Friday, March 4, 2022

Onward to rescue the Radiant Hour [...] to blast open the continuum of history.

 

Volunteers for the Territorial Defense Forces stand in formation, check their weapons, put on yellow armbands, get marching orders, and ship out to their posts to defend Kyiv on Feb. 28.
Marcus Yam—Los Angeles Times/Getty Images

 

Every day our cause becomes clearer 

and people get smarter.


**They manifest themselves in this struggle as courage, humor, cunning, and fortitude. They have retroactive force and will constantly call in question every victory, past and present, of the rulers. […] its spirit of sacrifice, […] nourished by the image of enslaved ancestors rather than that of liberated grandchildren.
 
 
Onward to rescue the Radiant Hour, which has been abstracted from the days 24 by colleagues of the Father,for sinister reasons of their own. 
 
 For the first time now it becomes apparent that the 4 and the Father-conspiracy do not entirely fill their world. Their struggle is not the only,or even the ultimate one. Indeed, there are many other struggles , but there are also spectators, watching as spectators will do,hundreds of thousands of them [...].
 
What's this? What're the antagonists doing here infiltrating their audience? Well, they're not really. It's somebody else's audience at the moment, and these nightly spectacles are an appreciable part of the darkside-hours of the Rocket-capital. The chances for any paradox here, really, are less than you think.
 
Outside and Inside interpiercing one another too fast, too finely labyrinthine,for either category to have much hegemony anymore. 
 
Come-on! Start-the-sho-w! Come-on! Start-the-show! The screen is a dim page spread before us, white and silent. The film has broken, or a projector bulb has burned out. It was difficult even for us, old fans who’ve always been at the movies (haven’t we?) to tell which before the darkness swept in. The last image was too immediate for any eye to register. It may have been a human figure, dreaming of an early evening in each great capital luminous enough to tell him he will never die, coming outside to wish on the first star. But it was not a star, it was falling, a bright angel of death. And in the darkening and awful expanse of screen something has kept on, a film we have not learned to see… it is now a closeup of the face, a face we all know-

And it is just here, just at this dark and silent frame, that the pointed tip of the Rocket, falling nearly a mile per second, absolutely and forever without sound, reaches its last unmeasurable gap above the roof of this old theatre, the last delta-t.

 
There is time,[...].
 


**The past carries with it a temporal index by which it is referred to redemption. There is a secret agreement between past generations and the present one. Our coming was expected on earth.

[…]  even the dead will not be safe from the enemy if he wins. And this enemy has not ceased to be victorious.

The current amazement that the things we are experiencing are ‘still’ possible in the twentieth century is not philosophical. This amazement is not the beginning of knowledge—unless it is the knowledge that the view of history which gives rise to it is untenable.


title/text:"Onward to rescue the Radiant Hour,"from Thomas Pynchon,Gravity's Rainbow,             Penguin Classics;2006,p.687-690.
image: Time
text **: Walter Benjamin 
 
 
see also:
 

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