The Nation-State is a ROC :
Resonance across Oceans

It’s easy to forget, among all his games and puzzles, that Pynchon can write razor-sharp beauty with the best of them. A page-long description of the Santa Anas demands a place next to classic passages by Chandler and Joan Didion. In Pynchon’s big books, these devastating descriptions, particularly of place, are often swept away in the tide of prose and characters. Here, in a novel that focuses on Los Angeles so sharply that Tommy’s is pinpointed by its cross streets, they shine. Neodymium, neopynchion exporter, adrift on catamaran pacific, hallucinating, populating Pacific with streetscapes, palms, flashes, currents, haze, rains

1. The Nation State is a ROC not an earthwork

we need to analyse the global economy not in terms of an “island model” of international economic interaction—national economy to national economy—but through the “interlocking matrix” of corporate balance sheets—bank to bank. These balance sheets resonate across oceans, just like weather dipoles, el ninos and la Ninas

So you have the transatlantic dollar liquidity corridor and you have the trans-pacific partnership, and you have the Eurozone Eastern Mediterranean arc, and now you have a proposed trans-Indian ocean corridor to the GCC and East Africa and beyond and who knows maybe the next PIMCO will be called IPIMCO (Indo-Pacific Investment Management Company, LLC) based in Singapore and catching trans-resonances by the trump-load.
Screaming holds against the sky. The three men at the bar are Piketty, Tooze and Pynchon, waiting on Zizek. 
Pynchon says: 
the whole German Inflation was created deliberately, simply to drive young enthusiasts of the Cybernetic Tradition into Control work: after all, an economy inflating, upward bound as a balloon, its own definition of Earth’s surface drifting upward in value, uncontrolled, drifting with the days, the feedback system expected to maintain the value of the mark constant having, humiliatingly, failed. . . . Unity gain around the loop, unity gain, zero change, and hush, that way, forever, these were the secret rhymes of the childhood of the Discipline of Control—secret and terrible, as the scarlet histories say. Diverging oscillations of any kind were nearly the Worst Threat. You could not pump the swings of these playgrounds higher than a certain angle from the vertical. Fights broke up quickly, with a smoothness that had not been long in coming. Rainy days never had much lightning or thunder to them, only a haughty glass grayness collecting in the lower parts, a monochrome overlook of valleys crammed with mossy deadfalls jabbing roots at heaven not entirely in malign playfulness (as some white surprise for the elitists up there paying no mind, no . . .), valleys thick with autumn, and in the rain a withering, spin-sterish brown behind the gold of it… very selectively blighted rainfall teasing you across the lots and into the back streets, which grow ever more mysterious and badly paved and more deeply platted, lot giving way to crooked lot seven times and often more, around angles of hedge, across freaks of the optical daytime until we have passed, fevered, silent, out of the region of streets itself and into the countryside, into the quilted dark fields and the wood, the beginning of the true forest, where a bit of the ordeal ahead starts to show, and our hearts to feel afraid . . . but just as no swing could ever be thrust above a certain height, so, beyond a certain radius, the forest could be penetrated no further. A limit was always there to be brought to. It was so easy to grow up under that dispensation. All was just as wholesome as could be. Edges were hardly ever glimpsed, much less flirted at or with. Destruction, oh, and demons—yes, including Maxwell’s—were there, deep in the woods, with other beasts vaulting among the earthworks of your safety. . . .
Pavlov believed that obsessions and paranoid delusions were a result of certain—call them cells, neurons, on the mosaic of the brain, being excited to the level where, through reciprocal induction, all the area around becomes inhibited. One bright, burning point, surrounded by darkness. Darkness it has, in a way, called up. Cut off, this bright point, perhaps to the end of the patient’s life, from all other ideas, sensations, self-criticisms that might temper its flame, restore it to normalcy. He called it a ‘point of pathological inertia.’ 
Whir underneath an oil pipeline up on trestles running down leftward to the water now, huge bolted flanges overhead softened by rust and oily dirt. Far out in the harbor rides an oil tanker, rocking serene as a web of stars. . . . Zoom uphill slantwise toward a rampart of wasted, knotted, fused, and scorched girderwork, stacks, pipes, ducting, windings, fairings, insulators reconfigured by all the bombing, grease-stained pebblery on the ground rushing by a mile a minute and wait, wait, say what, say “reconfigured” now?
There doesn’t exactly dawn, no but there breaks, as that light you’re afraid will break some night at too deep an hour to explain away—there floods on Enzian what seems to him an extraordinary understanding. This serpentine slag-heap he is just about to ride into now, this ex-refinery, Jamf Ölfabriken Werke AG, is not a ruin at all. It is in perfect working order. Only waiting for the right connections to be set up, to be switched on … modified, precisely, deliberately by bombing that was never hostile, but part of a plan both sides—”sides?”—had always agreed on … yes and now what if we—all right, say we are supposed to be the Kabbalists out here, say that’s our real Destiny, to be the scholar-magicians of the Zone, with somewhere in it a Text, to be picked to pieces, annotated, explicated, and masturbated till it’s all squeezed limp of its last drop . . . well we assumed—natürlich!—that this holy Text had to be the Rocket, orururumo orunene the high, rising, dead, the blazing, the great one (“orunene” is already being modified by the Zone-Herero children to “omunene,” the eldest brother) . . . our Torah. What else? Its symmetries, its latencies, the cuteness of it enchanted and seduced us while the real Text persisted, somewhere else, in its darkness, our darkness . . . even this far from Südwest we are not to be spared the ancient tragedy of lost messages, a curse that will never leave us. …”
 
But, if I’m riding through it, the Real Text, right now, if this is it …or if I passed it today somewhere in the devastation of Hamburg, breathing the ash-dust, missing it completely … if what the IG built on this site were not at all the final shape of it, but only an arrangement of fetishes, come-ons to call down special tools in the form of 8th AF bombers yes the “Allied” planes all would have been, ultimately, IG-built, by way of Director Krupp, through his English interlocks—the bombing was the exact industrial process of conversion, each release of energy placed exactly in space and time, each shock-wave plotted in advance to bring precisely tonight’s wreck into being thus decoding the Text, thus coding, recoding, redecoding the holy Text… If it is in working order, what is it meant to do? The engineers who built it as a refinery never knew there were any further steps to be taken. Their design was “finalized,” and they could forget it.
 
It means this War was never political at all, the politics was all theatre, all just to keep the people distracted . . . secretly, it was being die-
tated instead by the needs of technology … by a conspiracy between human beings and techniques, by something that needed the energy-burst of war, crying, “Money be damned, the very life of [insert name of Nation] is at stake,” but meaning, most likely, dawn is nearly here, I need my night’s blood, my funding, funding, ahh more, more. . . . The real crises were crises of allocation and priority, not among firms—it was only staged to look that way—but among the different Technologies, Plastics, Electronics, Aircraft, and their needs which are understood only by the ruling elite . . .
 
Yes but Technology only responds (how often this argument has been iterated, dogged and humorless as a Gaussian reduction, among the younger Schwarzkommando especially), “All very well to talk about having a monster by the tail, but do you think we’d’ve had the Rocket if someone, some specific somebody with a name and a penis hadn’t wanted to chuck a ton of Amatol 300 miles and blow up a block full of civilians? Go ahead, capitalize the T on technology, deify it if it’ll make you feel less responsible—but it puts you in with the neutered, brother, in with the eunuchs keeping the harem of our stolen Earth for the numb and joyless hardens of human sultans, human elite with no right at all to be where they are—”
We have to look for power sources here, and distribution networks we were never taught, routes of power our teachers never imagined, or were encouraged to avoid . . . we have to find meters whose scales are unknown in the world, draw our own schematics, getting feedback, making connections, reducing the error, trying to learn the real function . . . zeroing in on what incalculable plot? Up here, on the surface, coaltars, hydrogenation, synthesis were always phony, dummy functions to hide the real, the planetary mission yes perhaps centuries in the unrolling . . . this ruinous plant, waiting for its Kabbalists and new alchemists to discover the Key, teach the mysteries to others . . .
Piketty says: 
To recapitulate: the end of ownership society was due more than anything else to a political-ideological transformation. Reflection and debate around social justice, progressive taxation, and redistribution of income and wealth, already fairly common in the eighteenth century and during the French Revolution, grew in amplitude in most countries in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, owing largely to the very high concentration of wealth generated by industrial capitalism as well as to educational progress and the diffusion of ideas and information. What led to the transformation of the inequality regime was the encounter between this intellectual evolution and a range of military, financial, and political crises, which were themselves due in part to tensions stemming from inequality. Along with political-ideological changes, popular mobilizations and social struggles played a central role, with specificities associated with each country’s particular national history. But there were also common experiences, increasingly widely shared and interconnected throughout the world, which could accelerate the spread of certain practices and transformations. Things will probably be much the same in the future. (page 539) 
All human societies need to justify their inequalities. Their histories are organized around the ideologies they develop to regulate, by means of complex and changing institutional arrangements, social relations, property rights, and borders. The search for a just inequality is of course not exempt from hypocrisy on the part of dominant groups, but every ideology contains plausible and sincere elements from which we can derive useful lessons. In a period marked by internationalization of trade and rapid expansion of higher education, social-democratic parties failed to adapt quickly enough, and the left-right cleavage that had made possible the mid-twentieth-century reduction of inequality gradually fell apart. The conservative revolution of the 1980s, the collapse of Soviet communism, and the development of neo-proprietarian ideology vastly increased the concentration of income and wealth in the first two decades of the twenty-first century. Inequality has in turn heightened social tensions almost everywhere. For want of a constructive egalitarian and universal political outlet, these tensions have fostered the kinds of nationalist identity cleavages that we see today in practically every part of the world: in the United States and Europe, India and Brazil, China and the Middle East. When people are told that there is no credible alternative to the socioeconomic organization and class inequality that exist today, it is not surprising that they invest their hopes in defending their borders and identities instead.
The inability of the social-democratic coalition to move beyond the confines of the nation-state and renew its program in an era of globalized trade and expanded higher education contributed to the collapse of the left-right political system that made the postwar reduction of inequality possible. However, in the face of challenges raised by the historic resumption of inequality, the rejection of globalization, and the development of new forms of identitarian retreat, awareness of the limits of deregulated capitalism has grown rapidly since the financial crisis of 2008. People have once again begun thinking about a new, more equitable, more sustainable economic model. My discussion here of participatory socialism and social federalism draw largely on developments taking place in various parts of the world; my contribution here is simply to place them in a broader historical perspective.
The history of the inequality regimes studied in this book shows that such political-ideological transformations should not be seen as deterministic. Multiple trajectories are always possible. The balance of power at any moment depends on the interaction of the short-term logic of events with long-term intellectual evolutions from which come a wide range of ideas that can be drawn on in moments of crisis. Unfortunately, there is a very real danger that countries will try to avoid fundamental change by intensifying the competition of all against all and engaging in a new round of fiscal and social dumping. This could in turn intensify nationalist and identitarian conflict, which is already conspicuous in Europe, the United States, India, Brazil, and China.”
Tooze says: 
