in athletic paranoia 🔗

id791049759

3: In the Zone
Toto, I have a feeling we’re not in Kansas any more…
—DOROTHY, arriving in Oz 🔗

id791049787

2: Un Perm’ au Casino Hermann Goering
You will have the tallest, darkest leading man in Hollywood.
—MERIAN C. COOPER to Fay Wray 🔗

id791987024

Well here he is skidded out onto the Zone like a planchette on a Ouija board, and what shows up inside the empty circle in his brain might string together into a message, might not, he’ll just have to see. But he can feel a sensitive’s fingers, resting lightly but sure on his days, and he thinks of them as Katje’s. 🔗

id791987516

Let them cry like cheated lovers,
Let their cries find only wind.
Trains are meant for night and ruin.
We are meant for song, and sin. 🔗

id791987771

Those were the days when you carried marks around in wheelbarrows to your daily shopping and used them for toilet paper, assuming you had anything to shit. 🔗

id791987825

The name of this contractor was the Slothrop Paper Company. 🔗

id791987977

His erection hums from a certain distance, like an instrument installed, wired by Them into his body as a colonial outpost here in our raw and clamorous world, another office representing Their white Metropolis far away… 🔗

id791989244

The fear balloons again inside his brain. It will not be kept down with a simple Fuck You… A smell, a forbidden room, at the bottom edge of his memory. He can’t see it, can’t make it out. Doesn’t want to. It is allied with the Worst Thing. 🔗

id791989336

down here, back here in the warm dark, among early shapes where the clocks and calendars don’t mean too much 🔗

id791989817

Whatcha think they have in mind? You know what I think? They have a plan. Yeah. I think it’s rockets. Don’t ask me how, it’s just something I feel here, in m’heart. A-and you know, that’s awful dangerous. You can’t trust them— With rockets? They’re a childlike race. Brains are smaller.”
“But our patience,” suggests a calm voice now out of the darkness, “our patience is enormous, though perhaps not unlimited.” So saying, a tall African with a full imperial beard steps up grabs the fat American, who has time to utter one short yell before being flung bodily over the side. Slothrop and the African watch the Major bounce down the embankment behind them, arms and legs flying, out of sight. Firs crowd the hills. A crescent moon has risen over one ragged crest. 🔗

id791990263

“But you are free. We all are. You’ll see. Before long.” 🔗

id791991163

Even G-5, living its fantasy of being the only government in Germany now, is just the arrangement for being victorious, is all. No more or less real than all these others so private, silent, and lost to History. Slothrop, though he doesn’t know it yet, is as properly constituted a state as any other in the Zone these days. Not paranoia. Just how it is. Temporary alliances, knit and undone. 🔗

id791991293

detumescence 🔗

id791992544

Oh boy, am I gonna get out of here, sez Slothrop to himself, this is a badger game if I ever saw one, man. Who else would be interested in the one rocket out of 6000 that carried the Imipolex G device? 🔗

id791992709

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

id791996473

Tchitcherine comes roaring through the window, a Nagant blazing in his fist. Tchitcherine lands in a parachute and fells Slothrop with one judo chop. Tchitcherine drives a Stalin tank right into the room, and blasts Slothrop with a 76 mm shell. Thanks for stalling him, Liebchen, he was a spy, well, cheerio, I’m off to Peenemünde and a nubile Polish wench with tits like vanilla ice cream, check you out later. 🔗

id792484656

Interregnum 🔗

id792485154

couturier 🔗

id792487675

so jaded with Tomorrow… 🔗

id792489169

Rarely a bare bulb will hollow out a region of light. As darkness is mined and transported from place to place like marble, so the light bulb is the chisel that delivers it from its inertia, and has become one of the great secret ikons of the Humility, the multitudes who are passed over by God and History. 🔗

id792491899

He wants to preserve what he can of her from Their several entropies, from Their softsoaping and Their money: maybe he thinks that if he can do it for her he can also do it for himself… although that’s awful close to nobility for Slothrop and The Penis He Thought Was His Own. 🔗

id792492000

It is hard down here in the Mittelwerke to live in the present for very long. The nostalgia you feel is not your own, but it’s potent. All the objects have grown still, drowned, enfeebled with evening, terminal evening. 🔗

id792493086

our flesh doesn’t sweat and pimple here for the domestic mysteries, the attic horror of What Might Have Happened so much as for our knowledge of what likely did happen 🔗

id792496149

Ghosts used to be either likenesses of the dead or wraiths of the living. But here in the Zone categories have been blurred badly. The status of the name you miss, love, and search for now has grown ambiguous and remote, but this is even more than the bureaucracy of mass absence—some still live, some have died, but many, many have forgotten which they are. Their likenesses will not serve. Down here are only wrappings left in the light, in the dark: images of the Uncertainty 🔗

id792497523

Slothrop does not know that they are singing to him, and neither do they. 🔗

id792502087

Slothrop ducks down behind a cylindrical object at the rear of the tractor. Marvy starts shooting, wildly, inspired by hideous laughter from the others. 🔗

id792516135

The Rocket will have a final shape, but not its people. 🔗

id792518036

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 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 genitals. 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 enough to absorb all behavior, no matter how dirty, how animal it gets… 🔗

id792521110

It was a simple choice for the Hereros, between two kinds of death: tribal death, or Christian death. Tribal death made sense. Christian death made none at all. It seemed an exercise they did not need. But to the Europeans, conned by their own Baby Jesus Con Game, what they were witnessing among these Hereros was a mystery potent as that of the elephant graveyard, or the lemmings rushing into the sea. 🔗

id792521608

Vectors in the night underground, all trying to flee a center, a force, which appears to be the Rocket: some immachination, whether of journey or of destiny, which is able to gather violent political opposites together in the Erdschweinhöhle as it gathers fuel and oxidizer in its thrust chamber: metered, helmsmanlike, for the sake of its scheduled parabola. 🔗

id792521995

As the Rocket grows toward its working shape and fullness, so does he evolve, himself, into a new configuration. He feels it. It’s something else to worry about. 🔗

id792523244

What Enzian wants to create will have no history. It will never need a design change. Time, as time is known to the other nations, will wither away inside this new one. The Erdschweinhöhle will not be bound, like the Rocket, to time. The people will find the Center again, the Center without time, the journey without hysteresis, where every departure is a return to the same place, the only place 🔗

id792528304

There may be no gods, but there is a pattern: names by themselves may have no magic, but the act of naming, the physical utterance, obeys the pattern. 🔗

id792530788

There was no difference between the behavior of a god and the operations of pure chance. 🔗

id792531046

Enzian has grown cold: not so much a fire dying away as a positive coming on of cold, a bitter taste growing across the palate of love’s first hopes… It began when Weissmann brought him to Europe: a discovery that love, among these men, once past the simple feel and orgasming of it, had to do with masculine technologies, with contracts, with winning and losing. Demanded, in his own case, that he enter the service of the Rocket… Beyond simple steel erection, the Rocket was an entire system won, away from the feminine darkness, held against the entropies of lovable but scatterbrained Mother Nature: that was the first thing he was obliged by Weissmann to learn, his first step toward citizenship in the Zone. He was led to believe that by understanding the Rocket, he would come to understand truly his manhood… 🔗

id792531573

‘routinization of charisma.’” 🔗

id792757438

“I would set you free, if I knew how. But it isn’t free out here. All the animals, the plants, the minerals, even other kinds of men, are being broken and reassembled every day, to preserve an elite few, who are the loudest to theorize on freedom, but the least free of all. I can’t even give you hope that it will be different someday—that They’ll come out, and forget death, and lose Their technology’s elaborate terror, and stop using every other form of life without mercy to keep what haunts men down to a tolerable level—and be like you instead, simply here, simply alive…” 🔗

id792758368

(Quietly) It’s been a prevalent notion. Fallen sparks. Fragments of vessels broken at the Creation. And someday, somehow, before the end, a gathering back to home. A messenger 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. 🔗

id792759708

Because of the symmetry… He’s been led before, you know, down the garden path by symmetry: in certain test results 🔗

id792760340

Sure is daffy about that history, though. Jack… might Jack have kept it from falling, violated gravity somehow? 🔗

id792849160

Toward sundown, Schnorp gets thoughtful. “Look. You can see the edge of it. At this latitude the earth’s shadow races across Germany at 650 miles an hour, the speed of a jet aircraft.” The cloud-sheet has broken up into little fog-banklets the color of boiled shrimp. The balloon goes drifting, over countryside whose green patchwork the twilight is now urging toward black: the thread of a little river flaming in the late sun, the intricate-angled pattern of another roofless town.
The sunset is red and yellow, like the balloon. On the horizon the mild sphere goes warping down, a peach on a china plate. “The farther south you go,” Schnorp continues, “the faster the shadow sweeps, till you reach the equator: a thousand miles an hour. Fantastic. It breaks through the speed of sound somewhere over southern France—around the latitude of Carcassonne.”
The wind is bundling them on, north by east. “Southern France,” Slothrop remembers then. “Yeah. That’s where I broke through the speed of sound…” 🔗

id793004426

their shallow eyes following gently as piano chords from a suburban parlor 🔗

id793013344

We seem up against a dilemma built into Nature, much like the Heisenberg situation. There is nearly complete parallelism between analgesia and addiction. The more pain it takes away, the more we desire it. It appears we can’t have one property without the other, any more than a particle physicist can specify position without suffering an uncertainty as to the particle’s velocity 🔗

id793013742

Think of what it would mean to find such a drug—to abolish pain rationally, without the extra cost of addiction. A surplus cost—surely there is something in Marx and Engels,” soothe the customer, “to cover this. A demand like ‘addiction,’ having nothing to do with real pain, real economic needs, unrelated to production or labor… we need fewer of these unknowns, not more. We know how to produce real pain. Wars, obviously… machines in the factories, industrial accidents, automobiles built to be unsafe, poisons in food, water, and even air—these are quantities tied directly to the economy. We know them, and we can control them. But ‘addiction’? What do we know of that? Fog and phantoms. No two experts will even agree on how to define the word. ‘Compulsion’? Who is not compelled? ‘Tolerance’? ‘Dependence’? What do they mean? All we have are the thousand dim, academic theories. A rational economy cannot depend on psychological quirks. We could not plan…” 🔗

id793013831

“Doctors traffick in pain and no one would dream of criticizing their noble calling. Yet let the Verbindungsmann but reach for the latch on his case, and you all start to scream and run. Well—you won’t find many addicts among us. The medical profession is full of them, but we salesmen believe in real pain, real deliverance—we are knights in the service of that Ideal. It must all be real, for the purposes of our market. Otherwise my employer—and our little chemical cartel is the model for the very structure of nations—becomes lost in illusion and dream, and one day vanishes into chaos. Your own employer as well.” 🔗

id793014451

But They would not be who or where They are without a touch of Dante to Their notions of reprisal. Simple talion may be fine for wartime, but politics between wars demands symmetry and a more elegant idea of justice, even to the point of masquerading, a bit decadently, as mercy. It is more complicated than mass execution, more difficult and less satisfying, but there are arrangements Tchitcherine can’t see, wide as Europe, perhaps as the world, that can’t be disturbed very much, between wars 🔗

id793015801

By the time he left, they had learned each other’s names and a few words in the respective languages—afraid, happy, sleep, love… 🔗

id793019528

How alphabetic is the nature of molecules. 🔗

id793019680

“See: how they are taken out from the coarse flow—shaped, cleaned, rectified, just as you once redeemed your letters from the lawless, the mortal streaming of human speech… These are our letters, our words: they too can be modulated, broken, recoupled, redefined, co-polymerized one to the other in worldwide chains that will surface now and then over long molecular silences, like the seen parts of a tapestry.” 🔗

id793020754

On sidewalks and walls the very first printed slogans start to show up, the first Central Asian fuck you signs, the first kill-the-police-commissioner signs (and somebody does! this alphabet is really something!) and so the magic that the shamans, out in the wind, have always known, begins to operate now in a political way, and Džaqyp Qulan hears the ghost of his own lynched father with a scratchy pen in the night, practicing As and Bs… 🔗

id793026043

there is this other Tchitcherine’s kind, a mortal State that will persist no longer than the individuals in it. He is bound, in love and in bodily fear, to students who have died under the wheels of carriages, to eyes betrayed by nights without sleep and arms that have opened maniacally to death by absolute power. He envies their loneliness, their willingness to go it alone, outside even a military structure, often without support or love from anyone. 🔗

id793027769

on the last day of his life, with Japanese iron whistling down on him from ships that are too far off in the haze for him even to see, he will think of the slowly carbonizing faces of men he thought he knew, men turning to coal, ancient coal that glistened, each crystal, in the hoarse sputter of the Jablochkov candles, each flake struck perfect… a conspiracy of carbon, though he never phrased it as “carbon,” it was power he walked away from, the feeling of too much meaningless power, flowing wrong… he could smell Death in it. 🔗

id793034270

Time for retrospection here, for refining the recent history that’s being pumped up fetid and black from other strata of Earth’s mind… 🔗

id794282974

“Well, I think we’re here, but only in a statistical way. Something like that rock over there is just about 100% certain—it knows it’s there, so does everybody else. But our own chances of being right here right now are only a little better than even—the slightest shift in the probabilities and we’re gone—schnapp! like that.” 🔗

id794283791

Mba-kayere. It means ‘I am passed over.’ To those of us who survived von Trotha, it also means that we have learned to stand outside our history and watch it, without feeling too much. A little schizoid. A sense for the statistics of our being. One reason we grew so close to the Rocket, I think, was this sharp awareness of how contingent, like ourselves, the Aggregat 4 could be—how at the mercy of small things 🔗

id794314578

All anyone knows about you is that you keep showing up.” 🔗

id794314623

Toward dusk, the black birds descend, millions of them, to sit in the branches of trees nearby. The trees grow heavy with black birds, branches like dendrites of the Nervous System fattening, deep in twittering nerve-dusk, in preparation for some important message 🔗

id794319223

Names by themselves may be empty, but the act of naming… 🔗

id794337263

Old men with their tins searching the ground for cigarette butts wear their lungs on their breasts. 🔗

id794339060

(By Säure’s black-market watch, it’s nearly noon. From 11 to 12 in the morning is the Evil Hour, when the white woman with the ring of keys comes out of her mountain and may appear to you. Be careful, then. If you can’t free her from a spell she never specifies, you’ll be punished. She is the beautiful maiden offering the Wonderflower, and the ugly old woman with long teeth who found you in that dream and said nothing. The Hour is hers.) 🔗

id794341891

In the smoky Berlin sky, somewhere to the left of the Funkturm in its steelwool distance, appears a full-page photo in Life magazine: it is of Slothrop, he is in full Rocketman attire, with what appears to be a long, stiff sausage of very large diameter being stuffed into his mouth, so forcibly that his eyes are slightly crossed, though the hand or agency actually holding the stupendous wiener is not visible in the photo. A SNAFU FOR ROCKETMAN, reads the caption—“Barely off the ground, the Zone’s newest celebrity ‘fucks up.’” 🔗

id794344617

smiles breaking like kind dawns. 🔗

id794345495

Each driver thinks he’s in control of his vehicle, each thinks he has a separate destination, but Slothrop knows better. The drivers are out tonight because They need them where they are, forming a deadly barrier. 🔗

id794370527

For this crew, nostalgia is like seasickness: only the hope of dying from it is keeping them alive. 🔗

id794370585

Nobody was yelling. The conversation in the steel space that night was full of quiet damped ss and palatal ys, the peculiar, reluctant poignancy of Argentine Spanish, brought along through years of frustrations, self-censorship, long roundabout evasions of political truth—of bringing the State to live in the muscles of your tongue, in the humid intimacy just inside your lips… pero ché, no sós argentino 🔗

id794376536

He’s more useful running around the Zone thinking he’s free, but he’d be better off locked up somewhere. He doesn’t even know what his freedom is, much less what it’s worth. So I get to fix the price, which doesn’t matter to begin with.” 🔗

id794377432

Or has he by way of the language caught the German mania for name-giving, dividing the Creation finer and finer, analyzing, setting namer more hopelessly apart from named, even to bringing in the mathematics of combination, tacking together established nouns to get new ones, the insanely, endlessly diddling play of a chemist whose molecules are words… 🔗

id794383892

“The light came from above and below at the same time, so that everyone had two shadows: Cain’s and Abel’s 🔗

id794384354

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… 🔗

id794384379

Nostalgia. The pain of a return home. 🔗

id794384616

All Margherita’s chains and fetters are chiming, black skirt furled back to her waist, stockings pulled up tight in classic cusps by the suspenders of the boned black rig she’s wearing underneath. 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! Consider cathedral spires, holy minarets, the crunch of trainwheels over the points as you watch peeling away the track you didn’t take… mountain peaks rising sharply to heaven, such as those to be noted at scenic Berchtesgaden… the edges of steel razors, always holding potent mystery… rose thorns that prick us by surprise… even, according to the Russian mathematician Friedmann, the infinitely dense point from which the present Universe expanded… In each case, the change from point to no-point carries a luminosity and enigma at which something in us must leap and sing, or withdraw in fright. Watching the A4 pointed at the sky—just before the last firing-switch closes—watching that singular point at the very top of the Rocket, where the fuze is… Do all these points imply, like the Rocket’s, an annihilation? What is that, detonating in the sky above the cathedral? beneath the edge of the razor, under the rose? 🔗

id794385902

The plaster witch, wire mesh visible at her breasts and haunches, leans near the oven, her poke at corroded Hansel in perpetual arrest. Gretel’s eyes lock wide open, never a blink, crystal-heavy lashes batting at the landings of guerrilla winds from the sea. 🔗

id794386163

pressures of Fate or crowd hydrodynamics 🔗

id794386273

Other police came running as some dancers run, elbows close to sides, forearms thrusting out at an angle. 🔗

id794386625

The A4 operational-at-last hadn’t crept up on him. Its coming true was no climax. That hadn’t ever been the point.
“They’re using you to kill people,” Leni told him, as clearly as she could. “That’s their only job, and you’re helping them.”
“We’ll all use it, someday, to leave the earth. To transcend.”
She laughed. “Transcend,” from Pökler?
“Someday,” honestly trying, “they won’t have to kill. Borders won’t mean anything. We’ll have all outer space…” 🔗

id794387659

No one could really claim credit 100% for any idea, it was a corporate intelligence at work, specialization hardly mattered, class lines even less. The social spectrum ran from von Braun, the Prussian aristocrat, down to the likes of Pökler, who would eat an apple in the street—yet they were all equally at the Rocket’s mercy: not only danger from explosions or falling hardware, but also its dumbness, its dead weight, its obstinate and palpable mystery 🔗

id794388058

The Rocket for this Fahringer was a fat Japanese arrow. It was necessary in some way to become one with Rocket, trajectory, and target—“not to will it, but to surrender, to step out of the role of firer. The act is undivided. You are both aggressor and victim, rocket and parabolic path and…” 🔗

id794388256

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. 🔗

id794389084

The fear of extinction named Pökler knew it was the Rocket, beckoning him in. If he also knew that in something like this extinction he could be free of his loneliness and his failure, still he wasn’t quite convinced… So he hunted, as a servo valve with a noisy input will, across the Zero, between the two desires, personal identity and impersonal salvation. 🔗

id794389274

But to get a dependable working motor, one the military could use in the field to kill people, the real engineering problem now was to keep things as simple as possible. 🔗

id794389386

In the daily rushes you would watch the frames at around 3000 feet, where the model broke through the speed of sound. There has been this strange connection between the German mind and the rapid flashing of successive stills to counterfeit movement, for at least two centuries—since Leibniz, in the process of inventing calculus, used the same approach to break up the trajectories of cannonballs through the air. And now Pökler was about to be given proof that these techniques had been extended past images on film, to human lives. 🔗

id794389615

So, to stand between him and this impossible return, he had his anger—to preserve him from love he couldn’t really risk. 🔗

id794390850

It was nice of Jung to give us the idea of an ancestral pool in which everybody shares the same dream material. But how is it we are each visited as individuals, each by exactly and only what he needs? Doesn’t that imply a switching-path of some kind? a bureaucracy? Why shouldn’t the IG go to séances? They ought to be quite at home with the bureaucracies of the other side. 🔗

id794391407

Kekulé dreams the Great Serpent holding its own tail in its mouth, the dreaming Serpent which surrounds the World. But the meanness, the cynicism with which this dream is to be used. The Serpent that announces, “The World is a closed thing, cyclical, resonant, eternally-returning,” is to be delivered into a system whose only aim is to violate the Cycle. Taking and not giving back, demanding that “productivity” and “earnings” keep on increasing with time, the System removing from the rest of the World these vast quantities of energy to keep its own tiny desperate fraction showing a profit: and not only most of humanity—most of the World, animal, vegetable and mineral, is laid waste in the process. The System may or may not understand that it’s only buying time. And that time is an artificial resource to begin with, of no value to anyone or anything but the System, which sooner or later must crash to its death, when its addiction to energy has become more than the rest of the World can supply, dragging with it innocent souls all along the chain of life. Living inside the System is like riding across the country in a bus driven by a maniac bent on suicide 🔗

id794391782

over your own seat, where there ought to be an advertising plaque, is instead a quote from Rilke: “Once, only once…” One of Their favorite slogans. No return, no salvation, no Cycle—that’s not what They, nor Their brilliant employee Kekulé, have taken the Serpent to mean. 🔗

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“who, sent, the Dream?” 🔗

id794391912

we had been given certain molecules, certain combinations and not others… we used what we found in Nature, unquestioning, shamefully perhaps—but the Serpent whispered, ‘They can be changed, and new molecules assembled from the debris of the given 🔗

id794392100

(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…) 🔗

id794405635

In a corporate State, a place must be made for innocence, and its many uses. In developing an official version of innocence, the culture of childhood has proven invaluable. Games, fairy-tales, legends from history, all the paraphernalia of make-believe can be adapted and even embodied in a physical place, such as at Zwölfkinder. 🔗

id794418736

Whoever carried on the real business of the town—it could not have been children—they were well hidden. 🔗

id794424345

She, or They, let him off. “Oh,” with a shrug, “who wants to live on the Moon?” They never brought it up again. 🔗

id794426387

So it has gone for the six years since. A daughter a year, each one about a year older, each time taking up nearly from scratch. The only continuity has been her name, and Zwölfkinder, and Pokler’s love—love something like the persistence of vision, for They have used it to create for him the moving image of a daughter, flashing him only these summertime frames of her, leaving it to him to build the illusion of a single child… what would the time scale matter, a 24th of a second or a year (no more, the engineer thought, than in a wind-tunnel, or an oscillograph whose turning drum you could speed or slow at will…)? 🔗

id794427401

seen the true profile of the Rocket warped and travestied, a rocket of wax, humped like a dolphin at around caliber 2, necking down toward the tail which was then stretched up, impossibly, in a high point with a lower shoulder aft of it—and seen how his own face might be plotted, not in light but in net forces acting upon it from the flow of Reich and coercion and love it moved through… and known that it must suffer the same degradation, as death will warp face to skull 🔗

id794427580

A strange gradient of death and wreckage, south to north, in which the poorest and most helpless got it worst—as, indeed, the gradient was to run east to west, in London a year later when the rockets began to fall. 🔗

id794430805

The airburst, if it happens, will be in visual range. Abstractions, math, models are fine, but when you’re down to it and everybody’s hollering for a fix, this is what you do: you go and sit exactly on the target with indifferent shallow trenches for shelter, and you watch it in the silent fire-bloom of its last few seconds, and see what you will see. Chances are astronomically against a perfect hit, of course, that is why one is safest at the center of the target area. 🔗

id794430955

But inside Pökler’s life, on no record but his soul, his poor harassed German soul, the time base has lengthened, and slowed: the Perfect Rocket is still up there, still descending. He still waits—even now, alone at Zwölfkinder waiting for “Ilse,” for this summer’s return, and with it an explosion that will take him by surprise 🔗

id794431359

They had sold him convenience, so much of it, all on credit, and now They were collecting. 🔗

id794432453

Ilse gazed back at him, no tears, eyes room after room strung into the shadows of an old prewar house he could wander for years, hearing voices and finding doors, hunting himself, his life as it might have been… He could not bear indifference from her. 🔗

id794433933

each face so perfect, so individual, the lips stretched back into death-grins, a whole silent audience caught at the punch line of the joke… and the living, stacked ten to a straw mattress, the weakly crying, coughing, losers… All his vacuums, his labyrinths, had been the other side of this. While he lived, and drew marks on paper, this invisible kingdom had kept on, in the darkness outside… all this time… Pökler vomited. He cried some. 🔗

id794718490

If there is something comforting—religious, if you want—about paranoia, there is still also anti-paranoia, where nothing is connected to anything, a condition not many of us can bear for long. 🔗

id794718951

The smooth-faced Custodian of the Night hovers behind neutral eyes and smile, coiled and pale over the city, humming its hoarse lullabies. 🔗

id794722842

how can Slothrop just walk down into such a schizoid throat? Why, because it is what the guardian and potent Studio wants from him, natürlich: Slothrop is the character juvenile tonight: what’s kept him moving the whole night, him and the others, the solitary Berliners who come out only in these evacuated hours, belonging and going noplace, is Their unexplained need to keep some marginal population in these wan and preterite places, certainly for economic though, who knows, maybe emotional reasons too… 🔗

id794730943

“Rocketman! Spaceman! Welcome to our virgin planet. We only want to be left in some kind of peace here, O.K.? If you kill us, don’t eat us. If you eat, don’t digest. Let us come out the other end again, like diamonds in the shit of smugglers 🔗

id794731877

dodecaphonic 🔗

id794732435

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 🔗

id794732949

Säure really turns out to be an adept at the difficult art of papyromancy, the ability to prophesy through contemplating the way people roll reefers—the shape, the licking pattern, the wrinkles and folds or absence thereof in the paper. “You will soon be in love,” sez Säure, “see, this line here.”
“It’s long, isn’t it? Does that mean—”
“Length is usually intensity. Not time.” 🔗

id794736039

“Son,” a falling tower of words tumbling over and over themselves 🔗

id794736864

It is the warm, romantic summer of ’45, and surrender or not, the culture of death still prevails: what Grandmother called “a crime of passion” has become, in the absence of much passion over anything today, the technique of preference in resolving interpersonal disputes. 🔗

id794737005

He will look at his chalk hands, and along the borders of each finger, darkness will gutter and leap. 🔗

id794737721

This dream will not leave him. 🔗

id794766729

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. 🔗

id794770067

Does no one recognize what enslavement gravity is till he reaches the interface of the thunder? 🔗

id794778361

It is not clear if Thanatz has been thinking about his answer. “Yes, fueled, alive, ready for firing… fifty feet high, trembling… and then the fantastic, virile roar. Your ears nearly burst. Cruel, hard, thrusting into the virgin-blue robes of the sky, my friend. Oh, so phallic. Wouldn’t you say?” 🔗

id794778446

coloratura 🔗

id794778691

a tall Swiss divorcée in tight-laced leather corselette and black Russian boots, undoes the top of her friend’s gown and skillfully begins to lash at her bared breasts with the stems of half a dozen roses, red as the beads of blood which spring up and soon are shaking off the ends of her stiff nipples to splash into the eager mouth of another Wend who’s being jerked off by a retired Dutch banker sitting on the deck 🔗

id794778941

A girl with an enormous glass dildo inside which baby piranhas are swimming in some kind of decadent lavender medium amuses herself between the buttocks of a stout transvestite in lace stockings and a dyed sable coat. 🔗

id794778970

The sun is still hours away, down the vast unreadable underslope of Russia. Fog closes in, and the engines slow. Wrecks slide away under the keel of the white ship. Springtime corpses caught in the wreckage twist and flow as the Anubis moves by overhead. Under the bowsprit, the golden jackal, the only being aboard that can see through the fog, stares ahead, down the river, toward Swinemünde. 🔗

id794779844

he was somehow, actually, well, inside his own cock. If you can imagine such a thing. Yes, inside the metropolitan organ entirely, all other colonial tissue forgotten and left to fend for itself 🔗

id794781649

Her look now—this deepening arrest—has already broken Slothrop’s seeing heart: has broken and broken, that same look swung as he drove by, thrust away into twilights of moss and crumbling colony, of skinny clouded-cylinder gas pumps, of tin Moxie signs gentian and bittersweet as the taste they were there to hustle on the weathered sides of barns, looked for how many Last Times up in the rearview mirror, all of them too far inside metal and combustion, allowing the days’ targets more reality than anything that might come up by surprise, by Murphy’s Law, where the salvation could be… Lost, again and again, past poor dambusted and drowned Becket, up and down the rut-brown slopes, the hayrakes rusting in the afternoon, the sky purple-gray, dark as chewed gum, the mist starting to make white dashes in the air, aimed earthward a quarter, a half inch… she looked at him once, of course he still remembers, from down at the end of a lunchwagon counter, grill smoke working onto the windows patient as shoe grease against the rain for the plaid, hunched-up leaky handful inside, off the jukebox a quick twinkle in the bleat of a trombone, a reed section, planting swing notes precisely into the groove between silent midpoint and next beat, jumping it pah (hm) pah (hm) pah so exactly in the groove that you knew it was ahead but felt it was behind, both of you, at both ends of the counter, could feel it, feel your age delivered into a new kind of time that may have allowed you to miss the rest, the graceless expectations of old men who watched, in bifocal and mucus indifference, watched you lindy-hop into the pit by millions, as many millions as necessary… Of course Slothrop lost her, and kept losing her—it was an American requirement—out the windows of the Greyhound, passing into beveled stonery, green and elm-folded on into a failure of perception, or, in a more sinister sense, of will (you used to know what these words mean), she has moved on, untroubled, too much Theirs, no chance of a beige summer spook at her roadside… 🔗

id794810370

Distant, yes these are pretty distant. Sure they are. Too much closer and it begins to hurt to bring her back. But there is this Eurydice-obsession, this bringing back out of … though how much easier just to leave her there, in fetid carbide and dead-canary soups of breath and come out and have comfort enough to try only for a reasonable fascimile—“Why bring her back? Why try? It’s only the difference between the real boxtop and the one you draw for Them.” No. How can he believe that? It’s what They want him to believe, but how can he? No difference between a boxtop and its image, all right, their whole economy’s based on that … but she must be more than an image, a product, a promise to pay… 🔗

id795089794

Wars have a way of overriding the days just before them. In the looking back, there is such noise and gravity. But we are conditioned to forget. So that the war may have more importance, yes, but still… isn’t the hidden machinery easier to see in the days leading up to the event? There are arrangements, things to be expedited… and often the edges are apt to lift, briefly, and we see things we were not meant to 🔗

