Douglas Mercer
September 15 2024
Can a man have too much control?
One of the explicators of cybernetics said that “control” is a fraught word but that is just mealy mouthed fear. To be the helmsman is to be the one who steers, and the likes of Thomas Pynchon (American Novelist, American Recluse) gets caught up in an old game of so called “domination and submission”; their fear is that if (or as) we break into the new world the recurring patterns of slavery will persist. So they prefer the image of the world snake and constant flow and ouroboros, as it soothes their hippie revolutionary rhetoric. Wherever they go they see the White man as the oppressor, as keeping the dark man down, but neglect the fact that were it not for the White man all of their bold talk about “art becoming reality and reality art”, all of the “demon boxes” or “thermodynamics” would never have come to pass. That is they want to have their cake and eat it too but want to tell us “take one piece but not too much.” This is what is known as a category mistake, or a problem in sequencing. For energy might just be transformation with nothing gained nor lost but one day the supply of it will be infinite and once again thanks to the White man. As befits them with romanticism they view a reversion to the primal state of matter as an ideal but this is only enervation and a dereliction of our duty to always expand consciousness. The Germans with their rockets in their fantasies are always the fall guy and in our context are an easy and fat target—but their worries are beside the point. When it comes to it we won’t buy time, or borrow it, but control it, and no future can ever be based on the recalcitrant or the slow learners and laggards in the back of the class. Not when a screaming is about to come across the skies and the pleasure principle knows no bounds.
Thomas Pynchon is one of those great names that haunt the imagination, who overawe with seemingly encyclopedic erudition but tip over and fall to earth like one of those missiles that never make it off the ground. As a philosopher he got very warm indeed but ended up all wet. He himself said that it’s never about who says what but what is said that matters and he is right about that and his reputation is a bubble that one must blow on to see it evaporate. His initial fame was so great that early on it was speculated that Salinger wrote his books but then Salinger too scoffed at those “middle age hot rodders who insist on taking us to the moon”—as if it all was something rather pointless. Pynchon himself came from one of those good old stock New England families but he went to seed---he has become an aging hippie and rank yuppie and his wife is a great granddaughter of Theodore Roosevelt and a granddaughter of Robert Jackson, the latter or Nuremberg infamy, so he is a plugged in and paid-up member of “the system” if there ever was one. And if there is one question that haunts the halls of being it is “who are the bad guys and who are the good guys” but a short sifting through Pynchon’s shows him to be like that other aging hippie and sell out (John Lennon), a classic Yuppie New Yorker, and one who will defend to the teeth all of its worn-out shibboleths and closely guarded taboos. He made a big deal over the poor blacks of Watts when they chimped out and chastised the Germans for knocking back the nigger in Africa, and “the Jewish slave labor problem” makes a big splash in his biggest book; like any good critical race theorist or decolonialist scholar he called out the European heroism in the New World as just being a place for the White man to “rape and shit”; but behind every great fortune is a crime though in his case his crime is a paucity of imagination and a rank ingratitude. The shame of it is that Pynchon is a storied America name, mentioned in Hawthorne, but then Hawthorne was no negro lover, and one can easily imagine the author’s ancestors tut tutting about their flashy descendant even as he sends the last of his line to a private school and lives in a classic 1.7 million prewar six. He claims to fear above all the system; but here’s the thing: the Jews are now the system and he one of its most loyal servants.
I will save you the moral expense of reading his turgid and overwrought prose by going to the headline of the punch line. It’s all about rockets and rainbows you see. The rainbow (all the colors of the spectrum just like our world now!) is a kind of circle that goes back to the dewy earth. But a rocket? Well, a rocket is German and a rocket is phallic and it lusts for height and it thrusts against “old gravity?” Get it? Everyone I suppose stacks the deck to a point but his top heavy symbolism is heavy handed, something which the most High Handed finds most offensive.
“The parabolic rocket’s arc is a clear allusion the secret lusts that drive the planet itself and Those who use her.”
This is juvenile, schoolboy drivel, the kind of thing angst and acne ridden supercilious teens come up with. It boils down to “man attacks nature, and man is evil” just like those Indonesian tribesman warned us against going to the moon as it would be a violation against the principle of Divine Earth (see The Moist Star, White Biocentrism, June 30 2024). And don’t forget (he will tell you umpteen times) that the rocket is a German thing. The fact is that the earth was created for man to use, use as a stepping stone to the stars, and the earth and nature are not eternal, but our great future most definitely is.
A key word for Pynchon is Brenschluss which is “the stopping of burning” and when the rocket is subject to natural forces. This is seen by Pynchon as a “feminine” state of submission, but once again he is beholden to the hangover of the sixties, and its chastisement of patriarchy, trotting out the old tropes long past their expiration date. In essence he is an anachronism and troglodyte for all his pretension to be cutting (or bleeding) edge. It is really no more sophisticated than to see Faust as having made a bargain with the devil to plumb the secrets of nature—and end up in some sorry circle of hell. But I believe it was no less a personage than Humpty Dumpty who said to be master is all, and we did what all the king's horses and al the king's men supposedly could not do--put it all back together again.
The “holistic” ouroboros announces that the world is “closed thing, cyclical, resonant, ever returning.” But the “system” (ie, the Germans, patriarchy, the bureaucracy, however one wants to put it) according to Thomas Pynchon is geared toward violating the cycle, of “taking and not giving back, removing from the world vast quantities of energy to keep its own tiny fraction showing a Profit. The system may or may not understand that it only buying time, that sooner or later it must crash to its death, when it’s addiction to energy has become more than the rest of the World can bear, dragging along with is innocent souls all along the chain of life.”
So many errors and so little time. For here is the crux of it. In the end we will supplant addiction with addition; and when we break the bonds of nature it will not be a matter of having enough energy for who will need energy then? We will break out of fate and break out of the vicious cycle of being and bring something totally new to the world, it will be the Black Swan moment writ large when the bird of loudest lay sings her beautiful finale. Essentially Thomas “Ruggles” Pynchon is that worst of all things; a prophet hopelessly mired in the past and in a panic at what his own people have wrought, and is paralyzed and is incapable of conceiving the grand vistas and future that are to be ours. Ironically his is a scarcity model, a counsel of limits, in which homeostasis always rules; as right under his nose an inflationary model is arising out of a rupture in time when the Profits will be infinite. For if anything is true it’s that when the driver takes the helm all bets are off, and the parabola goes on an infinite arc, right out of the blue and into the wile blue yonder; and there will be no hyperbole then for it will be one lily that you can never gild. We call it the point of no return or, when all antecedents are jettisoned like the boosters of a rocket; or, more simply, our promised future.
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In Gravity’s Rainbow it said that the White man is repressed, and that as a result of this repression he views death as shit or “a stiff and rotting corpse inside the white man’s worn and private asshole.” A class act to the end, is he not? But such rot is easily controverted, all you have to do is read his book, the less than magnificent bastard. So much for him.
Risk is the game of Global Domination.
Kekulé dreams the Great Serpent holding its own tail in its mouth, the dreaming Serpent which surrounds the World. But the meanness, the cynicism with which this dream is to be used. The Serpent that announces, "The World is a closed thing, cyclical, resonant, eternally-returning," is to be delivered into a system whose only aim is to violate the Cycle. Taking and not giving back, demanding that "productivity" and "earnings" keep on increasing with time, the System removing from the rest of the World these vast quantities of energy to keep its own tiny desperate fraction showing a profit: and not only most of humanity — most of the World, animal, vegetable, and mineral, is laid waste in the process. The System may or may not understand that it's only buying time. And that time is an artificial resource to being with, of no value to anyone or anything but the System, which must sooner or later crash to its death, when its addiction to energy has become more than the rest of the World can supply, dragging with it innocent souls all along the chain of life.
It's a Rocket-raising: a festival new to this country. Soon it will come to the folk-attention how close Wernher von Braun's birthday is to the Spring Equinox, and the same German impulse that once rolled flower-boats through the towns and staged mock battles between young Spring and deathwhite old Winter will be erecting strange floral towers out in the clearings and meadows, and the young scientist-surrogate will be going round and round with Gravity or some such buffoon, and the children will be tickled, and laugh.
A market needed no longer be run by the Invisible Hand, but now could create itself — its own logic, momentum, style, from inside. Putting the control inside was ratifying what de facto had happened — that you had dispensed with God. But you had taken on a greater, and more harmful, illusion. The illusion of control. That A could do B. But that was false. Completely. No one can do. Thing only happen, A and B are unreal, are names for parts that ought to be inseparable.
There is a scene toward the end of Gravity’s Rainbow (as the blond German is being sacrificed inside the Rocket) where Superman is said to swoop in but the colors of his cape wilt and his hair turns gray; even poor old Phillip Marlow is dragooned into the action and befogged with terror turns to drink; and then the of all people the Lone Ranger storms in at the head of a posse (the dread posse!) but not in the nick of time for his nephew Dan was not in the next room at the hoedown but had his neck broken by being hung; the “heroes” are then kicked upstairs to observe the destruction of their system as singularities emerge that are beyond their ken. They call this outbreak “cancer” which they cannot control. Time is a funny thing says Superman to Jimmy, time’s a funny thing, it’s beyond me. That is the great men always arrive too late. No mention is made of what Snidely Whiplash is up to in this melodrama or the fate of the woman on the track. But Tonto puts on a ghost shirt and sharpens his blade. The message is: the White man is evil and the dark man good. And as the gleam of revenge burns in the Red Man’s eyes all the while some flipped out freaks are engaging in a breakout of harmonica and kazoo playing and driving in Volkswagen Bugs on the 10. This “scene” shows the cartoonish nature of Pynchon’s vision and reveals him to be the simpleton he so assuredly is. Just let him follow this bouncing betty all the way up to eye level: we always show up late—but right on time. You bet your life we do.
In celestial mechanics, escape velocity or escape speed is the minimum speed needed for an object to escape from contact with or orbit of a primary body.