One might be tempted to conclude that the crisis of globalization had brought a reaffirmation of the essential role of the nation-state and the emergence of a new kind of state capitalism. And that is an argument that would gain ever greater force in the years that followed, as the political backlash set in. But if we look closely not at the periphery but at the core of the 2008 crisis, it is clear that this diagnosis is partial at best. Among the emerging markets, the two that struggled most with the crisis of 2008 were Russia and South Korea. What they had in common apart from booming exports was deep financial integration with Europe and the United States. That would prove to be the key. What they experienced was not just a collapse in exports but a “sudden stop” in the funding of their banking sectors.17 As a result, countries with trade surpluses and huge currency reserves—supposedly the essentials of national economic self-reliance—suffered acute currency crises. Writ spectacularly larger, this was also the story in the North Atlantic between Europe and the United States. Hidden below the radar and barely discussed in public, what threatened the stability of the North Atlantic economy in the fall of 2008 was a huge shortfall in dollar funding for Europe’s oversized banks. And a shortfall in their case meant not tens of billions, or even hundreds of billions, but trillions of dollars. It was the opposite of the crisis that had been forecast. Not a dollar glut but an acute dollar-funding shortage. The dollar did not plunge, it rose.
If we are to grasp the dynamics of this unforecasted storm, we have to move beyond the familiar cognitive frame of macroeconomics that we inherited from the early twentieth century. Forged in the wake of World War I and World War II, the macroeconomic perspective on international economics is organized around nation-states, national productive systems and the trade imbalances they generate.18 It is a view of the economy that will forever be identified with John Maynard Keynes. Predictably, the onset of the crisis in 2008 evoked memories of the 1930s and triggered calls for a return to “the master.” And Keynesian economics is, indeed, indispensable for grasping the dynamics of collapsing consumption and investment, the surge in unemployment and the options for monetary and fiscal policy after 2009.20 But when “it comes to analyzing the onset of financial crises in an age of deep globalization, the standard macroeconomic approach has its limits. In discussions of international trade it is now commonly accepted that it is no longer national economies that matter. What drives global trade are not the relationships between national economies but multinational corporations coordinating far-flung “value chains.”21 The same is true for the global business of money. To understand the tensions within the global financial system that exploded in 2008 we have to move beyond Keynesian macroeconomics and its familiar apparatus of national economic statistics. As Hyun Song Shin, chief economist at the Bank for International Settlements and one of the foremost thinkers of the new breed of “macrofinance,” has put it, we need to analyze the global economy not in terms of an “island model” of international economic interaction—national economy to national economy—but through the “interlocking matrix” of corporate balance sheets—bank to bank. “As both the global financial crisis of 2007–2009 and the crisis in the eurozone after 2010 would demonstrate, government deficits and current account imbalances are poor predictors of the force and speed with which modern financial crises can strike.23 This can be grasped only if we focus on the shocking adjustments that can take place within this interlocking matrix of financial accounts. For all the pressure that classic “macroeconomic imbalances”—in budgets and trade—can exert, a modern global bank run moves far more money far more abruptly. What the Europeans, the Americans, the Russians and the South Koreans were experiencing in 2008 and the Europeans would experience again after 2010 was an implosion in interbank credit. As long as your financial sector was modestly proportioned, big national currency reserves could see you through. That is what saved Russia. But South Korea struggled, and in Europe, not only were there no reserves but the scale of the banks and their dollar-denominated business made any attempt at autarkic self-stabilization unthinkable.” (page 20) 
“In 2015–2016 the world economy dodged a third installment of the global crisis. The emerging market recessions remained confined to individual economies—Russia, Brazil, South Africa—and particular commodities—notably oil. The downturn did not become generalized. It did not spread to the advanced economies. The slow recovery of the eurozone, Britain and the United States continued. Too easily forgotten, this fact should frame our understanding of the extraordinary political and geopolitical turmoil of the years since 2013. In the Ukraine crisis the commodity price collapse even worked to the advantage of the West in multiplying the pressure of sanctions on Russia. Meanwhile, the Greek drama of 2015, Brexit and Trump’s election all took place against the backdrop of a nervous calm. We did not in 2017 face the full force of Paulson’s question: How would America and the world have fared if Trump at his inauguration had faced the kind of challenges facing Obama in 2009? 
But though crisis was avoided in 2015–2016, the stakes were going up. If we go back to the period before 2008, a “China crisis” had seemed in the cards then. But what worried observers was the possibility of a mass sell-off of dollar-denominated assets by China’s reserve managers. As the storm clouds gathered, holding China in place was the first priority of Paulson’s Treasury. And Paulson was willing to pay a high political price for doing so. Brad Setser’s quip was to the point: Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were “too Chinese to fail.”18 Nationalizing them helped to prevent a simultaneous Atlantic and Chinese crisis with consequences too awful to contemplate. But Paulson’s financial diplomacy also highlights the fact that in 2008, managing Sino-American financial relations was still very much a matter of intergovernmental relations. By contrast, in 2015–2016 not only were the risks on the Chinese side but the people moving the money were private businesses  “nese side but the people moving the money were private businesses and investors. In less than ten years, Chinese commercial and financial integration had come a staggeringly long way. Given the narrative unfolded in this book, this has daunting implications.