id795090679

oneiric 🔗

id795091874

across the golf links, the day’s last white-mustached men struggling up out of traps and hazards, their caddies standing at allegorical attention in the glow of the sunset, the bundled clubs in Fascist silhouette 🔗

id795094444

conviviality 🔗

id795094760

crystal birds flying up into forests of nose hair 🔗

id795566731

Out on the river the rain lashes: the rapids can now be heard approaching, still impossible to see, but real, and inevitable. And the doubles both experience an odd, ticklish fear now that perhaps they are really lost, and that there is really no camera on shore behind the fine gray scribbling of willows… all the crew, sound-men, grips, gaffers have left… or never even arrived… and what was that the currents just brought to knock against our snow-white cockle shell? and what was that thud, so stiffened and so mute? 🔗

id795569807

There was an abyss between my feet. Things, memories, no way to distinguish them any more, went tumbling downward through my head. A torrent. I was evacuating all these, out into some void… from my vertex, curling, bright-colored hallucinations went streaming… baubles, amusing lines of dialogue, objets d’art… I was letting them all go. Holding none. Was this ‘submission,’ then—letting all these go? 🔗

id795575250

he knows as well as he has to that it’s the S-Gerät after all that’s following him, it and the pale plastic ubiquity of Laszlo Jamf. That if he’s been seeker and sought, well, he’s also baited, and bait. 🔗

id795575293

They knew Slothrop would jump for it. Looks like there are sub-Slothrop needs They know about, and he doesn’t: this is humiliating on the face of it, but now there’s also the even more annoying question, What do I need that badly? 🔗

id795575426

Dowsing Rockets is a gift, and he had it, suffered from it, trying to fill his body to the pores and follicles with ringing prurience… to enter, to be filled… to go hunting after… to be shown… to begin to scream… to open arms legs mouth asshole eyes nostrils without a hope of mercy to its intention waiting in the sky paler than dim commercial Jesus 🔗

id795575531

He is growing less anxious about betraying those who trust him. He feels obligations less immediately. There is, in fact, a general loss of emotion, a numbness he ought to be alarmed at, but can’t quite…
Can’t … 🔗

id795579023

“Same problems of control. But more intense. As to some musical ears, dissonance is really a higher form of consonance. 🔗

id795579173

and pawns, even those that reach the final row, are condemned to creep in two dimensions, and no Tower will ever rise or descend—no 🔗

id795581616

Springer shrugs. “Be compassionate. But don’t make up fantasies about them. Despise me, exalt them, but remember, we define each other. Elite and preterite, we move through a cosmic design of darkness and light, and in all humility, I am one of the very few who can comprehend it in toto. Consider honestly therefore, young man, which side you would rather be on. While they suffer in perpetual shadows, it’s… always—”
BRIGHT DAYS (FOX-TROT) 🔗

id795582350

stevedoring 🔗

id795582549

pince-nez 🔗

id795584920

“Tchitcherine is a complex man. It’s almost as if… he thinks of Enzian as… another part of him—a black version of something inside himself. A something he needs to… liquidate.” 🔗

id795586161

There’s a late time of day when all shadows are thrown along the same east-northeast bearing as the test rockets were always fired out to sea from Peenemünde. The exact clock time, which varies through the year, is known as Rocket Noon… and the sound that must at that moment fill the air for its devout can only be compared with a noontime siren the whole town believes in… and guts resonate, hard as stone… 🔗

id795586352

In the Tarot he is known as The Fool, but around the Zone here they call him Slick. It’s 1945. Still early, still innocent. Some of it is). 🔗

id795587069

There is some excitement amidships. The Russians have thrown back a tarp to reveal the chimps, who are covered with vomit, and have also broken into the vodka. Haftung blinks and shudders. Wolfgang is on his back, sucking at a gurgling bottle he is clutching with his feet. Some of the chimps are docile, others are looking for a fight. 🔗

id795587480

Slothrop finds himself between Otto and Närrisch, being pushed ashore over the brow by soldiers chasing after chimps or girls, or trying to wrangle the cargo ashore. 🔗

id795591163

There’s singing from the barracks, and someplace a radio. The evening news from somewhere. Too far to hear the words or even the language, only the studious monotone: the news, Slothrop, going on without you 🔗

id795592597

“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… 🔗

id795592898

peripatetic 🔗

id795592950

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. 🔗

id795595059

Slothrop slides out of his tux. “Just see you don’t get a hardon here now, fella.”
“I’m serious. It’s your Schwarzphänomen.”
“Quit fooling.”
“You don’t even know about it. It choreographs you. Mine’s always trying to destroy me. We should be exchanging those, instead of uniforms.” 🔗

id795606205

The idea was always to carry along a fixed quantity, A. 🔗

id795606281

There we saw how we had to fit in… the machinery itself determined that… everything was so clear then, paranoia was all for the enemy, and never for one’s own… 🔗

id795606976

casuistry 🔗

id795607534

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. 🔗

id795607877

This serpentine slag-heap he is just about to ride into now, this ex-refinery, Jamf Ölfabriken Werke AG, is not a ruin at all. It is in perfect working order. Only waiting for the right connections to be set up, to be switched on… modified, precisely, deliberately by bombing that was never hostile, but part of a plan both sides—“sides?”—had always agreed on… yes and now what if we—all right, say we are supposed to be the Kabbalists out here, say that’s our real Destiny, to be the scholar-magicians of the Zone, with somewhere in it a Text, to be picked to pieces, annotated, explicated, and masturbated till it’s all squeezed limp of its last drop… 🔗

id795608082

the bombing was the exact industrial process of conversion, each release of energy placed exactly in space and time, each shock-wave plotted in advance to bring precisely tonight’s wreck into being thus decoding the Text, thus coding, recoding, redecoding the holy Text… 🔗

id795608118

It means this War was never political at all, the politics was all theatre, all just to keep the people distracted… secretly, it was being dictated instead by the needs of technology… by a conspiracy between human beings and techniques, by something that needed the energy-burst of war, crying, “Money be damned, the very life of [insert name of Nation] is at stake,” but meaning, most likely, dawn is nearly here, I need my night’s blood, my funding, funding, ahh more, more… The real crises were crises of allocation and priority, not among firms—it was only staged to look that way—but among the different Technologies, Plastics, Electronics, Aircraft, and their needs which are understood only by the ruling elite… 🔗

id795608300

“All very well to talk about having a monster by the tail, but do you think we’d’ve had the Rocket if someone, some specific somebody with a name and a penis hadn’t wanted to chuck a ton of Amatol 300 miles and blow up a block full of civilians? Go ahead, capitalize the T on technology, deify it if it’ll make you feel less responsible—but it puts you in with the neutered, brother, in with the eunuchs keeping the harem of our stolen Earth for the numb and joyless hardons of human sultans, human elite with no right at all to be where they are—” 🔗

id795609218

We have to look for power sources here, and distribution networks we were never taught, routes of power our teachers never imagined, or were encouraged to avoid… we have to find meters whose scales are unknown in the world, draw our own schematics, getting feedback, making connections, reducing the error, trying to learn the real function… zeroing in on what incalculable plot? 🔗

id795609677

The Moss Creature stirs. 🔗

id795610504

“Don’t sweet-talk me,” Christian explodes, “you don’t care about me, you don’t care about my sister, she’s dying out there and you just keep plugging her into your equations—you—play this holy-father routine and inside that ego you don’t even hate us, you don’t care, you’re not even connected any more—” He swings his fist at Enzian’s face. He’s crying.
Enzian stands there and lets him. It hurts. He lets it. His meekness isn’t all politics, either. He can feel enough of the bone truth in what Christian said—maybe not all of it, not all at once, but enough.
“You just connected. Can we go after her, now?” 🔗

id795639200

Her white hair in filaments of foam, her cheeks sculptured fog… cloudman, fogwife, they dwindle, aloof, silent, back into the heart of the storm. 🔗

id796355514

Say that Basil Rathbone stands for young Osbie himself. S. Z. Sakall may be Mr. Pointsman, and the Midget sheriff the whole dark grandiose Scheme, wrapped in one small package, diminished, a clear target. Pointsman argues that it’s real, but Osbie knows better. Pointsman ends up in the stagnant trough, and the plot/Midget vanishes, frightened, into the dust. A prophecy. A kindness. 🔗

id796357256

He’s been up for three days. He beams at Katje, a sunburst in primary colors spiking out from his head 🔗

id796357606

Dear Mom, I put a couple of people in Hell today… 🔗

id796360448

pantechnicons 🔗

id796360487

saccharomaniac 🔗

id796360597

labyrinthine 🔗

id796360927

insouciant 🔗

id796361778

Here to say that critical mass cannot be ignored. Once the technical means of control have reached a certain size, a certain degree of being connected one to another, the chances for freedom are over for good. The word has ceased to have meaning. 🔗

id796362390

“I think that there is a terrible possibility now, in the World. We may not brush it away, we must look at it. It is possible that They will not die. That it is now within the state of Their art to go on forever—though we, of course, will keep dying as we always have. Death has been the source of Their power. It was easy enough for us to see that. If we are here once, only once, then clearly we are here to take what we can while we may. If They have taken much more, and taken not only from Earth but also from us—well, why begrudge Them, when they’re just as doomed to die as we are? All in the same boat, all under the same shadow… yes… yes. But is that really true? Or is it the best, and the most carefully propagated, of all Their lies, known and unknown?
“We have to carry on under the possibility that we die only because They want us to: because They need our terror for Their survival. We are their harvests… 🔗

id796362614

“It must change radically the nature of our faith. To ask that we keep faith in Their mortality, faith that They also cry, and have fear, and feel pain, faith They are only pretending Death is Their servant—faith in Death as the master of us all—is to ask for an order of courage that I know is beyond my own humanity, though I cannot speak for others… But rather than make that leap of faith, perhaps we will choose instead to turn, to fight: to demand, from those for whom we die, our own immortality. They may not be dying in bed any more, but maybe They can still die from violence. If not, at least we can learn to withhold from Them our fear of Death. For every kind of vampire, there is a kind of cross. And at least the physical things They have taken, from Earth and from us, can be dismantled, demolished—returned to where it all came from.
“To believe that each of Them will personally die is also to believe that Their system will die—that some chance of renewal, some dialectic, is still operating in History. To affirm Their mortality is to affirm Return. I have been pointing out certain obstacles in the way of affirming Return…” It sounds like a disclaimer, and the priest sounds afraid. 🔗

id796362955

The man is actively at peace, in the way of a good samurai—each time he engages Them fully expecting to die, without apprehension or remorse. 🔗

id796363101

At the moment I’m involved with the ‘Nature of Freedom’ drill you know, wondering if any action of mine is truly my own, or if I always do only what They want me to do… regardless of what I believe, you see… 🔗

id796363835

“You hear? ‘Used to work.’ That’s rich, that is. No one has ever left the Firm alive, no one in history—and no one ever will.” 🔗

id796363877

“I can’t even trust myself? can I. How much freer than that can a man be? If he’s to be sold out by anyone? even by himself you see?” 🔗

id796363939

But he understands where he is, now. It will be possible, after all, to die in obscurity, without having helped a soul: without love, despised, never trusted, never vindicated—to stay down among the Preterite, his poor honor lost, impossible to locate or to redeem. 🔗

id796364290

He holds out to her the ball of taffy he’s been carrying, boobish as young Porky Pig holding out the anarchist’s ticking bomb to him. But there’s to be no sweetness. They are here instead to trade some pain and a few truths, but all in the distracted style of the period 🔗

id796364856

“But that’s the only medium we’ve got now,” he cries, “our gift for bad faith. We’ll have to build everything with it… deal it, as the prosecutors deal you your freedom.” 🔗

id796366119

horny Anonymous’s intentions are nothing less than a megalomaniac master plan of sexual love with every individual one of the People in the World—and that when every one, somewhat miraculously, is accounted for at last, that will be a rough definition of “loving the People.” 🔗

id796366151

milieux 🔗

id796367282

And they do dance: though Pirate never could before, very well… they feel quite in touch with all the others as they move, and if they are never to be at full ease, still it’s not parade rest any longer… so they dissolve now, into the race and swarm of this dancing Preterition, and their faces, the dear, comical faces they have put on for this ball, fade, as innocence fades, grimly flirtatious, and striving to be kind… 🔗

id796371435

eyes much older than what’s forced them into moving 🔗

id796371724

streaming over the surface of the Imperial cauldron 🔗

id796372246

“stripped by the SS, Bruder, ja, every fucking potato field, and what for? Alcohol. Not to drink, no, alcohol for the rockets. Potatoes we could have been eating, alcohol we could have been drinking. It’s unbelievable.” “What, the rockets?” “No! The SS, picking potatoes!” 🔗

id796373230

so the populations move, across the open meadow, limping, marching, shuffling, carried, hauling along the detritus of an order, a European and bourgeois order they don’t yet know is destroyed forever. 🔗

id796374038

Slothrop’s intensely alert to trees, finally. When he comes in among trees he will spend time touching them, studying them, sitting very quietly near them and understanding that each tree is a creature, carrying on its individual life, aware of what’s happening around it, not just some hunk of wood to be cut down. 🔗

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Of course he took it as a parable—knew that the squealing bloody horror at the end of the pike was in exact balance to all their happy sounds, their untroubled pink eyelashes and kind eyes, their smiles, their grace in crosscountry movement. 🔗

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William felt that what Jesus was for the elect, Judas Iscariot was for the Preterite. Everything in the Creation has its equal and opposite counterpart. How can Jesus be an exception? could we feel for him anything but horror in the face of the unnatural, the extracreational? Well, if he is the son of man, and if what we feel is not horror but love, then we have to love Judas too. 🔗

id796379316

maybe that anarchist he met in Zürich was right, maybe for a little while all the fences are down, one road as good as another, the whole space of the Zone cleared, depolarized, and somewhere inside the waste of it a single set of coordinates from which to proceed, without elect, without preterite, without even nationality to fuck it up… 🔗

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Some part of her is always blurred, too quick for the shutter. Even knowing when she was a baby what they’d be in for someday, still Ludwig has always loved her. 🔗

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He dreams of the generations of cannon fodder, struggling forward on their knees, one by one, to kiss his stomach while he gobbles turkey legs and ice-cream cones and wipes his fingers off in the polliwogs’ hair. Officially he is one of the American industrialists out here with the T-Force, scouting German engineering, secret weaponry in particular. 🔗

id796381266

dipsomaniac 🔗

id796381448

Chiclitz screaming out the window admonitions like “Fuck not with the Kid, lest instead of fucker thou become fuckee,” which takes a while and draws only a few bewildered Fascist salutes from old ladies and little children at the roadside. 🔗

id796382453

“Entlüftung, these are the female letters. North letters. In our villages the women lived in huts on the northern half of the circle, the men on the south. The village itself was a mandala. Klar is fertilization and birth, Entlüftung is the breath, the soul. Zündung and Vorstufe are the male signs, the activities, fire and preparation or building. And in the center, here, Hauptstufe. It is the pen where we kept the sacred cattle. The souls of the ancestors. All the same here. Birth, soul, fire, building. Male and female, together. 🔗

id796382644

“The four fins of the Rocket made a cross, another mandala. Number one pointed the way it would fly. Two for pitch, three for yaw and roll, four for pitch. Each opposite pair of vanes worked together, and moved in opposite senses. Opposites together. You can see how we might feel it speak to us, even if we don’t set one up on its fins and worship it. But it was waiting for us when we came north to Germany so long ago… even confused and uprooted as we were then, we knew that our destiny was tied up with its own. That we had been passed over by von Trotha’s army so that we would find the Aggregat.” 🔗

id796386620

Is your IG to be the very model of nations? 🔗

id796386890

fear would always keep him from going all the way in. He will never get further than the edge of this meta-cartel which has made itself known tonight, this Rocketstate whose borders he cannot cross… 🔗

id796684696

film and calculus, both pornographies of flight. 🔗

id796686232

Their two hearts pound, his for his danger, hers for Slothrop. 🔗

id796686343

It touches Slothrop’s own Puritan hopes for the Word, the Word made printer’s ink, dwelling along with antibodies and iron-bound breath in a good man’s blood, though the World for him be always the World on Monday, with its cold cutting edge, slicing away every poor illusion of comfort the bourgeois takes for real… 🔗

id796686882

But Slothrop only wants to lie still with her heartbeat awhile… isn’t that every paranoid’s wish? to perfect methods of immobility? 🔗

id796687518

Away they go, eggs cradled in pig mask, lady yelling, hens raising hell, pig galloping along beside. There’s a final shotgun blast, but by then they’re out of range. 🔗

id796689179

She’s still with you, though harder to see these days, nearly invisible as a glass of gray lemonade in a twilit room… still she is there, cool and acid and sweet, waiting to be swallowed down to touch your deepest cells, to work among your saddest dreams. 🔗

id796689301

That something so mutable, so soft, as a sharing of electrons by atoms of carbon should lie at the core of life, his life, struck Jamf as a cosmic humiliation. Sharing? How much stronger, how everlasting was the ionic bond—where electrons are not shared, but captured. Seized! and held! polarized plus and minus, these atoms, no ambiguities… how he came to love that clarity: how stable it was, such mineral stubbornness! 🔗

id796689464

“The lion does not know subtleties and half-solutions. He does not accept sharing as a basis for anything! He takes, he holds! He is not a Bolshevik or a Jew. You will never hear relativity from the lion. He wants the absolute. Life and death. Win and lose. Not truces or arrangements, but the joy of the leap, the roar, the blood.” 🔗

id796689792

He found delight not unlike a razor sweeping his skin and nerves, scalp to soles, in ritual submissions to the Master of this night space and of himself, the male embodiment of a technologique that embraced power not for its social uses but for just those chances of surrender, personal and dark surrender, to the Void, to delicious and screaming collapse… 🔗

id796690358

Metropolitan inventor Rothwang, King Attila, Mabuse der Spieler, Prof.-Dr. Laszlo Jamf, all their yearnings aimed the same way, toward a form of death that could be demonstrated to hold joy and defiance, nothing of bourgeois Goetzkian death, of self-deluding, mature acceptance, relatives in the parlor, knowing faces the children can always read… 🔗

id796690433

“move beyond life, toward the inorganic. Here is no frailty, no mortality—here is Strength, and the Timeless.” Then his well-known finale, as he wiped away the scrawled C—H on his chalkboard and wrote, in enormous letters, Si—N. 🔗

id796696766

Those like Slothrop, with the greatest interest in discovering the truth, were thrown back on dreams, psychic flashes, omens, cryptographies, drug-epistemologies, all dancing on a ground of terror, contradiction, absurdity.) 🔗

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the deep holes with their promises of rest that only kick you wobbling out again, always at the mercy of gravity 🔗

id796698665

XXX jug-clutching hillbillies 🔗

id796698737

all the boards of the pinball machines flashing on and off, primary colors with a touch of acid to them, flippers flipping, bells ringing, nickels pouring out of the coinboxes of the more enthusiastic, each sound and move exactly in its place in the complex ensemble. 🔗

id796698786

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… 🔗

id796699099

Non-Masons stay pretty much in the dark about What Goes On, though now and then something jumps out, exposes itself, jumps giggling back again, leaving you with few details but a lot of Awful Suspicions. Some of the American Founding Fathers were Masons, for instance. There is a theory going around that the U.S.A. was and still is a gigantic Masonic plot under the ultimate control of the group known as the Illuminati. It is difficult to look for long at the strange single eye crowning the pyramid which is found on every dollar bill and not begin to believe the story, a little. 🔗

id796699865

By the time we had the technology to make such voyages easy, we had long worded over all ability to know victory or defeat. 🔗

id796700097

To find that Gravity, taken so for granted, is really something eerie, Messianic, extrasensory in Earth’s mindbody… having hugged to its holy center the wastes of dead species, gathered, packed, transmuted, realigned, and rewoven molecules to be taken up again by the coal-tar Kabbalists of the other side, the ones Bland on his voyages has noted, taken boiled off, teased apart, explicated to every last permutation of useful magic, centuries past exhaustion still finding new molecular pieces, combining and recombining them into new synthetics 🔗

id797033774

paregoric 🔗

id797035127

“Cunt,” advises Seaman Bodine, in a calm and reasonable tone, “you are wrong. I can shoot you. Right? Now, you happen to be working for the same warm and wonderful organization that was charging fifteen cents for coffee and doughnuts, at the Battle of the fucking Bulge, if you really wanna get into who is stealing what from who.” 🔗

id797036244

What If We Don’t Want You To Find Anything? If We Don’t Want To Give You Your Discharge You’ll Just Go On Like This Forever Won’t You? Maybe We Want You Only To Keep On. You Don’t Know Do You Tyrone. What Makes You Think You Can Play As Well As We Can? You Can’t. 🔗

