Authors: Thomas Pynchon
Let the chorus line perform heroically: 16 ragged staring oldtimers who shuffle aimlessly
about the stage, jerking off in unison, waggling penises in mock quarterstaffing,
brandishing in twos and threes their green-leaved poles, exposing amazing chancres
and lesions, going off in fountains of sperm strung with blood that splash over glazed
trouser-pleats, dirt-colored jackets with pockets dangling like 60-year-old breasts,
sockless ankles permanently stained with the dust of the little squares and the depopulated
streets. Let them cheer and pound their seats, let the brotherly spit flow. Tonight
the Džabajev circle have acquired, through an ill-coordinated smash-and-grab at the
home of Niederschaumdorf’s only doctor, a gigantic hypodermic syringe and needle.
Tonight they will shoot
wine.
If the police are on the way, if far down the road certain savage ears can already
pick up the rumble of an occupation convoy across the night kilometers, signaling
past sight, past the first headlamp’s faintest scattering, the approach of danger,
still no one here is likely to break the circle. The wine will operate on whatever
happens. Didn’t you wake up to find a knife in your hand, your head down a toilet,
the blur of a long sap about to smash your upper lip, and sink back down to the old
red and capillaried nap where none of this could possibly be happening? and wake again
to a woman screaming, again to the water of the canal freezing your drowned eye and
ear, again to too many Fortresses diving down the sky, again, again. . . . But no,
never real.
A wine rush: a wine rush is defying gravity, finding yourself on the elevator ceiling
as it rockets
upward
, and no way to get down. You separate in two, the basic Two, and each self is aware
of the other.
T
HE
O
CCUPATION OF
M
INGEBOROUGH
The trucks come rolling down the hill, where the State highway narrows, at about three
in the afternoon. All their headlights are on. Electric stare after stare topping
the crest of the hill, between the maple trees. The noise is terrific. Gearboxes chatter
as each truck hits the end of the grade, weary cries of “Double-clutch it, idiot!”
come from under the canvas. An apple tree by the road is in blossom. The limbs are
wet with this morning’s rain, dark and wet. Sitting under it, with anyone else but
Slothrop, is a barelegged girl, blonde and brown as honey. Her name is Marjorie. Hogan
will come home from the Pacific and court her, but he’ll lose out to Pete Dufay. She
and Dufay will have a daughter named Kim, and Kim will have her braids dipped in the
school ink-wells by young Hogan, Jr. It will all go on, occupation or not, with or
without Uncle Tyrone.
There’s more rain in the air. The soldiers are mustering by Hicks’s Garage. In the
back lot is a greasy dump, a pit, full of ball-bearings, clutch plates, and pieces
of transmission. In the parking lot below—shared with the green-trimmed candy store,
where he waited for the first slice of very yellow schoolbus to appear each 3:15 around
the corner, and knew which high-school kids were easy marks for pennies—are six or
seven old Cord automobiles, in different stages of dustiness and breakdown. Souvenirs
of young empire, they shine like hearses now in the premonition of rain. Work details
are already putting up barricades, and a scavenging party has invaded the gray clapboards
of Pizzini’s Store, standing big as a barn on the corner. Kids hanging around the
loading platform, eating sunflower seeds out of burlap sacks, listen to the soldiers
liberating sides of beef from Pizzini’s freezer. If Slothrop wants to get home from
here, he has to slide into a pathway next to the two-story brick wall of Hicks’s Garage,
a green path whose entrance is concealed behind the trash-fire of the store, and the
frame shed where Pizzini keeps his delivery truck. You cut through two lots which
aren’t platted exactly back to back, so that actually you’re skirting one fence and
using a driveway. They are both amber and black old ladies’ houses, full of cats alive
or stuffed, stained lampshades, antimacassars and doilies on all the chairs and tables,
and a terminal gloom. You have to cross a street then, go down Mrs. Snodd’s driveway
beside the hollyhocks, through a wire gate and Santora’s back yard, over the rail
fence where the hedge stops, across your own street, and home. . . .
But there is the occupation. They may already have interdicted the kids’ short cuts
along with the grown-up routes. It may be too late to get home.
B
ACK IN
D
ER
P
LATZ
Gustav and André, back from Cuxhaven, have unscrewed the reed-holder and reed from
André’s kazoo and replaced them with tinfoil—punched holes in the tinfoil, and are
now smoking hashish out of the kazoo, finger-valving the small end pa-pa-pah to carburete
the smoke—turns out sly Säure has had ex-Peenemünde engineers, propulsion-group people,
working on a long-term study of optimum hashpipe design, and guess what—in terms of
flow rate, heat-transfer, control of air-to-smoke ratio, the perfect shape turns out
to be that of the classical
kazoo!
