There's something powerful about flying in to America from long abroad.Take Chicago -- minutes upon minutes approaching half hour of warehouses, suburbs, saturated infrastracture, more suburbs, more warehouses, blue-specky backyard swimming pools, and then a landing still far delayed beyond what any wonderful anticipation could reasonably inflict.This is my home (not 'Homeland')
We're supposed to shit our pants and protectively devour 'selves because a few clustering and persisting mofos dropped a speck of our buildings decade ago. Anyone bother to take measure of how many buildings we still have in reserve?
Alas, too much estrogen in our tap water.
Back to brave and composed, for no other reason than that we reasonably owe taciturn composure to our grandmothers' fallen neighbors and to those quietest of surviving persisters -- both then and now.
Sudden, silent, and violent burial upon our foreign enemies. Calamitous devastation upon our wailing domestic alarmists.
What are the stars but points in the body of God where we insert the healing needles of our terror and longing? --Gravity's Rainbow
2 comments:
That part you quote in GR is quite late into the book...[redacted]
Here's an important part, earlier in the book [...]
"There doesn’t exactly dawn, no but there breaks, as that light you’re afraid will break some night at too deep an hour to explain away—there floods on
Enzian what seems to him an extraordinary understanding. This serpentine slag-heap he is just about to ride into now, this ex-refinery, Jamf Ölfabriken Werke
AG, is not a ruin at all. It is in perfect working order.Only waiting for the right connections to be set up, to be switched on . . . modified, precisely, deliberately
by bombing that was never hostile, but part of a plan both sides—”sides?”—had always agreed on . . . yes and now what if we—all right, say we are supposed to be
the Kabbalists out here, say that’s our real Destiny, to be the scholar-magicians of the Zone, with somewhere in it a Text, to be picked to pieces, annotated,
explicated, and masturbated till it’s all squeezed limp of its last drop . . . well we assumed—natürlich!—that this holy Text had to be the Rocket, orururumo
orunene the high, rising, dead, the blazing, the great one (“orunene” is already being modified by the Zone-Herero children to “omunene,” the eldest brother). . . our Torah. What else? Its symmetries, its latencies, the cuteness of it enchanted and seduced us while the real Text persisted, somewhere else, in its darkness, our darkness . . . even this far from Südwest we are not to be spared the ancient tragedy of lost messages, a curse that will never leave us. . . .
"But, if I’m riding through it, the Real Text, right now, if this is it
I get it, kinda'sadly and happily so.
Thnx
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