id797036824

“Va-len-cia-a-a,” sings Major Marvy, to the well-known tune of the same name, “Señorita, fucky-fucky, sucky-sucky sixty-ni-i-ine, la-lalala la-la la-la laaa…” dancing her in a brief two-step about the grave center of the waiting madame. 🔗

id797041422

The testicles are plopped into a bottle of alcohol.
“Souvenirs for Pointsman 🔗

id797041600

There is change, and departure: but there is also help when least looked for from the strangers of the day, and hiding, out among the accidents of this drifting Humility, never quite to be extinguished, a few small chances for mercy… 🔗

id797042467

The real question is: will they get him before he gets Enzian? All he needs is a little more time… his only hope is if they’re looking for Enzian too, or the S-Gerät, and using him the same way he thinks he’s using Slothrop 🔗

id797042798

history as it’s been laid on the world is only a fraction, an outward-and-visible fraction. That we must also look to the untold, to the silence around us, to the passage of the next rock we notice—to its aeons of history under the long and female persistence of water and air (who’ll be there, once or twice per century, to trip the shutter?), down to the lowland where your paths, human and mineral, are most likely to cross… 🔗

id797043101

The man knows his odds, the shapes of risk are intimate to him as loved bodies. Each moment has its value, its probable success against other moments in other hands, and the shuffle for him is always moment-to-moment. He can’t afford to remember other permutations, might-have-beens—only what’s present, dealt him by something he calls Chance and Graciela calls God. He will stake everything on this anarchist experiment, and if he loses, he’ll go on to something else. But he won’t hold back. 🔗

id797043953

But the life-cry of that love has long since hissed away into no more than this idle and bitchy faggotry. In this latest War, death was no enemy, but a collaborator. Homosexuality in high places is just a carnal afterthought now, and the real and only fucking is done on paper… 🔗

id797045007

4: The Counterforce
What?
—RICHARD M. NIXON 🔗

id797045705

Could it be there’s something about ad hoc arrangements, like the present mission, that must bring you in touch with the people you need to be with? that more formal adventures tend, by their nature, to separation, to loneliness? 🔗

id797046291

“Sound is a game, if you’re capable of moving that far, you adenoidal closet-visionary. That’s why I listen to Spohr, Rossini, Spontini, I’m choosing my game, one full of light and kindness. You’re stuck with that stratosphere stuff and rationalize its dullness away by calling it ‘enlightenment.’ You don’t know what enlightenment is, Kerl, you’re blinder than I am.” 🔗

id797046372

And though Earthliness forget you,
To the stilled Earth say: I flow.
To the rushing water speak: I am. 🔗

id797047251

He’s been changing, sure, changing, plucking the albatross of self now and then, idly, half-conscious as picking his nose—but the one ghost-feather his fingers always brush by is America. 🔗

id797047400

ROCKETMAN WAS HERE
His first thought was that he’d written it himself and forgot. Odd that that should’ve been his first thought, but it was. Might be he was starting to implicate himself, some yesterday version of himself, in the Combination against who he was right then. In its sluggish coma, the albatross stirred.
Past Slothrops, say averaging one a day, ten thousand of them, some more powerful than others, had been going over every sundown to the furious host. They were the fifth-columnists, well inside his head, waiting the moment to deliver him to the four other divisions outside, closing in… 🔗

id797050316

what fat-haunched gnädige Frau Death may have come sashaying in as, gets an erection, a tremendous darkpurple swelling, and just as his neck breaks, he actually comes in his ragged loin-wrapping creamy as the skin of a saint under the purple cloak of Lent, and one drop of sperm succeeds in rolling, dripping hair to hair down the dead leg, all the way down, off the edge of the crusted bare foot, drips to earth at the exact center of the crossroad where, in the workings of the night, it changes into a mandrake root. 🔗

id797050357

Heiligenschein 🔗

id797050481

Magician takes the root tenderly home, dresses it in a little white outfit and leaves money with it overnight: in the morning the cash has multiplied tenfold. A delegate from the Committee on Idiopathic Archetypes comes to visit. “Inflation?” the Magician tries to cover up with some flowing hand-moves.” ‘Capital’? Never heard of that.” “No, no,” replies the visitor, “not at the moment. We’re trying to think ahead. We’d like very much to hear about the basic structure of this. How bad was the scream, for instance?” “Had m’ears plugged up, couldn’t hear it.” The delegate flashes a fraternal business smile. “Can’t say as I blame you…” 🔗

id797050964

and now, in the Zone, later in the day he became a crossroad, after a heavy rain he doesn’t recall, Slothrop sees a very thick rainbow here, a stout rainbow cock driven down out of pubic clouds into Earth, green wet valleyed Earth, and his chest fills and he stands crying, not a thing in his head, just feeling natural… 🔗

id797050997

Crosses, swastikas, Zone-mandalas, how can they not speak to Slothrop? He’s sat in Säure Bummer’s kitchen, the air streaming with kif moirés, reading soup recipes and finding in every bone and cabbage leaf paraphrases of himself… news flashes, names of wheelhorses that will pay him off enough for a certain getaway… He used to pick and shovel at the spring roads of Berkshire, April afternoons he’s lost, “Chapter 81 work,” they called it, following the scraper that clears the winter’s crystal attack-from-within, its white necropolizing… picking up rusted beer cans, rubbers yellow with preterite seed, Kleenex wadded to brain shapes hiding preterite snot, preterite tears, newspapers, broken glass, pieces of automobile, days when in superstition and fright he could make it all fit, seeing clearly in each an entry in a record, a history: his own, his winter’s, his country’s… instructing him, dunce and drifter, in ways deeper than he can explain, have been faces of children out the train windows, two bars of dance music somewhere, in some other street at night, needles and branches of a pine tree shaken clear and luminous against night clouds, one circuit diagram out of hundreds in a smudged yellowing sheaf, laughter out of a cornfield in the early morning as he was walking to school, the idling of a motorcycle at one dusk-heavy hour of the summer 🔗

id797051448

There’s something still on, don’t call it a “war” if it makes you nervous, maybe the death rate’s gone down a point or two, beer in cans is back at last and there were a lot of people in Trafalgar Square one night not so long ago… but Their enterprise goes on. 🔗

id797051485

The sad fact, lacerating his heart, laying open his emptiness, is that Jessica believes Them. “The War” was the condition she needed for being with Roger. “Peace” allows her to leave him. His resources, next to Theirs, are too meager. 🔗

id797051610

But it’s too late. We’re at Peace. The paranoia, the danger, the tuneless whistling of busy Death next door, are all put to sleep, back in the War, back with her Roger Mexico Years. The day the rockets stopped falling, it began to end for Roger and Jessica. 🔗

id797051762

Already she’s beginning to think of their time as a chain of explosions, craziness ganged to the rhythms of the War. 🔗

id797052039

He is losing more than single Jessica: he’s losing a full range of life, of being for the first time at ease in the Creation. 🔗

id797054279

Roger has unbuttoned his fly, taken his cock out, and is now busy pissing on the shiny table, the papers, in the ashtrays and pretty soon on these poker-faced men themselves, who, although executive material all right, men of hair-trigger minds, are still not quite willing to admit that this is happening, you know, in any world that really touches, at too many points, the one they’re accustomed to… 🔗

id797054673

apoplectic 🔗

id797055122

“Of course a well-developed They-system is necessary—but it’s only half the story. For every They there ought to be a We. In our case there is. Creative paranoia means developing at least as thorough a We-system as a They-system—” 🔗

id797055268

Without any contrary set of delusions—delusions about ourselves, which I’m calling a We-system 🔗

id797055541

“That’s exactly it,” Osbie screams, belly-dancing Porky into a wide, alarming grin, “They’re the rational ones. We piss on Their rational arrangements. Don’t we… Mexico?” 🔗

id797056048

soixante-neuf 🔗

id797056160

They’ve been sleeping on your shoulder,
They’ve been crying in your beer,
And They’ve sung you all Their sad lullabies,
And you thought They wanted sympathy and didn’t care for souls,
And They never were about to put you wise.
But I’m telling you today,
That it ain’t the only way,
And there’s shit you won’t be eating any more—
They’ve been paying you to love it,
But the time has come to shove it,
And it isn’t a resistance, it’s a war. 🔗

id797056189

Light one up before you mosey out that door,
Once you cuddled ’em and kissed ’em,
But we’re bringin’ down Their system,
And it isn’t a resistance, it’s a war… 🔗

id797057086

These pine limbs, crackling so blue 🔗

id797093885

“I mean what They and Their hired psychiatrists call ‘delusional systems.’ Needless to say, ‘delusions’ are always officially defined. We don’t have to worry about questions of real or unreal. They only talk out of expediency. It’s the system that matters. How the data arrange themselves inside it. Some are consistent, others fall apart. 🔗
“Ordinarily in our behavior, we 🔗

id797381946

Where you cannot feed, you take away weapons. Weapons and food have been firmly linked in the governmental mind for as long as either has been around. 🔗

id797383340

Yes, Private, the colors change, and how! The question is, are they changing according to something? Is the sun’s everyday spectrum being modulated? Not at random, but systematically, by this unknown debris in the prevailing winds? Is there information for us? Deep questions, and disturbing ones. 🔗

id797383888

The real War is always there. The dying tapers off now and then, but the War is still killing lots and lots of people. Only right now it is killing them in more subtle ways. Often in ways that are too complicated, even for us, at this level, to trace. But the right people are dying, just as they do when armies fight. 🔗

id797386084

Cause a few Bulbs, say a million, a mere 5% of our number, are more than willing to flame out in one grand burst instead of patiently waiting out their design hours… So Byron dreams of his Guerrilla Strike Force, gonna get Herbert Hoover, Stanley Baldwin, all of them, right in the face with one coordinated blast… 🔗

id797386257

languorous 🔗

id797386784

We can’t help, this common thought humming through pastures of sleeping sheep, down Autobahns and to the bitter ends of coaling piers in the North, there’s never been anything we could do… Anyone shows us the meanest hope of transcending and the Committee on Incandescent Anomalies comes in and takes him away. Some do protest, maybe, here and there, but it’s only information, glow-modulated, harmless, nothing close to the explosions in the faces of the powerful that Byron once envisioned, back there in his Baby ward, in his innocence. 🔗

