Miracle #4:
He leaps about the room. With a scream of longing that shatters the glass wall he leaps out into space. Masturbating end-over-end, three thousand feet down, his sperm floating beside him, he screams all the way against the shattering blue of sky, the rising sun burning over his body like gasoline, down past great oaks and persimmons, swamp cypress and mahogany, to shatter in liquid relief in a ruined square paved with limestone. (Naked Lunch 89)
Whether to send a satellite up the space, despatch instruments to explore Mars or to send man to moon - the rocket to carry them can lift off the surface of the earth only if it develops a force exceeding earths gravity. This velocity, termed escape velocity of a heavenly body, depends upon its gravity.
Naked Lunch was revealed in an age when even air flight by man could hardly be given a thought, let alone attempted. How then it could give a hint to man (and queer) about possibility of space travel is truly amazing. Could have this concept been authored by just normal man? Absolutely no chance!
Seriously? You're continuing this? Is this some kind of
joke to you? Let me clue you in:
this isn't funny!The passage quoted above has absolutely nothing to do with "escape velocity." It's from one of the most disturbing and misogynistic parts of the book.
It starts off with two men and a woman engaging in consensual experimental sex. There's nothing wrong with that. Then it suddenly takes a very violent turn. Here is the passage in its proper context:
"Let me hang you, Mark. . . . Let me hang you. . . . Please, Mark, let me hang you!"
"Sure baby." He pulls her brutally to her feet and pins her hands behind her.
"No, Mark!! No! No! No," she screams, shitting and pissing in terror as he drags her to the platform. He leaves her tied on the platform in a pile of old used condoms, while he adjusts the rope across the room . . . and comes back carrying the noose on a silver tray. He jerks her to her feet and tightens the noose. He sticks his cock up her and waltzes around the platform and off into space swinging in a great arc. . . . "Wheeeeee!" he screams, turning into Johnny. Her neck snaps. A great fluid wave undulates through her body. Johnny drops to the floor and stands poised and alert like a young animal.
He leaps about the room. With a scream of longing that shatters the glass wall he leaps out into space. Masturbating end-over-end, three thousand feet down, his sperm floating beside him, he screams all the way against the shattering blue of sky, the rising sun burning over his body like gasoline, down past great oaks and persimmons, swamp cypress and mahogany, to shatter in liquid relief in a ruined square paved with limestone. Weeds and vines grow between the stones, and rusty iron bolts three feet thick penetrate the white stone, stain it shit-brown of rust.
Johnny dowses Mary with gasoline from an obscene Chimu jar of white jade. . . . He anoints his own body. . . . They embrace, fall to the floor and roll under a great magnifying glass set in the roof . . . burst into flame with a cry that shatters the glass wall, roll into space, fucking and screaming through the air, burst in blood and flames and soot on brown rocks under a desert sun. Johnny leaps about the room in agony. With a scream that shatters the glass wall he stands spreadeagle to the rising sun, blood spurting out his cock . . . a white marble god, he plummets through epileptic explosions into the old Medjoub writhe in shit and rubbish by a mud wall under a sun that scar and grab the flesh into goose-pimples. . . . He is a boy sleeping against the mosque wall, ejaculates wet dreaming into a thousand cunts pink and smooth as sea shells, feeling the delight of prickly pubic hairs slide up his cock.
The woman is hanged, raped, killed and finally set on fire!This "book" is pure hate speech. Anyone presenting it as a source of "truth" is engaging in a very dangerous game. There is no "truth" in this book. There is only hatred and ignorance.