Status Updates From Gravity's Rainbow

the ARF wing, in to the inner room where octopus Grigori oozes sullenly in his tank. In other rooms the dogs whine, bark shrilly in pain, whimper for a stimulus that does not, will never come,...
The reel is threaded, the lights are switched off, Grigori’s attention is directed to the screen, where an image already walks. The camera follows as she moves (Katje recursion)

“Do you know what they have in mind, down there?”
Only that they’re brewing up something that involves a giant octopus.

as for faith... he can believe only in the one steel reality of the firearm he carries.

Indeed, if they save us from hunger in this world, then beyond, in Christ’s kingdom, our salvations must be, in like measure, inextricable. Otherwise the dodoes would be only what they appear as in the world’s illusory light—only our prey. God could not be that cruel.

They are all brothers now, they and the humans who used to hunt them, brothers in Christ, the little baby they dream now of sitting near, roosting in his stable, feathers at peace, watching over him and his dear face all night long.... It is the purest form of European adventuring.

For as much as they are the creatures of God, and have the gift of rational discourse, acknowledging that only in His Word is eternal life to be found ... And there are tears of happiness in the eyes of the dodoes.

Alas, their tragedy is to be the dominant form of Life on Mauritius, but incapable of speech.”

“If the species were not such a perversion,” he wrote, “it might be profitably husbanded to feed our generations.

Frans could not know that except for a few others on the island of Reunion, these were the only dodoes in the Creation, and that he was helping exterminate a race.

The act of ramming home the charges into their musketry became for these men a devotional act, one whose symbolism they understood.

But if they were chosén 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?

Was Mauritius some first poison trickle through the sheltering dikes of Earth? Christians must stem it here, or perish in a second Flood, loosed this time not by God but by the Enemy.

To some, it made sense. They saw the stumbling birds ill-made to the point of Satanic intervention, so ugly as to embody argument against a Godly creation.

all these men were caught in the spectrum between, trapped among frequencies of their own voices and words.

When loneliness began to drive him into situations like this, he often returned to a settlement and joined a hunting party.

There they were, the silent egg and the crazy Dutchman, and the hookgun that linked them forever, framed, brilliantly motionless as any Vermeer. Only the sun moved: from zenith down at last behind the snaggleteeth of mountains to Indian ocean, to tarry night. The egg, without a quiver, still unhatched, He should have blasted it then where it lay:
(Arcs and angles and degrees)

Usually, he hunted alone. But often, after months of it, the isolation would begin to change him, change his very perceptions—the jagged mountains in full daylight, flaring as he watched into freak saffrons, streaming indigos, the sky his glass house, all the island his tulipomania.

At home, the brother skimmed the letters, some crisp, some seastained or faded, spanning years, delivered all at once—understanding very little of it, only anxious to spend the day, as usual, in the gardens and greenhouse with his tulips (a reigning madness of the time), especially one new variety named for his current mistress:

(First speculative asset bubble, the dutch tulip craze)

like my own small luminary, he wrote home to Hendrik the older brother, the ruler of my Sign

Her old, intractable vice—she wants to cross seas, to connect countries between whom there is no possible rate of exchange. Her ancestors sang, in Middle Dutch,
I love you more than one wild boar, even if it were made of fine gold.
(Translated)
love incommensurate with gold, golden calf, even in this ease golden swine.

That reached her. Pirate only asked because he’s begun to suspect, darkly, any number of Someones Over Here. But to Katje a debt is for wiping out.

Pirate is having second thoughts, is what it is. He keeps recalling that Katje now avoids all mention of the house in the forest. She has glanced into it, and out, but the truth’s crystal sheets have diffracted all her audible words—often to tears—and he can’t quite make sense of what’s spoken, much less infer to the radiant crystal itself.

“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...
“I don't know. Where would be a good place?”
“The White Visitation,’ ” Pirate suggested."
‘The White Visitation’ is fine,” she said, and stepped into the void....

The true war is a celebration of markets. Organic markets carefully styled “black” by the professionals, spring up everywhere.

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,

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.

Unlike the Captain, he has never seen her as the loyal sister who'll free him from the cage. He dreams that release, but as a dark exterior Process that will happen, no matter what any of them may want. Whether she goes or stays. So, when Katje quits the game for good, he is silent.

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.

Now he’s learning a trade, tending the rockets, and when the War ends he'll study to be an engineer.

Here he feels taken, at true ease. Without the War what could he have hoped for? But to be part of this adventure

These rockets are his pet animals, barely domesticated, often troublesome, even apt to revert. He loves them in the way he would have loved — horses, or Tiger tanks, had he pulled duty somewhere else.