Precise Points

At the exact point, plotted precisely across all dimensions, (a) and (b) meet, projectile and target, lining up to form the terminal perfection. The finished product, the basket sunk, the paper pierced through, all of these are corpses, the terminus of a long line of change. Both engaged in continual becoming, target and projectile are drawn onto trajectories that cause their motions to merge at a final point. Their lines converge until they both zero out in relation to each other, emerging in negative distances, their compositions changed from the positive, moving-towards, to the decaying, corpse bodies, moving-after. At this single instant, this minute point, there is a true ending, a state of all zeros, of all things coming together, all becomings reaching their fullest potential and existing in a state of being.

When Quiet strikes down the enemy jetfighter from a helicopter’s side door in Metal Gear Solid V, she demonstrates the symbolic role of accuracy. Attuned to the world around her, she extrudes the firearm from herself, taking in a perfect knowledge and putting forth a perfect theory, meeting one trajectory with another and effortlessly generating these beings of projectile and target. The advice of firearms accuracy given in any introductory lesson is following in her footsteps. Let the firearm be an extension of your being, squeeze don’t pull, keep your eye on the target, all of these meant to allow one to make themselves a transitory being, a flowing channel between one trajectory, the read trajectory of the target, and another trajectory, the written trajectory of the projectile. Training for accuracy is training this specific action, this highly specialized conduit state that allows for the differences of motion to be met at will.

This bringing together via the conduit flow is a deconstructive process. In Gravity’s Rainbow, Slothrop is the target, the rockets falling the projectiles, while the firing of these rockets, the mechanics bringing them down to Earth upon his position make for a conduit between the binary halves that structure the novel’s circular path, the two opposing parabolas of the rocket’s rise and fall back to Earth and the implied inverse from the impact back to launch. One parabola forms another by the implied ellipse and in doing so, victim and shooter (x-intercepts), target and projectile (y-intercepts) are deconstructed, their meeting forming a unified ellipse that Pynchon walks us through as a mandala, showing the political and social transformations of the 20th century by a careful dissection of the deconstructed binary of World War Two.

The marksman looks through their scope, connecting through the eyes of the target, closing the loop. The perfect marksman is this, a closed circuit. The laboratory test for a rifle is where it’s affixed by machines to be as close to direct connection as possible. Making shots again and again, perfect accuracy unifies all things in question to a single equation of the battlefield. Quiet is unseen, making shots appear through the heads of the russians and afrikaners, terminus after terminus, micro-conclusions of the conflict occuring again and again to pile up, a sandpile of beings accumulating to the totality of the war.