Gravity's Rainbow-Tarot: overview.

I'm working this out as something of a larger scheme that might never come to fruition. Nevertheless, what I'm about is the book Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon. This book was first handed to me by the elusive Mike Ruiz, one of my oldest friends who has sadly up and disapeared on me and the whole world. If you know where he is, or have any news, it would be appreciated.

Back to the point, Mike handed me Gravity's Rainbow some time around 1995 with the comment, "you've got to look at this book. You can open to any page and it's just funny as hell." What this suggests is sort of a loss of narrative line. One can open anywhere, begin reading, and finish once one has attained the requisite guffaw. But what if, and I know this is bold, one began at the beginning as one does other books, and did not finish until the end. What then? Well, as it turns out this was Pynchon's intention, but as anyone who has tried this venture will tell you, the book does not gain linear cohesion--it actually digresses in understandability from the snap shot readings that were favorable to Mike. That is to say, read two pages and those two pages, taken out of context, will actually have more meaning than if you read all 760 pages. There is no brain drain in the two pages. The 760 page read, however, is something only the deranged or determined should try, and not simply because...well, that's a lot of pages. No. There's just very little sense to be made, except when there is--and then that sense is brilliant.

Nevertheless, I'll give a sort of example by way of introduction to this project. The first part of the book (of which there are four) is entitled 'Beyond The Zero,' and what that means, as with any other of Pynchon's extended metaphors, is multi-faceted, and not the point of this writing to explain. Suffice to say that the book is divided into 21 "scenes" spannng the nine days between December 18 and December 26, 1944. What is not made clear from the beginning of this section is that there is some correspondence between this part of the book and the Tarot. In fact, the Tarot is only mentioned off-handedly until much later in the book (page 746, Weissman's Tarot). Critics, however, have seen the Kabbalistic nature of the book is indespensible to the book's narrative and as such have, as I believe, rightly ascribed the first twenty one scenes of the first of the book's sections to the Tarot--and most specifically to the upper Arcana.

If the upper Arcana is taken in total, we have twenty two cards, numbered 0 to 21. But of course, the book begins "Beyond The Zero." This being one of a myriad contexts for the word zero. I like this because it has a certain "Pynchonian" charm to it. It's just the type of clue he would leave, and so I will supress my idea that the first section of the book represents cards 0-20, and that the last card is represented in the remainder of the book. At least, I will suspend my inclination until it proves fruitless to start at card 1 rather than card 0 (and yes, the "zero" also has to do with binary, such that when one is "Beyond the Zero," one is switched on, or in an electronic sense, not grounded, or in a computer sense, not set to null--with all the spiritual or language conotations that are carried with those terms).

Anyways, this is my side project for now. Enjoy, and oh yeah, write by W.A.S.T.E..