This book has examined the struggle to contain the crisis in three interlocking zones of deep private financial integration: the transatlantic dollar-based financial system, the eurozone and the post-Soviet sphere of Eastern Europe. The challenges were immense. The implosion entangled both public and private finances in a doom loop. Bank failures forced scandalous government intervention to rescue private oligopolists. The Fed acted across borders to provide liquidity to banks in other countries. The crisis spilled over into a question of international relations: Germany and Greece, the UK and the eurozone, the United States and the EU. And those questions were not posed in a power-political vacuum but in a geopolitical force field, graphically illustrated by the clashes with Russia over the destiny of Georgia and Ukraine. The challenges were mind-bogglingly technical and complex. They were vast in scale. They were fast moving. Between 2007 and 2012, the pressure was relentless. 
Zizek enters: 
The deadlock of “resistance” brings us back to the topic of parallax: all is needed is a slight shift in our perspective, and all the activity of “resistance,” of bombarding those in power with impossible “subversive” (ecological, feminist, antiracist, anti- globalist . . .) demands, looks like an internal process of feeding the machine of power, providing the material to keep it in motion.The logic of this shift should be univer- salized: the split between the public Law and its obscene superego supplement con- fronts us with the very core of the politico-ideological parallax: the public Law and its superego supplement are not two different parts of the legal edifice, they are one and the same “content”—with a slight shift in perspective, the dignified and impersonal Law looks like an obscene machine of jouissance. Another slight shift, and the legal regu- lations prescribing our duties and guaranteeing our rights look like the expression of a ruthless power whose message to us, its subjects, is: “I can do whatever I want with you!” Kafka, of course, was the inimitable master of this parallax shift with regard to the edifice of legal power: “Kafka” is not so much a unique style of writing as a weird innocent new gaze upon the edifice of the Law which practices a parallax shift of perceiving a gigantic machinery of obscene jouissance in what previously looked like a dignified edifice of the legal Order. 
They don’t stop him so he goes on: 
Claude Lévi-Strauss’s exemplary analysis, from Structural Anthropology, of the spatial dis- position of buildings in the Winnebago, one of the Great Lakes tribes, might be of some help here.The tribe is divided into two subgroups (“moieties”), “those who are from above” and “those who are from below”; when we ask an individual to draw on a piece of paper, or on sand, the ground-plan of his or her village (the spatial disposi- tion of cottages), we obtain two quite different answers, depending on his or her be- longing to one or the other subgroup. Both perceive the village as a circle; but for one subgroup there is within this circle another circle of central houses, so that we have two concentric circles, while for the other subgroup the circle is split in two by a clear di- viding line. In other words, a member of the first subgroup (let us call it “conservative- corporatist”) perceives the ground-plan of the village as a ring of houses more or less symmetrically disposed around the central temple, whereas a member of the second (“revolutionary-antagonistic”) subgroup perceives his or her village as two distinct heaps of houses separated by an invisible frontier. . . . The point Levi-Strauss wants to make is that this example should in no way entice us into cultural relativism, ac- cording to which the perception of social space depends on the observer’s group- belonging: the very splitting into the two “relative” perceptions implies a hidden reference to a constant—not the objective, “actual” disposition of buildings but a traumatic kernel, a fundamental antagonism the inhabitants of the village were unable to symbolize, to account for, to “internalize,” to come to terms with, an imbalance in social relations that prevented the community from stabilizing itself into a harmonious whole.The two perceptions of the ground-plan are simply two mutually exclusive endeavors to cope with this traumatic antagonism, to heal its wound via the imposition of a balanced symbolic structure. It is here that one can see in what precise sense the Real intervenes through anamorphosis. We have first the “actual,” “objec- tive” arrangement of the houses, then its two different symbolizations which both dis- tort the actual arrangement in an anamorphic way. However, the “Real” here is not the actual arrangement, but the traumatic core of some social antagonism which distorts the tribe members’ view of the actual arrangement of the houses in their village. 
This means that, ultimately, the status of the Real is purely parallactic and, as such, non- substantial: is has no substantial density in itself, it is just a gap between two points of perspective, perceptible only in the shift from the one to the other. The parallax Real is thus opposed to the standard (Lacanian) notion of the Real as that which “always returns to its place”—as that which remains the same in all possible (symbolic) uni- verses: the parallax Real is, rather, that which accounts for the very multiplicity of ap- pearances of the same underlying Real—it is not the hard core which persists as the Same, but the hard bone of contention which pulverizes the sameness into the multitude of appearances. In a first move, the Real is the impossible hard core which we can- not confront directly, but only through the lenses of a multitude of symbolic fictions, virtual formations. In a second move, this very hard core is purely virtual, actually non- existent, an X which can be reconstructed only retroactively, from the multitude of symbolic formations which are “all that there actually is. 

