Status Updates From Gravity's Rainbow

The only strange item, which grew strange as surveillance developed, was that he seemed to be alone. To date Slothrop has still not recorded, tagged, discovered, or liberated, a single scrap of A4 hardware or intelligence.

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…

Tchitcherine was the wolf. The minute he put on the head, in front of the mirror by the ikon, he knew himself. He was the wolf.

It is just precisamente a seagoing tower of Babel here— the torpedo? Why is he screaming about the torpedo?

There are worse foundations than a film. Did Prince Potemkins fake villages survive catharine’s Royal progress? Will the soul of the gaucho survive the mechanics of putting him into light and sound?

Since discovering that Schwartz commando are really in the zone, leading real, paracinematic lives that have nothing to do with him or the phony Schwartzcommando footage he shot last winter in England for operation black wing, Springer has been zooming around and a controlled ecstasy of megalomania. He is convinced that his film is somehow brought them into being.

“ something that antisocial?”
“ but it’s everything we believe in”…
“ but even the freest of gauchos end up selling out, you know, that’s how things are.”

It is the period of General Roca’s campaign to open the Pompas by exterminating the people who live there: turning the villages into labor camps, bringing more of the country under the control of Buenos Aires. Martin Fiero is soon sick of it. It’s against everything he knows is right. He deserts.

Keep the customer happy. Martin Fierro is not just the gaucho hero of a great Argentina epic poem. On the U-boat, he is considered an anarchist saint. Hernandez’s poem has figured in Argentine political thinking for years now— everybody everybody’s had his own interpretation,

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

“You were followed all the way.” others have grabbed Slothrops arms. High in the left one he feels something sharp, almost painless, very familiar. Before his throat can stir, he’s away, on the wheel, clutching in terror to the dwindling white point of himself, in the first wind rush of anesthesia, hovering coyly over the pit of death…

It will be six months yet before he runs into a beer advertisement featuring the six beauties and find himself rooting for a girl named Helen riickert: a blonde with a Dutch surname who will remind him dimly of someone…

Snarling inward toward that famous S curve where maniacs in white helmets and dark goggles once witched their wind faired machinery around the banked brick and shrieking drifts

Some Germans haven’t been able to get home for 10 20 years because they were caught on the wrong side of some Autobahn when it went through.

Max Schlepzig

So the Evil Hour has worked its sorcery. The wrong word was Schwartzgerat. Now the mountain has closed again thundering behind slothtop, damn near like to crush his heel, and it might just be centuries before that white woman appears again. Shit.

As the wide necropolis begins now to draw inward to neck down and stretch out into a corridor, one known to Slothrop, though not by name, a deformation of space that lurks inside his life, latent as a hereditary disease.

I’m no longer sure which of all words, images, dreams or ghosts are ‘yours’ and which are ‘mine.’ It’s past sorting out.