Austin Meakim’s Reviews > Gravity’s Rainbow > Status Update

Oh Jessie, his face against her bare, sleeping, intricately boned and tendoned back, I’m out of my depth in this....

When we shut off the metronome, oh then he'll turn to it, sniff, try to lick it, bite it—seek, in the silence, for the stimulus that is not there.
(Beyond the zero)
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.

We're working rn with a dog...he’s been through the ‘equivalent’ phase, where any stimulus; strong or weak, calls up exactly the same number of saliva drops...and on through the ‘paradoxical’ phase—strong stimuli getting weak responses and vice versa. Yesterday we got him to go ultraparadoxical. Beyond. When we turn on the metronome that used to stand for food--...--now he turns away.

He called it a ‘point of pathological inertia.’

The scores show it clearly: 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.

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...

Roger will remember the smile—it will haunt him—as the most evil look he has ever had from a human face.

Early barbarians of Europe who ventured close enough to this coast saw these white barriers through the mist, and knew then where their deed had been taken to.

“No—not ‘strike off.’ Regress. You’re 30 years old, man. There are no ‘other angles.’ There is only forward—into it—or backward.”

“Its not my forte, of course,” ... “but there’s a feeling about that 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.”