You are a ROC: Resonance Across Oceans

2. Identity is a ROC, not an Earthwork

Winter sunlight hitting half his face like a migraine, trouser cuffs out of press, wet and sandy because he’s up every morning at six to walk along the strand, Sir Stephen makes perfectly accessible his disguise, if not his function in the conspiracy. For all Slothrop knows he’s an agronomist, a brain surgeon, a concert oboist—in that London you saw all levels of command seething with these multidimensional geniuses.  Slothrop’s head is a balloon, which rises not vertically but horizontally, constantly across the room, whilst staying in one place. Each brain cell has become a bubble: he’s been transmuted to black Epernay grapes, cool shadows, noble cuvées. He looks across at Sir Stephen Dodson-Truck, who is still miraculously upright though with a glaze about the eyes staggering, propping each other up, they push through a bottle-wielding, walleyed, unbuttoned, roaring, white-faced and stomach-clutching mob, in among the lithe and perfumed audience of girls at the exit, all sweetly high, a decompression lock for the outside. “Holy shit.” This is the kind of sunset you hardly see any more, a 19th-century wilderness sunset, a few of which got set down, approximated, on canvas, landscapes of the American West by artists nobody ever heard of, when the land was still free and the eye innocent, and the presence of the Creator much more direct. Here it thunders now over the Mediterranean, high and lonely, this anachronism in primal red, in yellow purer than can be found anywhere today, a purity begging to be polluted … of course Empire took its way westward, what other way was there but into those virgin sunsets to penetrate and to foul?
But out at the horizon, out near the burnished edge of the world, who are these visitors standing . . . these robed figures—perhaps, at this distance, hundreds of miles tall—their faces, serene, unattached, like the Buddha’s, bending over the sea, impassive, indeed, as the Angel that stood over Lübeck during the Palm Sunday raid, come that day neither to destroy nor to protect, but to bear witness to a game of seduction. It was the next-to-last step London took before her submission, before that liaison that would bring her at length to the eruption and scarring of the wasting pox noted on Roger Mexico’s map, latent in this love she shares with the night-going rake Lord Death . . . because sending the RAF to make a terror raid against civilian Lübeck was the unmistakable long look that said hurry up and fuck me, that brought the rockets hard and screaming, the A4s, which were to’ve been fired anyway, a bit sooner instead. . . . What have the watchmen of world’s edge come tonight to look for? deepening on now, monumental beings, stoical, on toward slag, toward ash the color the night will stabilize at, tonight . . . what is there grandiose enough to witness? only Slothrop here, and Sir Stephen, blithering along, crossing shadow after long prison-bar shadow cast by the tall trunks of palms lining the esplanade. The spaces between the shadows are washed a very warm sunset-red now, across grainy chocolate beach. There seems to be nothing happening of any moment. No traffic whispering in the circular driveways, no milliards of francs being wagered because of a woman or an entente of nations at any of the tables inside. Only the somewhat formal weeping of Sir Stephen, down now on one knee in the sand still warm from the day: soft and strangled cries of despair held in, so testifying to all the repression he ever underwent that even Slothrop can feel, in his own throat, sympathetic flashes of pain for the effort it is clearly costing the man. . . .

 

“A-and you were so far away then … I couldn’t reach you. . . .” Their breaths are torn into phantoms out to sea. She has her hair combed high today in a pompadour, her fair eyebrows, plucked to wings, darkened, eyes rimmed in black, only the outboard few lashes missed and left blonde. Cloudlight comes slanting down across her “face, taking away color, leaving little more than a formal snapshot, the kind that might appear on a passport. . . . Then. Something like pity comes into her face and goes again. But her whisper is lethal and bright as sudden wire: “Maybe you’ll find out. Maybe in one of their bombed-out cities, beside one of their rivers or forests, even one day in the rain, it will come to you. You’ll remember the Himmler-Spielsaal, and the skirt I was wearing . . . memory will dance for you, and you can even make it my voice saying what I couldn’t say then. Or now.” Oh what is it she smiles here to him, only for that second? already gone. Back to the mask of no luck, no future—her face’s rest state, preferred, easiest. . . .”
Does no one recognize what enslavement gravity is till he reaches the interface of the thunder? [Lesser and the Fifth Island Chain resonance, the teleporting to 1942, pacific (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tS-BWXfFkVY) J.F. on Midway, gatakgatakgatak, and he’s billy pilgrim, he’s slothrop, hes blicero’s rocket]
as unmistakable as the smell of resin, first thing those blue hazy mornings. But Blicero would tell us nothing. We moved into the Heath. There were oilfields, and blackened earth. Jabos flew over in diamond shapes, hunting us. Blicero had grown on, into another animal… a werewolf. . . but with no humanity left in its eyes: that had faded out, day after day, and been replaced by gray furrows, red veins in patterns that weren’t human. Islands: clotted islands in the sea. Sometimes even the topographic lines, nested on a common point. ‘It is the map of my Ur-Heimat,’ imagine a shriek so quiet it’s almost a whisper, ‘the Kingdom of Lord Blicero. A white land.’ I had a sudden understanding: he was seeing the world now in mythical regions: they had their maps, real mountains, rivers, and colors. It was not Germany he moved through. It was his own space. But he was taking us along with him! swelled with blood at the danger, the chances for our annihilation, delicious never knowing when it would come down because the space and time were Blicero’s own. . . . “He did not fall back along roads, he did not cross bridges or lowlands. We sailed Lower Saxony, island to island. Each firing-site was another island, in a white sea. Each island had its peak in the center … was it the position of the Rocket itself? the moment of liftoff? A German Odyssey. Which one would be the last, the home island? I keep forgetting to ask Thanatz whatever became of Gottfried. Thanatz was allowed to stay with the battery. But I was taken away: driven in a Hispano-Suiza with Blicero himself, out through the gray weather to a petrochemical plant that for days had stalked us in a wheel at our horizon, black and broken towers in the distance, clustered together, a flame that always burned at the top of one stack. It was the Castle: Blicero looked over, about to speak, and I said, ‘The Castle.’ The mouth smiled quickly, but absent: the wrinkled wolf-eyes had gone even beyond these domestic moments of telepathy, on into its animal north, to a persistence on the hard edge of death I can’t imagine, tough cells with the smallest possible flicker inside, running on nothing but ice, or less. He called me Katje. ‘You’ll see that your little trick won’t work again. Not now, Katje.’ I wasn’t frightened. It was madness I could understand, or else the hallucinating of the very old. The silver stork flew wings-down into our wind, brow low and legs back, Prussian occipital knot behind: on its shiny surfaces now appeared black swirls of limousines and staff cars in the driveway of the main office. 
Slothrop, as noted, at least as early as the Anubis era, has begun to thin, to scatter. “Personal density,” Kurt Mondaugen in his Peene-münde office not too many steps away from here, enunciating the Law which will one day bear his name, “is directly proportional to temporal bandwidth.”
“Temporal bandwidth” is the width of your present, your now. It is the familiar “At” considered as a dependent variable. The more you dwell in the past and in the future, the thicker your bandwidth, the more solid your persona. But the narrower your sense of Now, the more tenuous you are. It may get to where you’re having trouble remembering what you were doing five minutes ago, or even—as Slothrop now—what you’re doing here, at the base of this colossal curved embankment. . . .
“Uh,” he turns slackmouth to Närrisch, “what are we …”
“What are we what?”
“What?”
“You said, ‘What are we . . . ,’ then you stopped.”
“Oh. Gee, that was a funny thing to say.”
“As for Närrisch, he’s too locked in to business. He has never seen this great Ellipse any other way but the way he was meant to. Greta Erdmann, on the contrary, saw the rust-colored eminences here bow, exactly as they did once, in expectancy, faces hooded, smooth cowlings
of Nothing . . . each time Thanatz brought the whip down on her skin, she was taken, off on another penetration toward the Center: each lash, a little farther in … till someday, she knows, she will have that first glimpse of it, and from then on it will be an absolute need, a ruling target . . . wh-wh-wh-whack the boneblack trestling of water towers above, bent to the great rim, visible above the trees in light that’s bleak and bruise-purple as Peenemünde sunsets in the chill slow firing-weather … a long look from the top of some known Low Country dike into a sky flowing so even and yellowed a brown that the sun could be anywhere behind it, and the crosses of the turning windmills could be spoke-blurs of the terrible Rider himself, Slothrop’s Rider, his two explosions up there, his celestial cyclist—
No, but even That only flickers now briefly across a bit of Slo-thropian lobe-terrain, and melts into its surface, vanishing. 
 
