Gravity's Rainbow-Tarot: The High Priestess

Here's the card. Here's the section of Gravity's Rainbow. Here's the earlier commentary:
Intro
The Magician

This card is essentially about seeking wisdom, which also means, shutting the hell up for a minute so that wisdom can be found. Notice that the High Priestess sits between two pillars and has the crescent of the moon at her feet. She holds the Torah in her hands, wears a cross at her neck, and behind her is a tapestry of what appears to be fruit, but could also easily be cells in the process of division, and therefore, the origins of life. Seen as an upward movement, we see a religious transition of paganism to pre-Christian Judaism, to Christianity, and beyond to the worship of life's proliferation.

In terms of the Tarot's narrative, the fool (zero card) has progressed to learn of the infinite powers and possibilities that are before him (magician first card) and has come up against the High Priestess who has none of these powers, but has the one thing that the fool does not have: wisdom. She stands between the pillars of the world with access to all spiritual knowledge.

In Gravity's Rainbow, the associated scene is of Pirate Prentice returning to his den of inebriation with the bananas from the rooftop. He then makes his insane banana breakfast only to receive a phone call that he is needed. A message has been sent across the English Channel by rocket. He hitches a ride on a personal carrier to the crash site and begins to be invaded by one of his fellow traveler's daydreams--he envisions the surrounding passengers as characters from old world Transylvanian legends. This causes the story to step back and explain Pirate Prentice's ability to have other people's fantasies for them, and recalls two occasions when the ability became apparent: the first, when it became apparent to Prentice; the second, when it became apparent to the government. However, before either of these flashbacks can occur, there is a montage moment where Pirate Prentice does a dance and sings his theme song surrounded by penny arcade animatronic phantasmagoria.

It might, of course, bear out to mention that the first of these fantasies involves scenes from Lawrence of Arabia and an all out revolt by the colonial army of natives. The second fantasy involves the foreign directors fears that his speech impediment will screw up diplomatic meetings with the prime minister of Novi Pazar (a Baltic nation) and will therefore instigate war. The foreign director's fantasy is that a giant adenoid gland will attack downtown London, monster movie style, and nothing will be able to stop it.

So, where does the high priestess come into all this. Well, first of all, those pillars in her card stand as the worlds of meaning which the High Priestess acts as intermediary between. How many worlds are in this scene? There's the Caribbean where the bananas come from, there's the camaraderie of Pirates barracks, there's the espionage-centered messages being sent across the English Channel in a rocket, the rocket is sent from Peenmunde, Norway--so Viking legend works in there too (V-2 rocket= Valkyrie 2), one fantasy involves the Baltic nation of Novi Pazar and London, and another fantasy involves British controlled Persia. That's seven, and I have yet to count the strange montage scene.

But the montage scene should not be counted with the others, because as strange as the world is in Gravity's Rainbow, this scene is clearly not part of it. Even with the possibility of being usurped by a stranger's daydream, this scene does not fit in with that liberal definition of reality. And here is the high priestess.

Prentice is acting as the intermediary between all these worlds, but the scene with its mechanical special effects representing everything that the reader is accepting as real, seems to suggest that, behind the scenes, what seems to be real is all just moving gears, smoke and mirrors. It's a movie. And Pirate Prentice is performing the ultimate movie trick.

All time and space are being set against each other as simply zones of the screen and in their center is a character out of time and space dancing and swinging a cane with W.C. Fields head on the end of it. Beyond the time and space of the novel, when all of the meaning to these two contexts has been rendered null, there sits Prentice performing his act.

When one moves "beyond the zero" of meaning, one finds only a celebration. The lack of meaning, rather than being hopeless, grants freedom from investing all of one's attention on the "here and now," or even the "there and then." It is as if to say, if all of our experiences amount to nothing more than a movie of our lives, we might still move beyond it to the figure dancing at the center of our montage moments. He is not part of the movie's meaning, and yet is inseparable from its experience. He enjoys the movie no matter what--and in the case of Gravity's Rainbow, that's quite a feat as the movie is about supersonic rockets falling at you at any moment, exploding before their incoming warning sound.

The figure of Prentice, the figure of the High Priestess, enjoys the movie because it is a farce. It is set up to defy meaning, and therefore, meaning can only be derived once it is accepted that the whole thing was a set up. The powers of The Magician (previous card) were a farce too. He seemed to have infinite power, but control is an illusion, and one event is as important as any other (no matter how grand, no matter how seemingly act rather than occurrence). It is the lesson that is important, and this is why the High Priestess lacks the trappings of the world that are so prevalent to The Magician.