id797386844

Byron has passed 1000 hours, and the procedure now is standard: the Committee on Incandescent Anomalies sends a hit man to Berlin. 🔗

id797387558

Look at all the propaganda. It’s a moral crime. Phoebus discovered—one of the great undiscovered discoveries of our time—that consumers need to feel a sense of sin. That guilt, in proper invisible hands, is a most powerful weapon. 🔗

id797387917

Of all the legacies Bland left around, the Bulbsnatching Heresy was perhaps his grandest. It doesn’t just mean that somebody isn’t buying a bulb. It also means that same somebody is not putting any power in that socket! It is a sin both against Phoebus and against the Grid. Neither one is about to let that get out of hand. 🔗

id797388196

Through his years of survival, all these various rescues of Byron happen as if by accident. Whenever he can, he tries to instruct any bulbs nearby in the evil nature of Phoebus, and in the need for solidarity against the cartel. He has come to see how Bulb must move beyond its role as conveyor of light-energy alone. Phoebus has restricted Bulb to this one identity. “But there are other frequencies, above and below the visible band. Bulb can give heat. Bulb can provide energy for plants to grow, illegal plants, inside closets, for example. Bulb can penetrate the sleeping eye, and operate among the dreams of men.” 🔗

id797388305

Any talk of Bulb’s transcendence, of course, was clear subversion. Phoebus based everything on bulb efficiency—the ratio of the usable power coming out, to the power put in. The Grid demanded that this ratio stay as small as possible. That way they got to sell more juice. On the other hand, low efficiency meant longer burning hours, and that cut into bulb sales for Phoebus. 🔗

id797388708

Prophets traditionally don’t last long—they are either killed outright, or given an accident serious enough to make them stop and think, and most often they do pull back. But on Byron has been visited an even better fate. He is condemned to go on forever, knowing the truth and powerless to change anything. No longer will he seek to get off the wheel. His anger and frustration will grow without limit, and he will find himself, poor perverse bulb, enjoying it 🔗

id797389522

She has felt the moon in the soles of her feet, taken its tides with the surfaces of her brain. 🔗

id797390090

Having gathered also that she is the allegorical figure of Paranoia (a grand old dame, a little wacky but pure heart), she must say that she finds the jazzy vulgarity of this music a bit distressing. 🔗

id797390271

But then she must see Enzian. Their first meeting. Each in a way has been loved by Captain Blicero. Each had to arrive at some way of making it bearable, just bearable, for just long enough, one day by one… 🔗

id797390507

But Enzian risks what former lovers risk whenever the Beloved is present, in fact or in word: deepest possibilities for shame, for sense of loss renewed, for humiliation and mockery. 🔗

id797390605

“There are things to hold to. None of it may look real, but some of it is. Really.” 🔗

id797390929

We would gaze down on staff-rooms, communications centers, laboratories, clinics. I would say—”
“All this will I give you, if you will but—”
“Negative. Wrong story. I would say: This is what I have become. An estranged figure at a certain elevation and distance…” who looks out over the Raketen-Stadt in the amber evenings, with washed and darkening cloud sheets behind him—“who has lost everything else but this vantage. There is no heart, anywhere now, no human heart left in which I exist. Do you know what that feels like?” 🔗

id797391053

Whatever happened at the end, he has transcended. Even if he’s only dead. He’s gone beyond his pain, his sin—driven deep into Their province, into control, synthesis and control, further than—” well, he was about to say “we” but “I” seems better after all, “I haven’t transcended. I’ve only been elevated. That must be as empty as things get: it’s worse than being told you won’t have to die by someone you can’t believe in… 🔗

id797391806

“Because I feel,” her voice, perhaps by design, very small, “that ‘the rest’ is exactly what I ought to be doing. I don’t want to get away with some shallow win. I don’t just want to—I don’t know, pay him back for the octopus, or something. Don’t I have to know why he’s out here, what I did to him, for Them? How can They be stopped? How long can I get away with easy work, cheap exits? Shouldn’t I be going all the way in?” 🔗

id797392102

“You are meant to survive. Yes, probably. No matter how painful you want to make it for yourself, still you’re always going to come through. You’re free to choose exactly how pleasant each passage will be. Usually it’s given as a reward. I won’t ask for what. I’m sorry, but you seem really not to know. That’s why your story is saddest of all.” 🔗

id797399304

The white Anubis, gone on to salvation. Back here, in her wake, are the preterite, swimming and drowning, mired and afoot, poor passengers at sundown who’ve lost the way, blundering across one another’s flotsam, the scrapings, the dreary junking of memories—all they have to hold to—churning, mixing, rising, falling. Men overboard and our common debris… 🔗

id797399582

numinous 🔗

id797399647

Yumsy-numsy ’n’ poopsie-poo,
If I’m a degenerate, so are you… 🔗

id797399948

This is one of his earlier lessons in being preterite: he won’t escape any of the consequences he sets up for himself now, not unless it’s by accident. 🔗

id797401489

His eyes go casting runes with the windmill silhouettes. 🔗

id797401745

Zeros bearing comrades away, finally as fallen cherry-blossoms—that favorite Kamikaze image—in the spring… from Greta Erdmann, a world below the surface of Earth or mud—it crawls like mud, but cries like Earth, with layer-pressed generations of gravities and losses thereto—losses, failures, last moments followed by voids stringing back, a series of hermetic caves caught in the suffocated layers, those forever lost… 🔗

id797810883

Onward to rescue the Radiant Hour, which has been abstracted from the day’s 24 by colleagues of the Father, for sinister reasons of their own. Travel here gets complicated—a system of buildings that move, by right angles, along the grooves of the Raketen-Stadt’s street-grid. You can also raise or lower the building itself, a dozen floors per second, to desired heights or levels underground, like a submarine skipper with his periscope—although certain paths aren’t available to you. They are available to others, but not to you. Chess. Your objective is not the King—there is no King—but momentary targets such as the Radiant Hour. 🔗

id797811869

She has lost respect for humans, they are clumsy, they fail, she does want to love them but love is the only miracle that’s beyond her. Love is denied her forever. 🔗

id797811876

Maximilian’s doom is never to go any further into danger than its dapperness, its skin-exciting first feel 🔗

id797812023

Marcel really is a mechanical chessplayer. No fakery inside to give him any touch of humanity at all. 🔗

id797812579

(but look out, it can get pretty Fascist in here, behind the candy-colored sweet stuff is thermodynamic elitism at its clearest—bulbs can be replaced with candles and the radios fall silent, but the Grid’s big function in this System is iceboxery: freezing back the tumultuous cycles of the day to preserve this odorless small world, this cube of changelessness) 🔗

id797814329

THE LOW-FREQUENCY LISTENER 🔗

id797865576

Sometimes things aren’t very clear, that’s all. Things look like they’re going against us, and though it always turns out fine at the end, and we can always look back and say oh of course it had to happen that way, otherwise so-and-so wouldn’t have happened—still, while it’s happening, in my heart I keep getting this terrible fear, this empty place, and it’s very hard at such times really to believe in a Plan with a shape bigger than I can see… 🔗

id797866078

He is a white-hat in the navy of life, and that extends to vocal impressions of the fake film-lives of strangers. 🔗

id797871785

consternation 🔗

id797872475

The lover leaps in the volcano!
It’s ten feet deep,
And inactive— 🔗

id797873632

no one awake in the quiet square but the driver, the Ortsschutz sentry in some kind of brown, official-looking uniform, old Mauser at sling arms, dreaming not of the enemy outside in the swamp or shadow but of home and bed, strolling now with his civilian friend who’s off-duty, can’t sleep, under the trees full of road-dust and night, through their shadows on the sidewalks, playing a harmonica… down past the row of faces in the bus, drowned-man green, insomniac, tobacco-starved, scared, not of tomorrow, not yet, but of this pause in their night-passage, of how easy it will be to lose, and how much it will hurt… 🔗

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At least one moment of passage, one it will hurt to lose, ought to be found for every street now indifferently gray with commerce, with war, with repression… finding it, learning to cherish what was lost, mightn’t we find some way back? 🔗

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She loomed in the eastern sky gazing down at the city about to be sacrificed. The sun was in Leo. The fireburst came roaring and sovereign… 🔗

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The basic idea is that They will come and shut off the water first. The cryptozoa who live around the meter will be paralyzed by the great inbreak of light from overhead… then scatter like hell for lower, darker, wetter. Shutting the water off interdicts the toilet: with only one tankful left, you really can’t get rid of much of anything any more, dope, shit, documents, They’ve stopped the inflow/outflow and here you are trapped inside Their frame with your wastes piling up, ass hanging out all over Their Movieola viewer, waiting for Their editorial blade. Reminded, too late, of how dependent you are on Them, for neglect if not good will: Their neglect is your freedom. But when They do come on it’s like society-gig Apollos, striking the lyre
ZONGGG 🔗

id797874410

The basic idea is that They will come and shut off the water first. The cryptozoa who live around the meter will be paralyzed by the great inbreak of light from overhead… then scatter like hell for lower, darker, wetter. Shutting the water off interdicts the toilet: with only one tankful left, you really can’t get rid of much of anything any more, dope, shit, documents, They’ve stopped the inflow/outflow and here you are trapped inside Their frame with your wastes piling up, ass hanging out all over Their Movieola viewer, waiting for Their editorial blade. Reminded, too late, of how dependent you are on Them, for neglect if not good will: Their neglect is your freedom. But when They do come on it’s like society-gig Apollos, striking the lyre
ZONGGG 🔗

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apocryphal 🔗

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(1) Deep Cheap-Perfume Aquamarine, or (2) Creamy Chocolate FBI-Shoe Brown. 🔗

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the slogan of a Kamikaze unit, an Ohka outfit—it means
Injustice cannot conquer Principle,
Principle cannot conquer Law,
Law cannot conquer Power,
Power cannot conquer Heaven. 🔗

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Come into the bulbshine and sit with him, with the stranger at the small public table. It’s almost hosing-out time. See if you can sneak in under the shadow too. Even a partial eclipse is better than never finding out—better than cringing the rest of your life under the great Vacuum in the sky they have taught you, and a sun whose silence you never get to hear.
What if there is no Vacuum? Or if there is—what if They’re using it on you? What if They find it convenient to preach an island of life surrounded by a void? Not just the Earth in space, but your own individual life in time? What if it’s in Their interest to have you believing that? 🔗

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What do you think every electrofreak dreams about? You’re such an old fuddyduddy! A-and who sez it’s a dream, huh? M-maybe it exists. Maybe there is a Machine to take us away, take us completely, suck us out through the electrodes out of the skull ’n’ into the Machine and live there forever with all the other souls it’s got stored there. It could decide who it would suck out, a-and when. Dope never gave you immortality. You hadda come back, every time, into a dying hunk of smelly meat! But We can live forever, in a clean, honest, purified Electroworld—
—Shit that’s what I get, havin’ a double Virgo fer a son… 🔗

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What are the stars but points in the body of God where we insert the healing needles of our terror and longing? 🔗

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What has actually grown itself a skin of Imipolex G, depending which heresy you embrace. We need not dwell here on the Primary Problem, namely that everything below the plastic film does after all lie in the Region of Uncertainty 🔗

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in which subscript R is for Rakete, and B for Blicero. 🔗

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“The basic problem,” he proposes, “has always been getting other people to die for you. What’s worth enough for a man to give up his life? That’s where religion had the edge, for centuries. Religion was always about death. It was used not as an opiate so much as a technique—it got people to die for one particular set of beliefs about death. Perverse, natürlich, but who are you to judge? It was a good pitch while it worked. But ever since it became impossible to die for death, we have had a secular version—yours. Die to help History grow to its predestined shape. Die knowing your act will bring a good end a bit closer. Revolutionary suicide, fine. But look: if History’s changes are inevitable, why not not die? Vaslav? If it’s going to happen anyway, what does it matter?” 🔗

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To chase or worry this argument is to become word-enemies, and neither man really wants to. Oneirine theophosphate is one way around the problem. (Tchitcherine: “You mean thiophosphate, don’t you?” Thinks indicating the presence of sulfur… Wimpe: “I mean theophosphate, Vaslav,” indicating the Presence of God.) They shoot up 🔗

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mantic 🔗

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About the paranoia often noted under the drug, there is nothing remarkable. Like other sorts of paranoia, it is nothing less than the onset, the leading edge, of the discovery that everything is connected, everything in the Creation, a secondary illumination—not yet blindingly One, but at least connected, and perhaps a route In for those like Tchitcherine who are held at the edge… 🔗

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Tchitcherine means he’s had to fight to believe in his mortality. As his body fought to accept its steel. Fight down all his hopes, fight his way into that bitterest of freedoms. Not till recently did he come to look for comfort in the dialectical ballet of force, counterforce, collision, and new order—not till the War came and Death appeared across the ring, Tchitcherine’s first glimpse after the years of training: taller, more beautifully muscled, less waste motion than he’d ever expected 🔗

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The dearest nation of all is one that will survive no longer than you and I, a common movement at the mercy of death and time: the ad hoc adventure.
—Resolutions of the Gross Suckling Conference 🔗

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Trouble is, what good’s a bearing, even a mythic-symmetric bearing, without knowing where the Rocket was fired from to begin with? 🔗

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The Man has a branch office in each of our brains, his corporate emblem is a white albatross, each local rep has a cover known as the Ego, and their mission in this world is Bad Shit. We do know what’s going on, and we let it go on. As long as we can see them, stare at them, those massively moneyed, once in a while. As long as they allow us a glimpse, however rarely. We need that. And how they know it—how often, under what conditions… 🔗

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Jessica is weeping on the arm of Jeremy her gentleman, who is escorting her, stiff-armed, shaking his head at Roger’s folly, away forever. Does Roger have a second of pain right here? Yes. Sure. You would too. You might even question the worth of your cause. But there are nosepick noodles to be served up buttery and steaming, grime gruel and pustule porridge to be ladled into the bowls of a sniveling generation of future executives, pubic popovers to be wheeled out onto the terraces stained by holocaust sky or growing rigid with autumn. 🔗

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somnolence 🔗

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This is the World just before men. Too violently pitched alive in constant flow ever to be seen by men directly. They are meant only to look at it dead, in still strata, transputrefied to oil or coal. Alive, it was a threat: it was Titans, was an overpeaking of life so clangorous and mad, such a green corona about Earth’s body that some spoiler had to be brought in before it blew the Creation apart. So we, the crippled keepers, were sent out to multiply, to have dominion. God’s spoilers. Us. Counterrevolutionaries. It is our mission to promote death. The way we kill, the way we die, being unique among the Creatures. It was something we had to work on, historically and personally. To build from scratch up to its present status as reaction, nearly as strong as life, holding down the green uprising. But only nearly as strong. 🔗

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They are also losing what reality they brought here, as Gottfried lost all of his to Blicero long ago. Now the boy moves image to image, room to room, sometimes out of the action, sometimes part of it… whatever he has to do, he does. The day has its logic, its needs, no way for him to change it, leave it, or live outside it. He is helpless, he is sheltered secure. 🔗

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“America was the edge of the World. A message for Europe, continent-sized, inescapable. Europe had found the site for its Kingdom of Death, that special Death the West had invented. Savages had their waste regions, Kalaharis, lakes so misty they could not see the other side. But Europe had gone deeper—into obsession, addiction, away from all the savage innocences. America was a gift from the invisible powers, a way of returning. But Europe refused it. It wasn’t Europe’s Original Sin—the latest name for that is Modern Analysis—but it happens that Subsequent Sin is harder to atone for. 🔗

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“In Africa, Asia, Amerindia, Oceania, Europe came and established its order of Analysis and Death. What it could not use, it killed or altered. In time the death-colonies grew strong enough to break away. But the impulse to empire, the mission to propagate death, the structure of it, kept on. Now we are in the last phase. American Death has come to occupy Europe. It has learned empire from its old metropolis. But now we have only the structure left us, none of the great rainbow plumes, no fittings of gold, no epic marches over alkali seas. The savages of other continents, corrupted but still resisting in the name of life, have gone on despite everything… while Death and Europe are separate as ever, their love still unconsummated. Death only rules here. It has never, in love, become one with… 🔗

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“Is the cycle over now, and a new one ready to begin? Will our new Edge, our new Deathkingdom, be the Moon? I dream of a great glass sphere, hollow and very high and far away… the colonists have learned to do without air, it’s vacuum inside and out… it’s understood the men won’t ever return… they are all men. There are ways for getting back, but so complicated, so at the mercy of language, that presence back on Earth is only temporary, and never ‘real’ … passages out there are dangerous, chances of falling so shining and deep… Gravity rules all the way out to the cold sphere, there is always the danger of falling. Inside the colony, the handful of men have a frosty appearance, hardly solid, no more alive than memories, nothing to touch… only their remote images, black and white film-images, grained, broken year after hoarfrost year out in the white latitudes, in empty colony, with only infrequent visits from the accidental, like me… 🔗

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Fathers are carriers of the virus of Death, and sons are the infected… and, so that the infection may be more certain, Death in its ingenuity has contrived to make the father and son beautiful to each other as Life has made male and female… 🔗

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Decisions are never really made—at best they manage to emerge, from a chaos of peeves, whims, hallucinations and all-round assholery. 🔗

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Their struggle is not the only, or even the ultimate one. Indeed, not only are there many other struggles, but there are also spectators, watching, as spectators will do, hundreds of thousands of them 🔗

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But remember if you loved it. If you did, how you loved it. And how much—after all you’re used to asking “how much,” used to measuring, to comparing measurements, putting them into equations to find out how much more, how much of, how much when… and here in your common drive to the sea feel as much as you wish of that dark double-minded love which is also shame, bravado, engineers’ geopolitics—“spheres of influence” modified to toruses of Rocket range that are parabolic in section… 🔗

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it’s only the peak that we are allowed to see, the break up through the surface, out of the other silent world, violently 🔗

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and heretics there will be: Gnostics who have been taken in a rush of wind and fire to chambers of the Rocket-throne… Kabbalists who study the Rocket as Torah, letter by letter—rivets, burner cup and brass rose, its text is theirs to permute and combine into new revelations, always unfolding… Manichaeans who see two Rockets, good and evil, who speak together in the sacred idiolalia of the Primal Twins (some say their names are Enzian and Blicero) of a good Rocket to take us to the stars, an evil Rocket for the World’s suicide, the two perpetually in struggle. 🔗

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each Rocket will know its intended and hunt him, ride him a green-doped and silent hound, through our World, shining and pointed in the sky at his back, his guardian executioner rushing in, rushing closer… 🔗

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“They have lied to us. They can’t keep us from dying, so They lie to us about death. A cooperative structure of lies. What have They ever given us in return for the trust, the love—They actually say ‘love’—we’re supposed to owe Them? Can They keep us from even catching cold? from lice, from being alone? from anything? Before the Rocket we went on believing, because we wanted to. But the Rocket can penetrate, from the sky, at any given point. Nowhere is safe. We can’t believe Them any more. Not if we are still sane, and love the truth.” 🔗

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So not all lemmings go over the cliff, and not all children are preserved against snuggling into the sin of profit. To expect any more, or less, of the Zone is to disagree with the terms of the Creation. 🔗

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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. 🔗

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“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. 🔗

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“There never was a Dr. Jamf,” opines world-renowned analyst Mickey Wuxtry-Wuxtry—“Jamf was only a fiction, to help him explain what he felt so terribly, so immediately in his genitals for those rockets each time exploding in the sky… to help him deny what he could not possibly admit: that he might be in love, in sexual love, with his, and his race’s, death. 🔗

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But there is the occupation. They may already have interdicted the kids’ short cuts along with the grown-up routes. It may be too late to get home. 🔗

id798678986

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. 🔗

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If you’re wondering where he’s gone, look among the successful academics, the Presidential advisers, the token intellectuals who sit on boards of directors. He is almost surely there. Look high, not low. His future card, the card of what will come, is The World. 🔗

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what is this death but a whitening, a carrying of whiteness to ultrawhite, what is it but bleaches, detergents, oxidizers, abrasives 🔗

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There is time, if you need the comfort, to touch the person next to you, or to reach between your own cold legs… or, if song must find you, here’s one They never taught anyone to sing, a hymn by William Slothrop, centuries forgotten and out of print, sung to a simple and pleasant air of the period. Follow the bouncing ball:
There is a Hand to turn the time,
Though thy Glass today be run,
Till the Light that hath brought the Towers low
Find the last poor Pret’rite one…
Till the Riders sleep by ev’ry road,
All through our crippl’d Zone,
With a face on ev’ry mountainside,
And a Soul in ev’ry stone…
Now everybody— 🔗