Status Updates From Gravity's Rainbow

“Slothrop is able to predict when a rocket will fall at a particular place, His survival to date is evidence he’s acted on advance information, and avoided the area at the time the rocket was supposed to fall.” Dr. Groast is not sure how, or even if, sex comes into it.

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.

Can a conditioned reflex survive in a man, dormant, over 20 or 30 years? Did Dr. Jamf extinguish only to zero—wait till the infant showed zero hardons in the presence of stimulus x, and then stop? Did he forget—or ignore—the “silent extinction beyond the zero”? If he ignored it, why? Did the National Research Council have anything to say about that?

Most likely he did. But as Ivan Petrovich himself said, “Not only must we speak of partial or of complete extinction of a conditioned reflex, but we must 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,”
(UHHHHHHHHHHHHH)

Now ordinarily, according to tradition in these matters, the little sucker would have been de-conditioned. Jamf would have, in Pavlovian terms, “extinguished” the hardon reflex he'd built up, before he let the baby go.

Uh, x? well, what’s x? Why, it’s the famous “Mystery Stimulus” that’s fascinated generations of behaviorial-psychology students, is what it is.

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

Pudding: We can’t, Pointsman, it’s beastly.
Pointsman: But the Americans have already been at’ him! don’t you see? It’s not as if we're corrupting a virgin or something—

Whig eccentricity is carried in this house to most unhealthy extremes.

“The subject will seek to impose structure on it. How he goes about structuring this blob, will reflect his needs, his hopes—will provide, us with clues to his dreams, fantasies, the deepest regions of his mind”

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.

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—…—lay the Füher-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:

The only issue now is survival—on through the awful interface of V-E Day, on into the bright new Postwar with senses and memories intact. PISCES must not be allowed to go down under the hammer with the rest of the bawling herd.

with the other persuasions-in-exile spread between these two wings: the balance of power, if any existed at “The White Visitation.”

“Would You Rather Be A Colonel with an Eagle on Your Shoulder, or a Private with a Chicken on Your Knee?”

well but this is just the doubtful sort of joke that Brigadier Pudding loves to play: how he’s chuckled, as unsuspecting dinner-guests go hinging into his notorious Toad-In-The-Hole, through the honest Yorkshire batter into—ugh! what is it? a beet rissolé? a stuffed beet rissolé?

On he goes, gabbing, gabbing, recipes for preparing beets in a hundred tasty ways, or such cucurbitaceous improbabilities as Ernest Pudding’s Gourd Surprise—yes, there is something sadistic about recipes with “Surprise” in the title, chap who’s hungry wants to just eat you know, not be Surprised really, just wants to bite into the (sigh) the old potato, and be reasonably sure there’s nothing inside…

The aged Brigadier himself, who just goes rambling on from the pulpit of what was a private chapel once, back there on the maniac side of the 18th century, and is now a launching platform for “The Weekly Briefings,” a most amazing volley of senile observations, office paranoia, gossip about the War which might or might not include violations of security, reminiscences of Flanders…

The cortex of Dog Vanya’s brain—is changing, in any number of ways, and that is the really peculiar thing about these transmarginal events. It no longer matters how loudly the metronome ticks. A stronger stimulus no longer gets a stronger response. The same number of drops flow or fall. The man comes and removes the metronome to the farthest corner of this muffled room.

He was pensioned off at the beginning of the Great Depression—went to sit in the study of an empty house in Devon, surrounded by photos of old comrades, none of whose gazes quite met one’s own, there to go at a spot of combinatorial analysis, that favorite pastime of retired Army officers, with a rattling intense devotion.

Ernest Pudding was brought up to believe in a literal Chain of Command, as clergymen of earlier centuries believed in the Chain of Being.

Mexico’s statisticians chart for it drops of saliva, body weights, voltages, sound levels, metronome frequencies, bromide dosages, number of afferent nerves cut, percentages of brain tissue removed, dates and hours of numbing, deafening, blinding, castration. Support even comes from Psi section, a colony dégagé and docile, with no secular aspirations at all.

—only Le Froyd’s leap, that single entertainment, up till the outbreak of this war.

“Bert is fine,” he says, and steps back into the void.

“visiting your relatives are you, how nice.”
“I can hear the Lord of the Sea,” cried Le Froyd, in wonder.
“Dear me, and what’s his name?” Both of them wetter, shouting for the wind.
“Oh I don’t know,” yells Le Froyd, “what would be a good name?”
“Bert,” suggests the constable, …
Le Froyd turns, and for the first time sees the man, and the crowd. His eyes grow round and mild.