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

He envies their loneliness,their willingness to go alone,outside even a military structure,often without support or love from anyone.His own faithful network of frauleins around the zone is a compromise:he knows there’s too much comfort in it,even when the intelligence inputs are good.But the perceptible hazards of love,of attachment,are still light enough for him to accept,when balanced against what he has to do

Demanded, in his own case, that he entered the service of the rocket… beyond simple steel erection, the rocket was an entire system won, away from the feminine darkness, held against the entropy of lovable but scatterbrained mother nature: …, his first step towards citizenship in the zone. He was led to believe that by understanding the rocket he would come to understand truly his manhood.

There was no difference between the behavior of a God and the operations of pure chance.

Before his conscious memories began, something took him, in and out of his mother’s circular village far out in the Kakua Veld, at the borders of the land of death, a departure and a return… he was told about it years later.

North is death’s region. There may be no gods, but there is a pattern: names by themselves may have no magic, but the act of naming, the physical utterance, obeys the pattern.

To allow the tribal past to disperse, all memories ought to be public record, there’s no point in preserving history with that final zero to look forward to…

No white Afrikaner could quite put down the way it felt… something sinister was moving out in the veld: he was beginning to look at their faces, especially those of the women, lined beyond the thorn fences, and he knew beyond logical proof: there was a tribal mind at work out here, and it had chosen to commit suicide…

Wait, wait a minute, yes it’s karl Marx, that sly old racist, skipping away with his teeth together and his eyebrows up, trying to make believe it’s nothing but cheap labor, and overseas markets… oh, no. Colonies are much, much more. Colonies are the outhouses of the European soul, where a fellow can let his pants down and relax, enjoy the smell of his own shit.

Back in Sudwest, the aardvark hole was a powerful symbol of fertility and life. But here in the zone, its real status is not so clear.

In preterite line they have pointed her here, to be in touch with earth’s gift for Genesis. The woman feels power flooding through every gate:…
She is a seed in the Earth.
The holy aardvark has dug her bed.