Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon

[Jan Klimkowski]

From an interview with Alex Constantine:

CONSTANTINE: To give you an example, Phil Ochs developed a multiple personality. He was a part of a group I called the "Baez Contras" who surrounded Joan Baez. It's known that Joan was used in C.I.A. mind control experimentation at a very early age. She was subjected to trauma-based programming, which is still in use today in the creation of multiple personalities. If you look at the latest record by Joan Baez, she thanks her multiple personalities on the back of the record. Then you have her friend Phil Ochs, who was equally adamant in his opposition to the U.S. government and covert operations and he developed a multiple personality by the name of John Train. It wasn't until ten years later that the name "John Train" surfaced as a C.I.A. operative working on Wall Street. As a matter of fact, Lyndon LaRouche complained about an agent named John Train who supposedly led him to his present jail sentence. During the 1960s and Seventies, John Train of the C.I.A. had the job of disrupting the Left, which was the sole purpose of Operation Chaos. So how was it that Phil Ochs came to have a multiple personality with the name of an actual C.I.A. agent? We know Phil Ochs was found hung in 1976 and it was his alternate personality that did the hanging that actually assassinated the host personality.

The F.B.I. and C.I.A. came together in Operation Chaos; it was an inter-agency program that drew upon the entire intelligence apparatus of the U.S. government. As I say, it was the largest covert project in American history.

SECONDS: Could you provide more informational support on the idea that Joan Baez was involved?

CONSTANTINE: Yes. She's admitted in private letters to two organizations for mind control victims that she had been submitted to trauma-based programming as a child.

SECONDS: What's trauma-based programming?

CONSTANTINE: The C.I.A. found they could take a young child, subject that child to extreme trauma, forcing the child to withdraw within himself. That's called disassociation and at that stage you can begin to program the child by creating altered personalities. Often the altered personality lives in the area of the body that is tortured. So if the child is tortured in the shoulder, for instance, he may have a multiple personality that lives in the shoulder.

SECONDS: How would a child he tortured?

CONSTANTINE: With electric shock.

SECONDS: Joan Baez's family was

CONSTANTINE: Her father was the head of Operations Research at Cornell University, which is known today as being the home base for all MK-Ultra contracts during the 1950s.

SECONDS: What does "Operations Research" mean?

CONSTANTINE: I'm not sure, but that was his title. Cornell was the home of all mind control experimentation conducted by the C.I.A. It was the also the home of the Human Ecology Fund, which is well known as the contract base of MK-Ultra. The C.I.A. handed out contracts to Ivy League universities and behind the fences of these colleges around the country there were scientists conducting over one hundred and twenty different sub-projects in the field of mind control.

SECONDS: So we have Phil Ochs and Joan Baez

CONSTANTINE: In a small circle of Folk singers, what are the odds that two of them would have multiple personalities? Now Joan Baez reaches the age of seventeen and hits those coffeehouses with her guitar and begins associating with a young man named Bob Dylan who, if you recall, has a motorcycle accident in 1966. This is three months after Joan Baez's brother-in-law had a fatal motorcycle accident. How was it this came about? Those are questions I want to ask about these musicians and their tragic lives. In the case of Phil Ochs, it's easy to understand why he was targeted by Operation Chaos. He was at the Chicago convention remember "Pig For President"? That was his pig. He was one of the organizers of the Chicago event. His career was on the rise up to the Chicago convention; then after the convention it went into steep decline. He was blackballed by the radio stations; he had a difficult time getting record contracts; his career nose-dived from 1968 until his death.

SECONDS: What other musicians were assassinated?

CONSTANTINE: There's a whole slew of musicians who were vocally political and opposed the Central Intelligence Agency. Joan Baez had gone to Chile and rallied against the C.I.A. and the youth movement in general had targeted the Central Intelligence Agency for its role in the Vietnam War and bringing the United States into it. You had Fascism openly condemned on campuses; they were burning Nixon in effigy this is why Operation Chaos geared up. To put down the youth movement entailed assassinating political leaders and musicians who spoke openly against the Nixon regime.

Mimi Baez, Joan's sister, was married to the folk singer and poet Richard Farina.

Farina was the best friend of Thomas Pynchon.

Farina is Joan Baez's brother-in-law who died in a motorcycle accident.

Pynchon dedicated Gravity's Rainbow to Richard Farina.

The following is strictly for those with Eyes Wide Open.

"Pavlov was fascinated with the "ideas of the opposite". Call it a cluster of cells, somewhere on the cortex of the brain. Helping to disintiguish pleasure from pain, light from dark, dominance from submission….but when somehow starve them, traumatize, castrate them send them over into one of the transmarginal phases, past borders of their waking selves, past equivalent and paradoxical phases you weaken this idea of the opposite, and here all at once is the paranoid patient, who would be master, yet now feels himself a slave…..who would be loved, but suffers his world's indifference, and "I think", Pavlov writing to Janet, "it is precisely the ultraparadoxical phase which is the base of the weakening of the idea of the opposite in our patients. Our madmen, our paranoid, maniac, schizoid, morally imbecilic.
Spectro shakes his head. "You are putting response before stimulus. Not at all. Think about it. He is out there, he can feel them coming, days in advance, but it is a reflex. A reflex to something that is in the air right now, something were too coarsely put together to sense, but Slothrop can."

Pynchon, Gravity's Rainbow

Tyrone Slothrop.

Infant conditioning.

IG Farben.

Behaviourist conditioning.

Nazi scientist Laszlo Jamf Paperclipped to the USofA.

A programmed Reflex, linking Sex and Death.

Imipolex-G.

Conditioning infants.

The Good Rocket to take us to the Stars.

The Evil Rocket for the World's suicide.

The two perpetually in struggle.

So generation after generation of men in love with pain and passivity serve out their time in the Zone, silent, redolent of faded sperm, terrified of dying, desperately addicted to the comforts others sell them, however useless, ugly or shallow, willing to have life defined for them by men whose only talent is for death.

Pynchon, Gravity's Rainbow

There is also the story about Tyrone Slothrop, who was sent into the Zone to be present as his own assembly--perhaps heavily paranoid voices whisper, 'his time's assembly'--and there ought to be a punchline to it, but there isn't. The plan went wrong. He is being broken down instead and being scattered. His cards have been laid down, Celtic style, in the order suggested by Mr. A.E. Waite, laid out and read, but they are the cards of a tanker and feeb: they point only to a long and scuffling future, to mediocrity...-to no clear happiness or redeeming cataclysm.

Pynchon, Gravity's Rainbow