Tag Archives: Gravity’s Rainbow

Research of terms between pages 348-364 of Gravity’s Rainbow

Herero Insignia

Klar: Clear | Entlüftung: Ventilation | Zündung: Ignition | Vorstufe: Initial stage | Haupstufe: Main stage

Hebephrenic Scizophrenia

A form of schizophrenia in which affective changes are prominent, delusions and hallucinations fleeting and fragmentary, behaviour irresponsible and unpredictable, and mannerisms common. The mood is shallow and inappropirate and often accompanied by giggling or self-satisfied, self-absorbed smiling, or by a lofty manner, grimaces, mannerisms, pranks, hypochondriacal complaints, and reiterated phrases. Thought is disorganized and speech rambling and incoherent. There is a tendency to remain solitary, and behaviour seems empty of purpose and feeling. This form of schizphrenia usually starts between the ages of 15 and 25 years and tends to have a poor prognosis because of the rapid development of “negative” symptoms, particularly flattening of affect and loss of volition.

In addition, disturbances of affect and volition, and thought disorder are usually prominent. Hallucinations and delusions may be present but are not usually prominent. Drive and determination are lost and goals abandoned, so that the patient’s behaviour becomes characteristically aimless and empty of purpose. A superficial and manneristic preoccupation with religion, philosophy, and other abstract themes may add to the listener’s difficulty in following the train of thought.

ICD-10 Classification of Mental and Behavioural Disorders, World Health Organization, Geneva, 1992.

Ululation

A long, wavering, high-pitched sound resembling the howl of a dog or wolf with a trilling quality. It is produced by emitting a high pitched loud voice accompanied with a rapid movement of the tongue and the uvula.

Uvular

Consonants articulated with the back of the tongue against or near the uvula, that is, further back in the mouth than velar consonants.

Plosive

A consonant sound produced by stopping the airflow in the vocal tract.

Apparatchik

An agent of the governmental or party “apparat” (apparatus) that held any position of bureaucratic or political responsibility. Members of the “apparat” were frequently transferred between different areas of responsibility, usually with little or no actual training for their new areas of responsibility. Thus, the term apparatchik, or “agent of the apparatus” was usually the best possible description of the person’s profession and occupation.

Weltschmerz

World-weariness

Heisenberg Situation

In physics, the formulation of quantum mechanics where the operators (observables and others) are time-dependent and the state vectors are time-independent. It stands in contrast to the Schrödinger picture in which operators are constant and the states evolve in time. The two pictures only differ by a time-dependent basis change.

Pynchon on integration

The young stastician is devoted to number and to method, not table-rapping or wishful thinking. But in the domain of zero to one, not-something to something, Pointsman can only possess the zero and the one. He cannot, like Mexico, survive anyplace in between. Like his master I. P. Pavlov before him, he imagines the cortex of the brain as a mosaic of tiny on/off elements. Some are always in bright excitation, others darkly inhibited. The contours, bright and dark, keep changing. But each point is allowed only the two states: waking or sleep. One or zero. “Summation,” “transition,” “irradiation, “concentration,” “reciprocal induction” – all Pavlovian brain-mechanics – assumes the presence of these bi-stable points. But to Mexico belongs the domain between zero and one – the probabilities.

-Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow

Leave your war awhile

Come then. Leave your war awhile, paper or iron war, petrol or flesh, come in with your love, your fear of losing, your exhaustion with it. All day it’s been at you, coercing, jiving, claiming your belief in so much that isn’t true. Is that who you are, that vaguelly criminal face on your ID card, its soul snatched by the government camera as the guillotine shutter fell or maybe just left behind with your heart, at the stage Door Canteen, where they’re counting the nights take…

Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow