"There's lights, but there's sound, too. Mostly in the upper altitudes, where it gets that dark blue in the daytime? Voices calling out together. All directions at once. Like a school choir, only no tune, just these—"
* * * * * * * * * *
This book just keeps reminding me more and more of Alan Moore's Jerusalem although I can't entirely pinpoint why. I guess this bit that seems to be about angels or the voices of the dead being heard in the "heavens" is vaguely reminiscent of his story about a "heaven" that's physically just above the Earth, so close that pigeons often find their way there and trees grow up into it (although just the tree's spirit is there or something. It was a long book! I can't remember every detail!). Moore's book was also populated with angels and dead kids running around on adventures. Maybe the only similarity is the adventuring kids and because of that, I've decided the kids are angels and/or ghosts, thus causing me to compare every part of their adventure to the Dead Dead Kids in Jerusalem.
The voices in the heavens also keep bringing me back to parts of Gravity's Rainbow since so much of it is tied up in medium Carroll Eventyr and the dead with whom he communicates. In Gravity's Rainbow, Katje once describes the rocket's arc as the life of the rocket, being birthed in Penemünde and dying in London. But the rocket's arc is not just an arc; it's part of a sine wave. So its trajectory would, theoretically, continue down past the point of impact. This would be the afterlife of the rocket which must be of some concern in the novel seeing as how Pynchon's story is often concerned with the afterlife and how the opening epigraph of the novel is by the father of the rocket, Wernher von Braun, and reads, "Nature does not know extinction; all it knows is transformation. Everything science has taught me, and continues to teach me, strengthens my belief in the continuity of our spiritual existence after death." And so how does the rocket live on after its death? It lives on in how it impacts our culture's perception of death; it lives on in the force it's unleashed on our knowledge, and our perception; it lives on in manipulating our fears and our hatreds. And somehow, all of these things are part of the entire arc and life of the rocket, probably coalescing most thickly about the apex of the rocket's trajectory (and possibly, following the sine wave, most thickly about its nadir underground as well. But that's subconscious talk and I'm already too deep in the weeds on this one as it is). This built up force, whatever it might be, might possibly attract the dead somehow, explaining why Roland Feldspath winds up at this height when he finds himself attached to Slothrop and Slothrop's quest for the 000000 rocket.
There might also be something with the apex being the point Gottfried succumbed to heat and suffocation while traveling in the 000000 rocket.
"There's lights, but there's sound, too"
Perhaps the kids are picking up on radio signals? Maybe even alien radio signals from UFOs. More likely, they're seeing heavenly visions of angels and hearing angelic choirs. Or, although this is basically the same thing only once removed semantically, ghosts of the dead, calling out in unrest and flashing lights, the only things they can manipulate in the material world.
What I'm trying to express is the kids have stumbled onto a Scooby Doo Mystery! Except when they pull off the mask of this baddie, they're going to reveal the face of God! Which is probably a metaphor for light which is like the most important thematic element of this book.
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