Yeah, another odd thing about the kazoo: the knuckle-thread above the reed there is
exactly the same as a thread in a light-bulb socket. Gustav, good old Captain Horror,
wearing a liberated pair of very yellow English shooting-glasses (“Helps you find
the vein easier, I guess”), likes to proclaim this as the clear signature of Phoebus.
“You fools think the kazoo is a subversive instrument? Here—” he always packs a light
bulb on his daily rounds, no use passing up an opportunity to depress the odd dopefiend . . .
deftly screwing the light bulb flush against the reed, muting it out, “You see? Phoebus
is even behind the
kazoo.
Ha! ha! ha!” Schadenfreude, worse than a prolonged onion fart, seeps through the
room.
But what Gustav’s light bulb—none other than our friend Byron—wants to say is no,
it’s not that way at all, it’s a declaration of brotherhood by the Kazoo for all the
captive and oppressed light bulbs. . . .
There is a movie going on, under the rug. On the floor, 24 hours a day, pull back
the rug sure enough there’s that damn movie! A really offensive and tasteless film
by Gerhardt von Göll, daily rushes in fact from a project which will never be completed.
Springer just plans to keep it going indefinitely there, under the rug. The title
is
New Dope
, and that’s what it’s about, a brand new kind of dope that nobody’s ever heard of.
One of the most annoying characteristics of the shit is that the minute you take it
you are rendered incapable of ever telling anybody what it’s like, or worse, where
to get any. Dealers are as in the dark as anybody. All you can hope is that you’ll
come across somebody in the act of taking (shooting? smoking? swallowing?) some. It
is the dope that finds
you
, apparently. Part of a reverse world whose agents run around with guns which are
like vacuum cleaners operating in the direction of life—pull the trigger and bullets
are sucked back out of the recently dead into the barrel, and the Great Irreversible
is actually reversed as the corpse comes to life to the accompaniment of a backwards
gunshot (you can imagine what drug-ravaged and mindless idea of fun the daily sound
editing on this turns out to be). Titles flash on such as
GERHARDT VON GÖLL BECOMES SODIUM AMYTAL FREAK!
And here he is himself, the big ham, sitting on the toilet, a . . . well what appears
to be an unusually large infant’s training toilet, up between the sitter’s legs rises
the porcelain head of a jackal with what, embarrassingly, proves to be a
reefer
, in its rather loosely smiling mouth—“Through evil and eagles,” blithers the Springer,
“the climate blondes its way, for they are no strength under the coarse war. No not
for roguery until the monitors are there in blashing sheets of earth to mate and say
medoshnicka bleelar medoometnozz in bergamot and playful fantasy under the throne
and nose of the least merciful king. . . .” well, there is a good deal of this sort
of thing, and a good time to nip out for popcorn, which in the Platz turn out to be
morning-glory seeds popped into little stilled brown explosions. None of the regular
company here actually watch the movie under the rug much—only visitors passing through:
friends of Magda, defectors from the great aspirin factory in Leverkusen, over in
the corner there dribbling liberated cornstarch and water on each other’s naked bodies,
giggling unhealthily . . . devotees of the I Ching who have a favorite hexagram tattooed
on each toe, who can never stay in one place for long, can you guess why? Because
they always have I Ching feet! also stumblebum magicians who can’t help leaving themselves
wide open for disastrous visits from Qlippoth, Ouija-board jokesters, poltergeists,
all kinds of astral-plane tankers and feebs—yeah they’re all showing up at Der Platz
these days. But the alternative is to start keeping some out and not others, and nobody’s
ready for that. . . . Decisions like that are for some angel stationed very high,
watching us at our many perversities, crawling across black satin, gagging on whip-handles,
licking the blood from a lover’s vein-hit, all of it, every lost giggle or sigh, being
carried on under a sentence of death whose deep beauty the angel has never been close
to. . . .
W
EISSMANN’S
T
AROT
Weissmann’s Tarot is better than Slothrop’s. Here are the real cards, exactly as they
came up.
