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

a process by which living souls unwillingly become the demons known to the main sequence of Western magic as the Qlippoth, Shells of the Dead… It is also what the present dispensation often does to decent men and women entirely on this side of the grave.

Demonic possessions in this house are not unknown. Is this really Keith, her father? taken when she was half her present age, and returned now as not the man she knew, but only the shell—with the soft meaty slug of soul that smiles and loves, that feels its mortality, either rotted away or been picked at by the needle mouths of death-by-government—

“To the babies.” Grinning, completely mad.
“Babies, Gwenhidwy?”
“Ah. I’ve been keep-ing my own map? Plot-ting da-ta from the maternity wards. The ba-bies born during this Blitz are al-so fol-lowing a Poisson distribution, you see.”
“Well—to the oddness of it, then. Poor little bastards.”

The people out here were meant to go down first. We’re expendable: those in the West End, and north of the river are not. Oh, I don’t mean the Threat has this or that specific shape. Political, no. If the City Paranoiac dreams, it’s not accessible to us. Perhaps, the Ci-ty dreamed of another, en-emy city, float-ing across the sea to invade the es-tuary…

Here is the City Paranoiac. All these long centuries, growing over the country-side? like an intelligent creature. An actor, a fantastic mimic, Pointsman! Count-erfeiting all the correct forces? the eco-nomic, the demographic? oh yes even the ran-dom, you see.”

A silence, which prolongs itself. There is some shifting in the seats around the table, but the sets of little fingers stay in touch.
“Herr Rathenau? Could you tell me one thing?” It is Heinz Rippenstoss, the irrepressible Nazi wag and gad-about. The sitters begin to giggle, and Peter Sachsa to return to his room. “Is God really Jewish?”

“You must ask two questions. First, what is the real ‘nature of synthesis? And then: what is the real nature of control?"
“You think you know, you cling to your beliefs. But sooner or later you will have to let them go....”

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.

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.

Earth’s excrement, purged out for the ennoblement of shining steel. Passed over.