But the ringing bright thing inside brought him here, instead: here, down in a pipe, to only a handful more of minutes. . . .
The idea was always to carry along a fixed quantity, A. Sometimes you’d use a Wìen bridge, tuned to a certain frequency A{, whistling, heavy with omen, inside the electric corridors . . . while outside, according to the tradition in these matters, somewhere a quantity B would be gathering, building, as the Rocket gathered speed. So, up till assigned Brennschluss velocity, “v,” electric-shocked as any rat into following this very narrow mazeway of clear space—yes, radio signals from the ground would enter the Rocket body, and by reflex—literally by electric signal traveling a reflex arc—the control surfaces twitch, to steer you back on course the instant you’d begin to wander off (how could you’ve kept from lapsing, up here, into that radiant inattention, so caught up in the wind, the sheer altitude . . . the unimaginable fires at your feet?)… so, for that tightly steered passage, all was carried on in the sharpest, most painful anticipation, with B always growing, as palpably cresting as the assault of a tidal wave that stills every small creature and hones the air down to a cold stir. . . . Your quantity A— shining, constant A, carried as they must have once packed far overland at night the Grail, in their oldtime and military bleakness of humor . . . and one morning a wide upper lip steelwool gray with the one day’s growth, the fatal, the terrible sign, he shaved smooth every day, it meant that this was the Last Day—and, too, with only the grim sixth sense, as much faith as clear reception, that the B of Many Subscripts just over the electric horizon was really growing closer, perhaps this time as “Biw,” the precession angle of the gyro, moving invisibly but felt, terrifically arousing, over the metal frame toward angle Aiw (which is how they have set you the contacts: to close, you must see, at that exact angle). Or as “BiL,” another integrating, not of gyro rate but of the raw current flow itself, bled from the moving coil inside the poles, the “fettered” pendulum . . . they thought this way, Design Group, in terms of captivity, prohibition . . . there was an attitude toward one’s hardware more brutal and soldierly than most engineers’ got the chance to be. … They felt quite the roughshod elite, Driwelling, and Schmeíl, with the fluorescent lights shining on his “bared forehead night after night. . . . Inside their brains they shared an old, old electro-decor—variable capacitors of glass, kerosene for a dielectric, brass plates and ebonite covers, Zeiss galvanometers with thousands of fine-threaded adjusting screws, Siemens milliammeters set on slate surfaces, terminals designated by Roman numerals, Standard Ohms of manganese wire in oil, the old Gülcher Thermosäule that operated on heating gas, put out 4 volts, nickel and antimony, asbestos funnels on top, mica tubing. . . 
 
Separations are proceeding. Each alternative Zone speeds away from all the others, in fated acceleration, red-shifting, fleeing the Center. Each day the mythical return Enzian dreamed of seems less possible. Once it was necessary to know uniforms, insignia, airplane markings, to observe boundaries. But by now too many choices have been made. The single root lost, way back there in the May desolation. Each bird has his branch now, and each one is the Zone.
You are a ROC
Resonance Across Oceans

You is Smear
State is Smear
Real is Smear
The Zone, Over the couple of generations, moved by accelerations unknown in the days before the Empire, they have been growing an identity that few can see as ever taking final shape. The Rocket will have a final shape, but not its people. Annihilation Garland, shimmers  the zero v. time is spherical (Nabokov) || Virilio on the Pacific | Farocki over the Pacific || War at a Distance, Synthetic Ground images of a missile guidance, displacement of the human as blip in the resonance
See Soul folder. Kepler, the zone 

Harun Farocki

war is technology is production is destruction, laser guidance, laser production, operational images, displacement of the human, blip in the machine lattice, cyborgeal miniscula in the resonance-waves – end of War at a Distance, blip-land was imaged, the plane streaking out flares to off-put the heat-seeking missile, the man in the simulation, blip in a radar, the Hualien scream and his father, the Harockian heat, Harockenheit 451 (1953)
J.F on the Baja talking to his double punchdrunk, Eistenstein in Mexico, Curtis on Bitter Lake, Suez, lineage, ghosts, desiderata, heat-seekers 
Parallels I – IV … Farocki… and his future on the 38th Parallel 
Workers leaving the factory and his ghost in the Taipei sun-set 
Serious Games IV: A Sun with no Shadow (to be watched 10Jul2020)