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

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!

Well. What happens when paranoid meets paranoid? A crossing of sollipsisms. The two patterns create a third: a moire, a new world of flowing shadows, interferences…

“Greta, somebody also thought it prudent to name me Max Schlepzig.” he shows her the pass he got from suare Bummer.
She gazes at it, then at slothrop briefly. She’s begun to tremble again. Some mixture of desire and fear. “I knew it.”
“Knew what?”
Looking away, submissive. “Knew he was dead. He disappeared in 38. They’ve been busy, haven’t they?”

Ah, we were the Reich’s Sweethearts—Greta Erdmann and Max Schlepzig, Wonderfully Together—“
“Max Schlepzig,” repeats Slothrop, goggling “quit fooling. Max Schlepzig?”
“It wasn’t his real name. Erdmann wasn’t mine. But anything with earth and it was politically safe— earth, soil, folk…a code. Which they, staring, knew how to decipher… Max had a very Jewish name, something-sky,

“ the light came from above and below at the same time, so that everyone had two shadows: Cain and Abel’s, … it was at the height of his symbolist period. Later on he began to use more natural light, to shoot more on location.