Significator: Knight of Swords
Covered by: The Tower
Crossed by: Queen of Swords
Crowning: King of Cups
Beneath: Ace of Swords
Before: 4 of Cups
Behind: 4 of Pentacles
Self: Page of Pentacles
House: 8 of Cups
Hopes and Fears: 2 of Swords
What will come: The World
He appears first with boots and insignia shining as the rider on a black horse, charging
in a gallop neither he nor horse can control, across the heath over the giant grave-mounds,
scattering the black-faced sheep, while dark stands of juniper move dreamily, death-loving,
across his path in a parallax of unhurrying fatality, presiding as monuments do over
the green and tan departure of summer, the dust-colored lowlands and at last the field-gray
sea, a prairie of sea darkening to purple where the sunlight comes through, in great
circles, spotlights on a dancing-floor.
He is the father you will never quite manage to kill. The Oedipal situation in the
Zone these days is terrible. There is no dignity. The mothers have been masculinized
to old worn moneybags of no sexual interest to anyone, and yet here are their sons,
still trapped inside inertias of lust that are 40 years out of date. The fathers have
no power today and never did, but because 40 years ago we could not kill them, we
are condemned now to the same passivity, the same masochist fantasies
they
cherished in secret, and worse, we are condemned in our weakness to impersonate men
of power our own infant children must hate, and wish to usurp the place of, and fail. . . .
So generation after generation of men in love with pain and passivity serve out their
time in the Zone, silent, redolent of faded sperm, terrified of dying, desperately
addicted to the comforts others sell them, however useless, ugly or shallow, willing
to have life defined for them by men whose only talent is for death.
Of 77 cards that could have come up, Weissmann is “covered,” that is his present condition
is set forth, by The Tower. It is a puzzling card, and everybody has a different story
on it. It shows a bolt of lightning striking a tall phallic structure, and two figures,
one wearing a crown, falling from it. Some read ejaculation, and leave it at that.
Others see a Gnostic or Cathar symbol for the Church of Rome, and this is generalized
to mean any System which cannot tolerate heresy: a system which, by its nature, must
sooner or later fall. We know by now that it is also the Rocket.
Members of the Order of the Golden Dawn believe The Tower represents victory over
splendor, and avenging force. As Goebbels, beyond all his professional verbalizing,
believed in the Rocket as an avenger.
On the Kabbalist Tree of Life, the path of The Tower connects the sephira Netzach,
victory, with Hod, glory or splendor. Hence the Golden Dawn interpretation. Netzach
is fiery and emotional, Hod is watery and logical. On the body of God, these two Sephiroth
are the thighs, the pillars of the Temple, resolving together in Yesod, the sex and
excretory organs.
But each of the Sephiroth is also haunted by its proper demons or Qlippoth. Netzach
by the Ghorab Tzerek, the Ravens of Death, and Hod by the Samael, the Poison of God.
No one has asked the demons at either level, but there may be just the wee vulnerability
here to a sensation of falling, the kind of very steep and out-of-scale fall we find
in dreams, a falling more through space than among objects. Though the different Qlippoth
can only work each his own sort of evil, activity on the path of The Tower, from Netzach
to Hod, seems to’ve resulted in the emergence of a new kind of demon (what, a dialectical
Tarot? Yes indeedyfoax! A-and if you don’t think there are Marxist-Leninist magicians
around, well
you
better think
again!
). The Ravens of Death have now tasted of the Poison of God . . . but in doses small
enough not to sicken but to bring on, like the Amanita muscaria, a very peculiar state
of mind. . . . They have no official name, but they are the Rocket’s guardian demons.
Weissmann is crossed by the Queen of his suit. Perhaps himself, in drag. She is the
chief obstacle in his way. At his foundation is the single sword flaming inside the
crown: again, Netzach, victory. In the American deck this card has come down to us
as the ace of spades, which is a bit more sinister: you know the silence that falls
on the room when it comes up, whatever the game. Behind him, moving out of his life
as an influence, is the 4 or Four of Pentacles, which shows a figure of modest property
desperately clutching on to what he owns, four gold coins—this feeb is holding two
of them down with his feet, balancing another on his head and holding the fourth tightly
against his stomach, which is ulcerous. It is the stationary witch trying to hold
her candy house against the host of nibblers out there in the dark. Moving in, before
him, comes a feast of cups, a satiety. Lotta booze and broads for Weissmann coming
soon. Good for him—although in his house he is seen walking away, renouncing eight
stacked gold chalices. Perhaps he is to be given only what he must walk away from.
Perhaps it is because in the lees of the night’s last cup is the bitter presence of
a woman sitting by a rocky shore, the Two of Swords, alone at the Baltic edge, blindfolded
in the moonlight, holding the two blades crossed upon her breasts . . . the meaning
is usually taken as “concord in a state of arms,” a good enough description of the
Zone nowadays, and it describes his deepest hopes, or fears.