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

The choice was between building what the Army wanted—practical hardware—or pushing on in chronic poverty, dreaming of expeditions to Venus.

“Shit,” said Leni. “They’re all in on it together. You really can’t see that, can you?”
Within the Society, the lines were drawn clear enough. Without money the Verein Fur Raumschiffahrt was suffocating—the Army had had the money, and was already financing them in roundabout ways.

“Someday,” honestly trying, “they won’t have to kill. Borders won’t mean anything. We’ll have all outer space….”
“Oh you’re blind,” spitting it as she spat his blindness at him every day,

The A4 operational-at-last hadn’t crept up on him. It’s coming true was no climax. That hadn’t ever been the point.
“They’re using you to kill people,” Leni told him, as clearly as she could. “That’s their only John’s and you’re helping them.”
“We’ll all use it, somebody’s to leave the earth. To transcend.”
She laughed “transcend,” from Pokler?

Over the years, as the Rocket neared its fullness, about to go operational, the coordinates switched from the Cartesian x and y of the laboratory to the polar azimuth and range of the weapon as he deployed: once he knelt on the lavatory floor of his old rooming house in Munich, understanding that if he faced exactly along a certain compass bearing his prayer would be heard: he’d be safe.

When he began to dream about the Rocket with some frequency, it would sometimes not be a literal rocket at all, but a street he knew was in a certain district of the city, a street in a certain small area of the grid that held something he thought he needed. The coordinates were clear in his mind, but the street eluded him.

He couldn’t talk to her—it was arguing with his own ghost from ten years ago, the same idealism, the adolescent fury—items that had charmed him once—a woman with spirit!—but which he came to see as evidence of her single-mindedness, even, he could swear, some desire to be actually destroyed…

His latest reminder of Katie… and they commence fucking, the old phony rack groaning beneath them, margarita, whispering God how you hurt me and ah max… and just as Slothrops about to come, the name of her child: strained through her perfect teeth, a clear extrusion of pain that is not in play, she cries, Bianca…..

Do all these points imply, like the Rocket’s, an annihilation?

It’s easy for non-fetishist to sneer about Pavlovian conditioning and let it go at that, but any underwear enthusiast worth his unwholesome giggle can tell you there is much more here— there is a cosmology: of nodes and cusps and points of osculation, mathematical kisses… singularities!