August 6

[lahockman]

At least one moment of passage, one it will hurt to lose, ought to be found, for every street now indifferently gray with commerce, with war, with repression . . . finding it, learning to cherish what was lost, oughtn't we find some way back?In one of these streets, in the morning fog, plastered over two slippery cobblestones, is a scrap of newspaper headline, with a wirephoto of a giant white cock, dangling in the sky straight downward out of a white pubic bush the letters                           MB DRO                            ROSHIappear with the logo of some occupation newspaper, a grinning glamor girl riding astraddle the cannon of a tank, steel penis with slotted serpent head, 3rd Armored treads  'n' triangle on a sweater rippling across her tits. The white image has the same coherence, the hey-lookit-me smugness, as the Cross does.  It is not only a sudden white genital onset in the sky--it is also, perhaps, a Tree.   Slothrop sits on a curbstone watching it, and the letters, and girl with steel cock waving hi fellas, as the fog whitens into morning, and figures with carts, or dogs, or bicycles go by in brown-gray outlines, wheezing, greeting briefly in fog-flattened voices, passing. He doesn't remember sitting on the curb so long staring at the picture. But he did. At the instant it happened, the pale Virgin was rising in the east, head, shoulders, breasts, 17 degrees 36' down to her maidenhead at the horizon. A few doomed Japanese knew of her as some Western deity. She loomed in the eastern sky gazing down at the city about to be sacrificed. The sun was in Leo. The fireburst came roaring and sovereign . . .Gravity's RainbowThomas Pynchon