Paraboloids

References in Gravity's Rainbow

crystal palace, 3

"they go in under archways, secret entrances" 3

"to string the Heath with huge magnets, electric-arc terminals" 15

bow-shaped curve in plotting frequencies of words, 32

"bell-curves of farewell," 51

"weak little coal swinging in orange arc once" 51

"crossed arcs of Roger and Jessica" 53

"nothing to link the rocket strike--no reflex arc" 56

"Snow packs into the arches" 70

"Everywhere are archways" 82

" the arc-lamps crackle" 134

"Arch her youngest" 171

"But it is a curve each of them feels, unmistakably. It is the parabola. They must have guessed, once or twice--guessed and refused to believe--that everything, always, collectively, had been moving toward that purified shape latent in the sky, that shape of no surprise, no second chances, no return. Yet they do move forever under it, reserved for its own black-and-white bad news certainly as if it were the Rainbow, and they its children...." 209

"Katje has understood the great airless arc as a clear allusion to certain secret lusts that drive the planet and herself, and Those who use her--over its peak and down, plunging, burning, toward a terminal orgasm" 223

"The Archies were chugging in the darkness" 233

"stationed [...] along one of the Last Parabolas--flight paths that must never be taken" 238

"arching kindly nose" 254

"The entrance to the tunnel is shaped like a parabola. The Albert Speer Touch. Somebody during the thirties was big on parabolas [...] This parabola here happens to be the inspiration of a Speer disciple named Etzel Ölsch. He had noted this parabola shape around on Autobahn overpasses, sports stadiums u.s.w. and thought it was the most contemporary thing he'd ever seen. Imagine his astonishment on finding that the parabola was also the shape of the path intended for the rocket through space. [...] His parabola has a high loft to it" 298

"In under parabola and parable, straight into the mountain, sunlight gone, into the cold, the dark, the long echoes of the Mittelwerke." 299

"And what is the specific shape whose center of gravity is the Brennschluss Point?" 302

"they see now the entrance ahead, growing parabola of green mountainslopes, and sunlight" 312

" as [the Rocket] gathers fuel and oxidizer in its thrust chamber [...] for the sake of its scheduled parabola" 318

"Parabolas weren't all that New German Architecture went in for--there were the spaces" 372

"The Russian sentries wait under a wood archway painted red" 377

"the others lean Slothrop up against the arch and shake him down" 377

" the pallid arch of the Avus overpass ahead" 379

"The folds of his cape are gone to corroded bronze under the arc lighting. " 381

"'It's supposed to fly in a big curve,' motioning with his hand, the parabola trailing behind encompassing testing stands, assembly buildings, drawing them together as the crosses priests make in the air quarter and divide the staring congregations behind them" 409

"Kekule's dream here's being routed now past points which may arc through the silence" 411

"Rockets are supposed to be like artillery shells, they disperse about the aiming point in a giant ellipse--the Ellipse of Uncertainty." 425

"somewhere in his brain now two foci sweep together and become one...zero ellipse...a single point" 425

"'We all move in an Ellipse of Uncertainty, don't we?'" 427

"Slothrop moseys toward the first archway" 436

"looks like you have your own Ellipse all right" 427

inverted, 437

"'A parabola! A trap! You were never immune over there from the simple-minded German symphonic arc, tonic to dominant, back again to tonic [...]'" 443

"into the shadowed arches of the Kurhaus" 459

"pretty twin bottoms arched to receive" 467

"into the hollow of her arched throat" 467

"far down the arches of lindens and chestnuts" 476

"strange airship passages that thread underneath arches" 482

"over the skull's arc" 502

"Under that big ellipse." 504

"[Nä~rrisch] has never seen this great Ellipse any other way but the way he was meant to." 509

"a tremendous fart that echoes for minutes across the historic ellipse" 514

"stucco arches" 516

"by electric signal traveling a reflex arc" 517

"the brown ellipse her blood made on the torn ticking" 518

"she makes no move to step through the arch with him" 573

"bobbing ellipses of blue light" 576

"pure milk-colored light sweeps up in a bell-curve" 561

"archgangster" 579

"the planetoid Katspiel of veryvery elliptical orbit," 584

"Blood drips into the white jumper, black under these arclights." 598

"a revelation, blinding, crescent, at the periphery of his brain" 631

"Little kids boil up like ants on the webby arches of viaducts" 679

"blue-white flashlight blobbing ellipse-to-parabola across the shaking map" 730

"written on the damp arch of wall" 733

"a brand-new reflex arc" 740

"run in arches fine and whirled as the arches of a fingerprint, as filings along magnetic lines of force" 750

U, 755

"follow the bouncing ball" 760

Carl Jung's Life/Death Parabola

From "The Soul and Death"^[1]:

"Life is an energy process. Like every energy-process, it is in principle irreversible and is therefore directed towards a goal. That goal is a state of rest. [...] The end of every process is its goal.

"With the attainment of maturity and at the zenith of biological existence, life's drive towards a goal in no wise halts. With the same intensity and irresistibility with which it strove upward before middle age, life now descends; for the goal no longer lies on the summit, but in the valley where the ascent began. The curve of life is like the parabola of a projectile which, disturbed from its initial state of rest, rises and then returns to a state of repose.

"The psychological curve of life, however, refuses to conform to this law of nature. Sometimes the lack of accord begins early in the ascent. The projectile ascends biologically, but psychologically it lags behind. [...] Our psychology then loses its natural basis. Consciousness stays up in the air, while the curve of the parabola sinks downward with ever-increasing speed.

"Natural life is the nourishing soil of the soul. Anyone who fails to go along with life remains suspended, stiff and rigid in midair. [...] From the middle of life onward, only he remains vitally alive who is ready to die with life. For in the secret hour of life's midday the parabola is reversed, death is born. The second half of life does not signify ascent, unfolding, increase, exuberance, but death, since the end is its goal. The negation of life's fulfilment is synonymous with the refusal to accept its ending. Both mean not wanting to live, and not wanting to live is identical with not wanting to die. Waxing and waning make one curve.

[...]

"Like a projectile flying to its goal, life ends in death. Even its ascent and its zenith are only steps and means to this goal."

References

1. ↑ Carl Jung, "The Soul and Death", pp. 405-408, from Volume 8 of the Collected Works of C.G. Jung: The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche