As far as I know, it’s impossible to explore all of Khare without going back in time. But you can finish the game with collecting all the important[1] items but without traveling back in time:
[Spoilers for all 4 games]
Outside the Gate
Talk to the guard outside the city gate. Be kind to him, don’t fight. No need to give him food to be friends with him. If you agree to help each other, once you enter the gate he will say the codeword and you have the key to open the gate.
Inside Khare
First stop: Prison cell. Learn to play swindlestones from the one-armed man. Try to get as much information as possible from the dialogue options in the game. You may rest, but don’t sleep or the old man will rob you. In the morning the guards will let you out. If you leave the prison without spending the night, you will miss the chance to collect a black facemask from a dead black-elf. But it’s possible to get it at the end of the game, so you may as well leave the cell asap to collect more clues from outside.
Next main location is an inn near a junction. If the inn is open, enter it. Play dice with the innkeeper, get information. Staking four gold pieces is the better option. The option to invite the innkeeper for a game of dice is only available if you learned the game from the one-armed prisoner. The inn is safe but don’t sleep there. It’s a waste of money, and if you sleep outside you’ll be attacked by a werewolf, searching whose armor will give you first clue about Vik. If you reach there near daytime, go straight to the chainmaker’s at the right side of the junction.
Chainmakers: Search the walls to get some gold and a bottle of Blimberry. If you linger too long the chain maker will come and accuse you of thieving. You can talk your way out and buy a silver chain (useful against undead), or you can fight and rob his corpse of the chain. If you call out at any time, he’ll come and ask you what you want. The chain is only 5 gold pieces (three of which we already stole from him), so I usually buy the chain from him without fighting. From here, you may go back to the first junction or go right toward the festival. To explore as much as possible, go to the festival.
The Festival:
1 - Barrel boy. The idea is to hit his sister with some apples. Buy 5 apples for 1 gold (but you can’t eat them). So far I have never been able to hit the mark. It says you need to spend more time practicing swordplay and less time reading spell books to improve your aim. But it’s fun for one gold pieces’s worth, and I think the boy and the girl used to work for the innkeeper at the first junction. In one of the games he mentioned that the girl and her brother went to the festival.
2 - Green-haired man. Pay one gold piece, enter, cast TEL to read his thoughts and find he’s suppressing a laughter. Grab his wig, or cast SAP to make him give up his act and give you the wig (useful for talking to animals and talking other languages). Serves him right for selling a bad joke!
3 - Beer tent. Smell the air, it heals 1 health. Talk to the bartender. Choose ‘What’s on sale?’ dialogue and then you’ll hear some goblins talking about killing a noble. Leave the tent without buying anything. If you met Flanker and became friends with him in Part 1, you can spot him now. You may talk with him and find some clues. Most important one is that portal traps are circular.
4 - Dancing bear. Opportunity to loss your money. Avoid! (So far I have not found any use for entering this tent). ETA: You will be able to rob the robbers if you visit this tent during the second visit.
5 - Musicians. Cast JIG to earn their friendship. You can meet them later at the Meat and Cleaver inn.
6 - Bare-knuckle fight. Place a bet, rig the match in your favor (SAP, DOZ) to win some gold. Then take up the fight yourself and win more money.
After this there is the cabinet of fortune, but it’s better to visit there later during the game. So now go back to the middle of the Fair and leave. Follow the path and you’ll reach the place near the poachers. If you visited it earlier, you’d have met the poachers and Sirisi. But as we spent time enjoying the festivities, they have already left and you missed the chance to learn the answer to the difficult question asked by the priest of Slangg which in turn gives you Moulas’s spell-line. But that’s okay. There are other ways to find that spell-line.
Go back down the road, towards the junction near the Chainmakers. You’ll meet Moulas’s corpse here. The silver chain is handy against it. If you cast SIX, then the corpse is defeated without entering a fight-screen. Search the body and find a scrap of paper containing half a spell-line. One of the local creatures (elvins?) living nearby will invite you to their house and gift you with gold, information, and pebbles as gratitude for killing the living corpse. Continue going down the road, and then turn to the alley to the west (it’s the only way forward from here). Visit the burnt house, collect the burnt mask - it’s charcoal, useful for clearing out inscriptions in tombs (afaik, one tomb - Lorag’s).
Next up along this road is Theetah’s house. Explore, don’t fall into portal traps. You get to find what Theetah looks like (from the portrait), collect his walking stick and badge, and also get some hints about the ritual of Courga. From the house, take the exit to the back to return to the road where you met Moulas. Now continue north, enter Flayer’s hut at the top junction.
Flayer’s hut: Talk, cast dIM to take his box and eat the food he cooked for free. Do not kill him or engage him in fight, or else Courga will kill you should you meet him and you won't be able to become a follower of Courga.
From Flayer’s hut, go west and meet the statue of the Mantis man. Fight him, search the body, search the hut to get some gold coins, a sun jewel (useful for SUN), and a bracelet of bones (useful for KID). There are other locations where you can get a sun jewel. And you can own multiple sun jewels. Finish the game with at least two, so that in Sorcery 3 you can gift one to the Sham, who will gift you with an oak sapling in return. If you don’t get a bracelet of bone from the hut here, you can get one from the necropolis (Riif’s tomb) or the cabinet of fortune (if you shout the right words).
Next, it’s the monastery of Effe: There is a priest outside with whom you can play dice and gather information. You can’t enter the monastery. If the Analander is female, they’ll say women aren’t allowed inside. If the Analander is male, they say strangers aren’t allowed inside. In Sorcery! 4, they raised no objection to my gender when entering the temple of Effe in Mampang, and even when I wore the robes of a monk, they addressed me as sister. Clearly female priests of Effe are not unusual in Mampang but they follow different rules in Khare.
From here you go to the artist’s corner. Visit the portrait painter and see how he paints without hands. You’ll have to fight a copy of yourself here (use SAP to weaken it), but it’s worth it as you can collect all the portrait of the nobles of Khare (which will prove useful burning materials in Part 3), find the number of each noble (Eg: Theetah is seventh noble, etc). You can also get the clue ‘Vik for First Noble’ from the artist. Next, visit the flame-master. Go inside, cast mAG, step into the fire, collect the box containing some gold, buy a small flame from him using his own gold. There is also a carpet-seller but he’ll only try to kill you. I’ve heard that you can get nose plugs from here, but I already had nose plugs (from Alianna, Part 1) so I avoid this person. ETA: It's actually better to get Ragnarista's wrist-band from Alianna and pick up the noseplugs here. You just spend some time in the shop and look under the carpet to find the noseplugs.
From the artists corner, get out using HOW, NIF, or just 'asking someone'. Do not linger outside or else you’ll be robbed. Drink from the fountain. Go left, to the place where people walk around carrying ladders. Help a little girl without ladder get inside her house (I used BIG), buy a ladder from her. She’ll ask eight gold - give half, she’ll throw a rope-ladder, and you can pay the rest or simply walk away (after all, she only gave you a rope ladder after agreeing to sell a proper ladder). From here, turn right go the junction with a well. You'll meet a girl addicted to swindlestones here. From here, go to the junction with the well. If you have the rope-ladder, use it to climb down the well (if you don’t have the ladder then don’t climb down). Explore the sewers. Return after finding a scratched poem. This poem is the spell for the North Gate, but each line if missing half (and it doesn’t contain the Fourga’s pride part). Still, it gives the correct order in which the lines are to be recited. Go back up.
From the junction, go south/down. If you meet a creature called Cancax here, he’ll pay to to get some information from the bathhouse. Visit the bathhouse. Take a swim to heal a bit, visit the steam-room. Eavesdrop, stay silent. You’ll overhear a plot to assassinate Lorag, which will be useful in two locations. From the bathhouse, do south to the festival.
Fair grounds (again): Enter the fortune tent. Talk to Honest Hannah. Pay him then ask ‘what now’ so he’ll tell you to shout something to annoy the creature in the cage so he’ll pick a good gift. Based on the information from the bathhouse (and by casting TEL to listen to the creature), you can shout ‘Lorag’ or ’Sansas’ to anger the creature. From the creature, you can get a bone bracelet if you haven’t got one, or some other gift. If you have all the main magical items already, then he’ll give a giant’s tooth. Continue going south and let the girls smack you. They’ll give you some sand at the end, which is very useful in Sorcery 3. From the festival, you can rob some drunk men, and then maybe meet Flanker again. From here, you have to go up the way you came.
At the junction near the bathhouse, go west, towards the pool with a fish and gold coin. Go up from there to get invited into Vangorn's house. If you fight him, you can get essence of bark and some gold from there. If you talk smartly instead, he'll give you a black facemask. After coming out of the house, turn back, retrace your steps to the junction near the bathhouse and go up. Knock at Cancax’s door to tell him what you overheard and earn six gold pieces. If you ask him about Lorag, he’ll warn you to hurry so that you get the spell-line before Lorag is assassinated. Once you reach the junction again (with the well), go north (up).
The shrine of Slangg: Here you may get Moulas’s spell line if you answer the easy question and become a follower. It’s possible to become a follower of Courga later in the game even you are following Slangg, so you can just get the spell-line here. [In general, if you know the answer to the impossible question (Sirisi), you can take up the difficult challenge and they’ll tell you the spell-line if you win. The third way of knowing the spell-line if finding the other half of the paper you found in Moulas’s thread. I remember finding the other half once long time ago, but have never been able to redo that.]
From the shrine, if it’s dark you’ll have to visit some of the inns. There are two inns, the Meat and Cleaver and the Wayfarer’s Rest. You can get food at both places but can’t sleep at Meat and Cleaver because the the innkeeper attack you at night for meat (better not eat there either). So first go to the Meat and Cleaver, meet the musicians from the fair. Leave, go to Wayfarer’s Rest (which is the nicer and safer inn). Play dice with the sailor, talk with Flanker if you met him. If you didn’t meet Flanker in the first game, you’ll meet a dwarf instead. Either of them will offer to take you the the council, but for different reasons. If you go (it’s not necessary or useful), don’t kill the guards, don’t step into the big circle (which is actually a portal trap) but read the names behind the chairs. When you come back you cannot enter any inn you have already visited. Don’t sleep in the market or the alleys unless you want to be press-ganged into a slaver ship and lose all the perishable items (food, paper - including the one with the spell line) in the process of escaping. If you do get captured, you can meet your old friend Tomas (the guard from the city gate) and maybe also have an audience with Vik (mention meeting Glandragor). I don’t usually do this because I like to keep Flayer’s scroll which is the recipe for a soup that increases max-stamina by one (in Sorcery 3). If you prefer not to visit the ship, wait by the river.
In the morning, go to the bridge keeper. Ask to lower the bridge. Offer to help if you want to be nice but obey when the old man asks you to stop interfering - you’ll do more harm than good and end up breaking the bridge if you are involved in lowering it.
Now you are on the other side of the river, that is Upper Khare.
First, go to the Red-Eyes quarter. Avoid getting captured by young Red-Eyes (use KIN or gAK). Continue along the road and you’ll reach a place near a high wall. Cast BIG, get the sun-jewel from atop the cliff. Climb to the other side of the wall. You’ve broken into the Red-Eye prison!
Red-eye prison: Cast NIF to get the guards out of here, rescue the elvin in cell #6 (use DOP or the copper key if you got it from the man outside the ruins of La-Ki in Part 1). Once outside, go Left-Right-Left. Leave the elvin (he’s safer without you). Now you are back to the road and will meet some orclings. Cast DUD, TEL, or SIX to get rid of them without giving any gold. Look up to see Lorag’s house.
Lorag’s mansion: Look around for useful stuff before going straight into the house. If you search the junk outside, you’ll find at most three broken objects - a mirror, a ring, and an orb. If yo have some glue, and you do not have a golden backed mirror (in this walkthrough you’d have got it from Flayer’s box), you can repair the mirror. The other two items can’t be repaired. So if you have the mirror already, you may as well go knock at the door straightaway. Tell Lorag you need his help. Tell him about overhearing the plot to kill him. Help him figure out the spells. First is dIM (spell of confusion), second is TEL (mind reading), third is ZEd (the third letter, d, in the old script looks like a rotated L). If you get the third letter correctly, he’ll be impressed and tell you his line for the gate. He’ll invite you for an experiment. If you don’t have a green-haired wig yet, now is the time to get it. Agree to take part in the experiment, wear the green wig that he gives you, cast RAp or mAG. Lorag is trying to bind you to his will(LAW?) but mAG or RAp will counter it. Once you survive the experiment, he’ll give you the wig. ETA: You will be able to meet Lorag alive if you followed the steps in this walkthrough as long as you broke into (as opposed to captured and thrown into) the Red-eye jail. If you were captured however, you'll find him dead. You can still get the green-haired wig from here but not the spell-line.
Go back to the street. You’ll see some fire/smoke ahead but push forwards to meet a blacksmith. Do not steal from him. Instead, pay forty gold pieces to buy the legendary sword(+4 damage) form him. It’s totally worth it, and don’t sell it anywhere (you’ll be given this option a few times), and try not to loose it. Keep going down to reach the square. There is a market, a statue, and a casino (Halls of Vlada) here and just outside the archway is a monument. Only visit the monument after you’re done with the casino and the statue. Near Fire View square:
a - The statue. Take the gold pieces, do not run when the statue tries to attack you. If you have the legendary sword, you can defeat the statue and keep your gold. If you don’t, you’ll need information from the dwarf at the Metalworker’s Guild (not visited in this walkthrough) that the left leg hides a panel. If you have neither, better leave the statue be.
b - Halls of Vlada. This is where you earn gold. Try to finish the game with at least 4030 gold, as you’ll need to buy some important magical items in the next game. If you earn too much though it won’t be much of an advantage, because the prices will be higher then. But it’s better to have more gold than less. So try to play as many games as possible. After each game, go back to the halls and then choose. This way you get to rewind if you lose.
c - Market. You may buy food here, but it’s not needed. In Khare, the water from most fountains can substitute for food, and in Baklands (Part 3) you come across edible moss at multiple locations. There are some magical items to be bought here - sun jewel, snake-bite antidote, and tinderbox. Tinderbox is useful. Antidote is good to have but there is no place in any of the four games where it is essential. You have two sun jewels already, and the one here is 15 gold (haggle to lower it to 10 gold) so you can do without it or since you’ll be finishing the game super-rich, you might as well buy it too. The weapon seller tells you that silver weapons will damage the undead, and you can buy bow and silver arrows here. Arrows can only be used once.
d - The monument. It’s a portal trap, so don’t step into it. Move away, then look back to get the option to talk with a herbalist. First, ask him about the Mustik he’s selling. It’s a hypnotic, so don’t smell it. Take advantage of it’s influence on the herbalist to make him give you something else (one bottle of Blimberry) for free. There’s also a fruit seller, you can buy a Bomba fruit from him and get some clues if you talk with him.
From the square, take the path to the left, towards the Fallen Quarter. From here there isn’t much of choice regarding which directions to take. The main locations are listed below.
a - Shinva’s home. You’ll find a diseased creature in front whom you can heal using dOC. You can talk with her and she’ll tell you to avoid the mill-wheel which is another portal trap. Inside Shinva’s house, his manservant will tell you his master can be found at the necropolis but there is no thieving to be done here, because the servant is part red-eye and burn you.
b - The house where everything is turned to stone. If you are playing game+ mode, you can cast ZIp here to reach the Gardens of Briar and talk with Throben who’ll give a clue to find the ‘final secret’ of the game. To do this you need to get a green ring from the goblin inside the mine in Part 1 by casting TEL (I have to thank u/AdVictoriamLink for this info).
ETA: After the house, there is a well where you'll be given the option to put a coin inside it. Put a coin, observe, and if you have the rope-ladder, climb down (rope ladder isn't essential to climb down, but you can't return to this entrance if there is no rope ladder). You'll meet some goblins part of Sansas's plan to take over the city. Don't get taken to the goblin king, but fight the goblins who attack you and then follow their group. You'll overhear the Fourga's pride part of the spell-line. If you go further you can take a look at the goblin king and realize that he doesn't have the true crown. But do not linger. Turn back the way you came, climb out of the same well you entered.
c - The steeple. You’ll meet Theetah here. Give him some food and he’ll give you a serpent ring very useful in Part 3 so make sure you have some actual food (not Blimberry) when you reach him. You can also give him his badge and the walking cane but he doesn’t need them any more so you may as well keep them [ETA: If you give him the badge he'll only throw it away, but if you keep the badge, then you can use it to gain entry to the tower of Mampang (Part 4) posing to be an ambassador from Khare]. No matter what you do, he’ll only be able to remember half of the line. To get the full line you need to know who is the God of Pride. Usually I get it from Courga. But another location where it can be found is if you go to the sewer and get embroiled in the goblin attack. You’ll overhear some goblins mention Fourga’s name.
d - The low hovel. If you need any magical item, you can get it here but the gnome will steal one of your items in return (you have no control over what she will take). By this point you would have collected nearly everything you can, so it’s better to avoid this location.
To reach the necropolis, go over to the fence, use HOW, BIG, or ZEN to get to the other side. Inside the Necropolis,
a - Visit the oldest grave, find Lorag’s tomb, if you have the burnt face-mask use it to clear the inscription on the tomb. But you’ll find nothing important so it’s okay if you don’t have the charcoal.
b - Visit the newer graves, those from O - T. If you don’t have a bone-bracelet yet, visit Riif’s tomb to get a bracelet but if you already have it then there’ll be nothing there, so go straight to Shinva’s tomb.
Shinva’s Mausoleum: Cast mAG to safely take the silver stake (it’s a silver sword). Enter the tomb, you’ll need the sun jewel to find the way inside without getting killed by a death wraith (the fire of danger or the tinderbox+paper could also be used for light but they won’t last long). Go down the steps. You’ll be met with a deathwraith. Use the silver sword or chain (sword has more damage) to fight it, or cast WAL to avoid fighting. Talk to Shinva’s ghost(?). Tell him you’re going to Baklands, he’ll give you a clue which is useful in Part 3.
The temple of Courga: Climb up. There’s a snake but it’s easily defeated. When walking towards the shrine, avoid circles (portal traps). Finish the ritual. You would have got the clues form Theetah’s house and Theetah himself. Ask the name of the God of Pride, and ask anything else you’d like to know. Courga will ask if you want to enter his religion, and he’s a kind god so it’s good if you do, but he doesn’t get angry if you don't. At the roof of the temple, you can fashion a new spell. The spells I have tried are: LAK (rain), PUR (kittens), TAK (get a magical item). If you don’t have a black facemask yet, then cast TAK, clench the fist, catch the black sparks and then open the fist to find one.
After this, go back to the road and reach the gate. You must have the "Vik for First Noble” clue in your inventory by now, or else it’ll take half your gold to get past Vik’s soldiers and reach the gate. At the gate, recite the spell. Use the scratched poem from the sewers to know the order of the lines. Go through the gate, and save Khare by destroying the goblins (using your power over the gate).
[1] What you miss taking this route: Dwarftown and hence beeswax, mystery potion, and chainmail/leather gauntlets. Only the gauntlets are a unique find but I was able to finish the whole series fine without them. You can visit the dwarftown if you exit Theetah's house via the front door. This way you'll miss Flayer's hut, Mantis Man and swindlestones outside the monastery. If you are more focused on collecting as many items as possible, this is the better route because Flayer's scroll gives only +1 stamina, and all other items (mirror, sun jewel, bracelet) can be collected from other locations. But if you don't have the mirror, you can't cast KIN and you'll lose some gold near the red-eye quarter (greet them and let them pickpocket you, better than getting thrown in jail and miss Lorag's spell-line).
Note: If you just want to get across Khare as soon as possible, then you can avoid the first visit to festival and go straight north from the junction near the chain makers house. This way you’ll get the Sirisi answer (to the impossible question) but can’t visit Theetah’s house. So the route is: first junction - poachers camp - Flayer’s hut - Mantis man - Monastery - Artist’s Quarter. Alternatively you can go to the shrine straight from the festival. You don’t really need to go down the well and find the scratched poem because (1) If you know the number of each noble, the spell lines are in the reverse order, eg: first noble’s line would be the last. (2) Provided you have all four lines, you can rewind until you get the right order or simply google the full line and enter the lines in the correct order. You can also avoid the festival altogether, because the main advantage of going to the festival is collecting the sand, bone bracelet (or giants tooth), and the green wig. You only need sand in the next game, and there are several places you can collect sand in Baklands/Ishtara. Giant’s tooth is not a unique item, the bone bracelet you get from two other locations, and the green wig can be collected from Lorag’s mansion.

I've read Gravity's Rainbow four times and thought I understood it pretty well. However, reading Beckett's Molloy/Malone Dies/The Unnameable trilogy and the Beckett biography Damned to Fame, and a lot of Jung, and going through some difficult times made me realise how much within me that I had previously repressed. The slow process of integrating everything I was in denial about has allowed me to find peace that I never thought I would attain, having been clinically depressed and suicidal for around ten years. I started reading GR again with this new understanding of myself and realised that I actually hadn't understood it properly at all. I thought I'd share a few things I realised in case they might be of interest to any of you. I will discuss the book from a psychoanalytical perspective and a political perspective here, but I do not wish to reduce what is such a brilliant novel in its own right to these elements alone; I feel like the literary perspective has been discussed far more than these aspects though, and strongly doubt I would be able to add anything new to that excellent body of existing work. Even though I have realised that the political and psychoanalytical aspects are examined and explored very overtly in GR, I think they are often underexamined because the readers themselves haven't come to terms with their own inner conflicts, and are therefore in denial about certain things in themselves, such as their own possible complicity (through inaction or otherwise) with the System - much like Pokler. Therefore I am only going to be discussing the book within the very narrow frameworks of psychoanalysis and politics, while acknowledging that this comprises only a fraction of what it really is.
The sheer density of GR can make it hard to tell what the hell is going on even just in terms of things like the plot. But maybe this isn't such a surprise, Pynchon's intelligence and education, how long he spent writing it, and and how much research he had to do in the process. It's only after doing a lot of the background reading that he refers to that things started to come together for me. With subjects such as Pavlov's theories of conditioning, statistics, physics, engineering, Pynchon reproduces key concepts within the text. For example:

Pavlov was fascinated with “ideas of the opposite.” Call it a cluster of cells, somewhere on the cortex of the brain. Helping to distinguish pleasure from pain, light from dark, dominance from submission... . But when, somehow—starve them, traumatize, shock, 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 imbecile—

However, for much of the history, particular that regarding intelligence agencies (whether that is WWII activity such as the O.S.S. or the S.O.E., or CIA activity in the 60s and 70s around the time that Pynchon was writing GR in a Californian beach house, very near where groups such as the Black Panthers were operating, targets of programs such as COINTELPRO and Operation CHAOS), the books had not even been written yet. I think the first few pages, with the carriage full of evacuees, can be interpreted as moving into the darkest parts of lost or repressed history, e.g.:

and it is poorer the deeper they go... ruinous secret cities of poor, places whose names he has never heard..

These names he has never heard could range from the Herero tribe whose genocide he discovered while writing V. ten years before, to Novi Pazar (with the Adenoid passage), to the all other hidden history in the book. I have also read people remarking on how in The Crying of Lot 49 it seems like Pynchon was somehow aware of MK-Ultra (which Dr Hilarius was involved with) before well the documents were leaked and the program confirmed. However, fortunately, many these history books have since been written. If anyone is interested, a great place to start is The Devil's Chessboard: Allen Dulles, the CIA, and the Rise of America's Secret Government, published in 2016, which follows Dulles from his time at the Wall Street law firm Sullivan and Cromwell to his time in the O.S.S. in Switzerland, working with Nazis in Operation Paperclip, to his directorship of the CIA through the 50s and 60s. Reading about this Cold War history, and also the writing of Huey Newton (who I strongly believe Enzian is in part based on), made a lot of GR far clearer. It is important to recognise that these histories of intelligence agencies contain irrefutable documented facts that the public at large is collectively in denial about - because they are too dark for them to acknowledge and face. For them to acknowledge these facts requires integrating that darkness into their conscious minds, before anything can be done about it on the political level. I think that, through the incorporation of all the world's darkness, from politics to history to sexual and paedophilic fantasies to etc..., this is the Secret Integration that Pynchon is trying to accomplish, and which concept he wrote a story about, published in Slow Learner. Reading this book causes the beginnings of this process, as all of the darkness is brought into one's mind by reading it.
Another crucial area for me was understanding a bit about Freud and Jung. Particularly Freud's tendency to project his own incredibly powerful repression onto his patients, because of his own compulsion to analyse and differentiate everything, much in the Western tradition, seen in, for example, his five stages of psychosexual development, oral, anal, phallic, latent and genital stages. Some people don't need to delve into the darkest aspects of their unconscious to find peace, but since Freud did, he felt the need to inflict this also on his patients - seen in the many cases where he would tell victims of childhood sexual abuse that it was due to their own subconscious desires to be raped, which could, obviously, do enormous damage to his patients. His compulsion to do this might have stemmed from, alongside his overanalytical compulsions, the truth that anything we are in denial of or repress causes inner conflicts that manifest in our daily lives, and the only way to get rid of them is to integrate them into the conscious mind. Jung's equivalent of this is his statement that “until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.” Jung's thinking on the unconscious, and particularly the notion of the collective unconscious - this idea that all the darkness in humanity is also within ourselves, and vice versa, much as in Daoism, another critical source for GR - is very useful to help understand the book.
An interesting thing to consider is that the old psychoanalytic approach, more directive/authoritarian (going back to Mesmer powerfully dominating his hypnotic subjects), where the analyst would attempt to integrate these repressions into the conscious mind of the patient by force, has fallen out of favour - it is now seen that the permissive style, in which the therapist tries to help the patient realise things themselves without use of force, is a much healthier approach for the average person (though there are still some cases where the directive style can be more effective). The former's effects can be seen in GR when, after many sessions with Freud, Greta's darkest parts of her unconscious mind rise up and she begins murdering children. Pynchon links Freud's repressions to trauma carried down by Jews from life under the Romans, and elsewhere, slavery under the Ancient Egyptians, which is fundamental to their religious texts (linked itself with attitudes and trauma in the black population about the more recent black slavery).

The trouble with Sigmund was the place he happened to be living in, a drafty, crenelated deformity overlooking a cold little lake in the Bavarian Alps. Parts of it must have dated back to the fall of Rome. That was where Sigmund brought her.
She had got the idea somewhere that she was part Jewish. Things in Germany by then, as everyone knows, were very bad. Margherita was terrified of being “found out.” She heard Gestapo in every puff of air that slipped in, among any of a thousand windways of dilapidation. Sigmund spent whole nights trying to talk it away. He was no better at it than Rollo. It was around this time that her symptoms began.
However psychogenic these pains, tics, hives and nauseas, her suffering was real. Acupuncturists came down by Zeppelin from Berlin, showing up in the middle of the night with little velvet cases full of gold needles. Viennese analysts, Indian holy men, Baptists from America trooped in and out of Sigmund’s castle, stage-hypnotists and Colombian curanderos slept on the rug in front of the fireplace. Nothing worked. Sigmund grew alarmed, and before long as ready as Margherita to hallucinate. Probably it was she who suggested Bad Karma. It had a reputation that summer for its mud, hot and greasy mud with traces of radium, jet black, softly bubbling. Ah. Anyone who’s been sick in that way can imagine her hope. That mud would cure anything. Where was anybody that summer before the War? Dreaming. The spas that summer, the summer Ensign Morituri came to Bad Karma, were crowded with sleepwalkers. Nothing for him to do at the Embassy. They suggested a holiday till September. He should have known something was up, but he only went on holiday to Bad Karma—spent the days drinking Pilsener Urquelle in the cafe by the lake in the Pavilion Park. He was a stranger, half the time drunk, silly beer-drunk, and he hardly spoke their language. But what he saw must have been going on all over Germany. A premeditated frenzy.

This is a similar process to what Slothrop goes through in the Abreaction Ward, when under sodium amytal ("truth serum") and the supervision of psychoanalysts, Slothrop explores the parts of his unconscious that he has repressed, including his feelings towards race and homosexuality.

PISCES: We want to talk some more about Boston today, Slothrop. You recall that we were talking last time about the Negroes, in Roxbury. Now we know it’s not all that comfortable for you, but do try, won’t you. Now—where are you, Slothrop? Can you see anything?
Slothrop: Well no, not see exactly...

By the presence of Red (Malcolm X) in the scene where Slothrop flees the black men at the jazz club trying to rape him down the toilet (which leads through a trip not only through Slothrop's own unconscious racism but also through the repressed histories, all the Preterite lost and forgotten.

Either he lets the harp go, his silver chances of song, or he has to follow. Follow? Red, the Negro shoeshine boy, waits by his dusty leather seat. The Negroes all over wasted Roxbury wait. Follow? “Cherokee” comes wailing up from the dance floor below, over the hi-hat, the string bass, the thousand sets of feet where moving rose lights suggest not pale Harvard boys and their dates, but a lotta dolled-up redskins. The song playing is one more lie about white crimes. But more musicians have floundered in the channel to “Cherokee” than have got through from end to end.

Here, among other things, if we consider Slothrop's mouth harp a (Rilke-referencing) metaphor, in part, for Pynchon's own tools of artistry, I feel like these floundering musicians can be seen as other writers who have not come to terms with the darkest parts of history, and thus their own unconscious. And the decision to delve into these things as an artist necessitates exposing one's own unconscious repressions, which causes you to be in a vulnerable position - particularly since They like to use these aspects of people to control them, as with Prentice and the drawing of the Scorpia Mossmoon lookalike he is given to activate the Kryptosam. In Pynchon's case, this means exposing his own racism and homophobia:

If Slothrop follows that harp down the toilet it’ll have to be headfirst, which is not so good, cause it leaves his ass up in the air helpless, and with Negroes around that’s just what a fella doesn’t want, his face down in some fetid unknown darkness and brown fingers, strong and sure, all at once undoing his belt, unbuttoning his fly, strong hands holding his legs apart—and he feels the cold Lysol air on his thighs as down come the boxer shorts too, now, with the colorful bass lures and trout flies on them. He struggles to work himself farther into the toilet hole as dimly, up through the smelly water, comes the sound of a whole dark gang of awful Negroes come yelling happily into the white men’s room, converging on poor wriggling Slothrop, jiving around the way they do singing, “Slip the talcum to me, Malcolm!” [*] And the voice that replies is who but that Red, the shoeshine boy who’s slicked up Slothrop’s black patents a dozen times down on his knees jes poppin’ dat rag to beat the band... now Red the very tall, skinny, extravagantly conked redhead Negro shoeshine boy who’s just been “Red” to all the Harvard fellas—“Say Red, any of those Sheiks in the drawer?” “How ’bout another luck-changin’ phone number there, Red?”—this Negro whose true name now halfway down the toilet comes at last to Slothrop’s hearing—as a thick finger with a gob of very slippery jelly or cream comes sliding down the crack now toward his asshole, chevroning the hairs along like topo lines up a river valley—the true name is Malcolm, and all the black cocks know him, Malcolm, have known him all along—Red Malcolm the Unthinkable Nihilist sez, “Good golly he sure is all asshole ain’t he?” Jeepers Slothrop, what a position for you to be in! Even though he has succeeded in getting far enough down now so that only his legs protrude and his buttocks heave and wallow just under the level of the water like pallid domes of ice. Water splashes, cold as the rain outside, up the walls of the white bowl. “Grab him ’fo’ he gits away!” “Yowzah!” Distant hands clutch after his calves and ankles, snap his garters and tug at the argyle sox Mom knitted for him to go to Harvard in, but these insulate so well, or he has progressed so far down the toilet by now, that he can hardly feel the hands at all...

GR can be seen even as a process of abreaction that Pynchon underwent. If the rumours that he used drugs through writing it are true, then that would mean exposing things in him unconscious even to himself while writing it. Worth at this point also to note Jung's criticisms of Freud's use of abreaction, and thus the possible dangers of doing this.

Though traumata of clearly aetiological significance were occasionally present, the majority of them appeared very improbable. Many traumata were so unimportant, even so normal, that they could be regarded at most as a pretext for the neurosis. But what especially aroused my criticism was the fact that not a few traumata were simply inventions of fantasy and had never happened at all.

However, as Daoism asserts, light and darkness is in everything. For the Pavlovian Pointsman, who views things in binary, this is impossible to accept - the idea that for between every extreme - like black and white - lies a spectrum, a continuous rainbow. As Western humans understand things through this differentiation and analysis, this continuity causes an inherent conflict. Pointsman, the pure cause-and-effect man, the "Antimexico" (since Mexico, the statistician who thinks all can be explained through independent variables and probability distributions, takes the opposite position), says this on Daoist thinking early on.

“Pierre Janet —sometimes the man talked like an Oriental mystic. He had no real grasp of the opposites. ‘The act of injuring and the act of being injured are joined in the behavior of the whole injury.’ Speaker and spoken-of, master and slave, virgin and seducer, each pair most conveniently coupled and inseparable—The last refuge of the incorrigibly lazy, Mexico, is just this sort of yang-yin rubbish.

But by the end of Beyond the Zero, he's having a breakdown, as his unconscious is trying to tell him the truth of the Daoist wisdom he was so quick to reject in his scientific arrogance.

“Talking to myself, here. Little—sort of—eccentricity, heh, heh.”
“Yang and Yin,” whispers the Voice, “Yang and Yin... .”

With all that out of the way, the plot of what GR is actually about can perhaps begin to be discussed. I'm going to make a lot of assumptions here that many of the male characters are based on Pynchon himself. You may disagree with this approach, which is very understandable, given my total lack of evidence. My justification for it is the following passages from Slothrop's trip down the toilet:

Here now is Crutchfield or Crouchfield, the westwardman. Not “archetypical” westwardman, but the only. Understand, there was only one. There was only one Indian who ever fought him. Only one fight, one victory, one loss. And only one president, and one assassin, and one election. True. One of each of everything. You had thought of solipsism, and imagined the structure to be populated—on your level—by only, terribly, one. No count on any other levels. But it proves to be not quite that lonely. Sparse, yes, but a good deal better than solitary. One of each of everything’s not so bad. Half an Ark’s better than none.

Then slightly later on:

Isn’t there supposed to be only one of each?
A. Yes.
Q. Then one Indian girl...
A. One pure Indian. One mestiza. One criolla. [*] Then: one Yaqui. One Navaho. One Apache—
Q. Wait a minute, there was only one Indian to begin with. The one that Crutchfield killed.
A. Yes. Look on it as an optimization problem. The country can best support only one of each.
Q. Then what about all the others? Boston. London. The ones who live in cities. Are those people real, or what?
A. Some are real, and some aren’t.
Q. Well are the real ones necessary? or unnecessary?
A. It depends what you have in mind.
Q. Shit, I don’t have anything in mind.
A. We do.

However, given the extent to which Pynchon has managed to keep his life quiet, I'm aware that this assumption could be projection from me. I think might be by design of the book though:

“Pre cise-ly why,” leaps Rozsavolgyi, “we are now proposing, to give, Slothrop a com plete- ly dif-ferent sort, of test. We are now de sign- ing for him, a so called, ‘projec-tive’ test. The most famil-iar exam- ple of the type, is the Rorschach ink-blot. The ba- sic theory, is that when given an un struc-tured stimulus, some shape-less blob of exper-ience, the subject, will seek to impose, struc- ture on it. How, he goes a -bout struc-turing this blob, will reflect his needs, his hopes—will pro vide, us with clues, to his dreams, fan- tasies , the deepest re-gions of his mind.”

With those disclaimers out the way, here's what I think. I think Mexico is the "cheap nihilist" of Pynchon as a younger man, before he's delved into his own darkness, and still very much without belief in any sort of spiritualism:

“It makes no sense unless we also consider those who’ve passed over to the other side. We do transact with them, don’t we? Through specialists like Eventyr and their controls over there. But all together we form a single subculture, a psychical community, if you will.”
“I won’t,” Mexico says dryly, “but yes I suppose someone ought to be looking into it.”

Pointsman is his analytical side, obsessed with cause-and-effect, which eventually, he comes to realise, necessitates delving in the darkest regions of Slothrop's mind, but still obsessed with control, never losing control:

Sign and symptoms. Was Spectro right? Could Outside and Inside be part of the same field? If only in fairness... in fairness... Pointsman ought to be seeking the answer at the interface... oughtn’t he... on the cortex of Lieutenant Slothrop. The man will suffer—perhaps, in some clinical way, be destroyed—but how many others tonight are suffering in his name? For pity’s sake, every day in Whitehall they’re weighing and taking risks that make his, in this, seem almost trivial. Almost. There’s something here, too transparent and swift to get a hold on—Psi Section might speak of ectoplasms—but he knows that the time has never been better, and that the exact experimental subject is in his hands. He must seize now, or be doomed to the same stone hallways, whose termination he knows. But he must remain open—even to the possibility that the Psi people are right. “We may all be right,” he puts in his journal tonight, “so may be all we have speculated, and more. Whatever we may find, there can be no doubt that he is, physiologically, historically, a monster. We must never lose control. The thought of him lost in the world of men, after the war, fills me with a deep dread I cannot extinguish...”

Prentice, the employee, the seasoned intelligence veteran, strikes me as a maturation from Pynchon's earlier Mexico phase, into a more realistic and experienced person and, by the time he gets into the Counterforce, "activist". This could be projection but given that the book was written from around the mid-60s until 1973, and how much changed in that time, I feel like this could be based on his own experiences with political activism in California around that time. Might be totally wrong about that, but I just got that impression from reading the weird "interview" towards the end of the book with the Wall Street Journal between the interviewer and the "spokesman for the Counterforce". Who knows, read it again and see what you think.
And Slothrop, the experimental subject, is a model of Pynchon himself, rather than a differentiated portion of his own psyche which he turned into a character.
So, what I think is going on:
PISCES is using Slothrop (conditioned by Jamf) to exploit the racism of the Germans in psychological warfare with the whole Schwarzkommando thing. Pointsman is following his own pathological drive to analyse every facet of Slothrop's psyche. This includes Bloat taking photographs of Slothrop's map of girls linked to rockets, which we find out later might partly be falsified, which I interpret perhaps as Pynchon's recognition of his own attempt to impose his sexual interpretation system onto the world at large - interestingly something touched on early on in Bleeding Edge, though I can't find the passage right now, he quietly references the sexual hysterias of youth or something like that.
Prentice is an employee of the Firm, a greater They than either PISCES or Pointsman, using his ability to have other people's fantasies, notionally for Pointsman, but really for some even grander scheme. This is reflected in the discussion of the message which Prentice picks up from the rocket which he and Slothrop see at the beginning of the book. From the Kryptosam message with the Scorpia lookalike:

Slowly then, a revelation through the nacreous film of his seed, in Negro-brown, comes his message: put in a simple Nihilist transposition whose keywords he can almost guess. Most of it he does in his head. There is a time given, a place, a request for help. He burns the message, fallen on him from higher than Earth’s atmosphere, salvaged from Earth’s prime meridian, keeps the picture, hmm, and washes his hands. His prostate is aching. There is more to this than he can see. He has no recourse, no appeal: he has to go over there and bring the operative out again. The message is tantamount to an order from the highest levels.

This "highest orders" thing can be compared with Slothrop seeing the hand of God pointing down at him.

There is in his history, and likely, God help him, in his dossier, a peculiar sensitivity to what is revealed in the sky. (But a hardon?) On the old schist of a tombstone in the Congregational churchyard back home in Mingeborough, Massachusetts, [*] the hand of God emerges from a cloud, the edges of the figure here and there eroded by 200 years of seasons’ fire and ice chisels at work, and the inscription reading:
In Memory of Constant
Slothrop, who died March
ye 4th 1766, in ye 29th
year of his age.
Death is a debt to nature due,
Which I have paid, and so must you.

...

6:43:16 BDST—in the sky right now here is the same unfolding, just about to break through, his face deepening with its light, everything about to rush away and he to lose himself, just as his countryside has ever proclaimed... slender church steeples poised up and down all these autumn hillsides, white rockets about to fire, only seconds of countdown away, rose windows taking in Sunday light, elevating and washing the faces above the pulpits defining grace, swearing this is how it does happen—yes the great bright hand reaching out of the cloud...

I think Pynchon recognised that with his unique abilities, perception, intelligence, and even privilege, it was his duty to delve into these hidden histories and play his role in bringing about this integration of the darkest levels of the unconscious. But Beyond the Zero is all about systems, and as Pynchon is well aware all systems are inherently limited because there are irrational elements in the world. So after this we have the briefer section in the Casino Hermann Goering, where the role of chance - or fate, depending on your interpretation - is recognised, and systems are examined, particularly language systems, like the drinking game Prince. So after that, with the third part, In the Zone, I think he may have been using drugs and various other techniques to bring out unconscious things in himself, to get past these conscious systems. And then completed with the Tarot reading performed at the end, where it says "here are the cards, exactly as they came up" - I think it's very possible that he did an actual Tarot reading at this point. Maybe I'm wrong about this though, I don't want to make too many assumptions given the lack of information we really have on him. If that thing with the drugs is true, it would explain that infamous quote Jules Seigal attributed to him, "I was so fucked up while I was writing it... that now I go back over some of those sequences and I can't figure out what I could have meant." But it's unclear whether that quote is real or not.
How does this play into politics? I've written far too much already, but I'll just leave things with a couple more quotes and the observation that the final part, the Counterforce, contains some very valid criticisms of the countercultural movement as it manifested in the 60s through 70s. There's this critical passage when Enzian is motorbiking around the Zone, high on Pervitins, and realises that everything has come together for this. There's definitely a sense that Pynchon is acknowledging here the importance of his work, the fact it has done things that no other book had before. But in it too there's also, in it, the mocking of the temptation to view everything as an ordered conspiracy, and not acknowledge the non-rational and non-causal forces also at work, and mocking of his own self-seriousness.

There doesn’t exactly dawn, no but there breaks, as that light you’re afraid will break some night at too deep an hour to explain away—there floods on Enzian what seems to him an extraordinary understanding. This serpentine slagheap he is just about to ride into now, this ex-refinery, Jamf Ölfabriken Werke AG, is not a ruin at all. It is in perfect working order. Only waiting for the right connections to be set up, to be switched on... modified, precisely, deliberately by bombing that was never hostile, but part of a plan both sides—”sides?” —had always agreed on... yes and now what if we—all right, say we are supposed to be the Kabbalists out here, say that’s our real Destiny, to be the scholar-magicians of the Zone, with somewhere in it a Text, to be picked to pieces, annotated, explicated, and masturbated till it’s all squeezed limp of its last drop... well we assumed—natürlich!—that this holy Text had to be the Rocket, orururumo orunene the high, rising, dead, the blazing, the great one (“orunene” is already being modified by the Zone-Herero children to “omunene,” the eldest brother)... our Torah. What else? Its symmetries, its latencies, the cuteness of it enchanted and seduced us while the real Text persisted, somewhere else, in its darkness, our darkness... even this far from Südwest we are not to be spared the ancient tragedy of lost messages, a curse that will never leave us... . But, if I’m riding through it, the Real Text, right now, if this is it... or if I passed it today somewhere in the devastation of Hamburg, breathing the ashdust, missing it completely... if what the IG built on this site were not at all the final shape of it, but only an arrangement of fetishes, come-ons to call down special tools in the form of 8th AF bombers yes the “Allied” planes all would have been, ultimately, IG-built, by way of Director Krupp, through his English interlocks—the bombing was the exact industrial process of conversion, each release of energy placed exactly in space and time, each shock-wave plotted in advance to bring precisely tonight’s wreck into being thus decoding the Text, thus coding, recoding, redecoding the holy Text... If it is in working order, what is it meant to do? The engineers who built it as a refinery never knew there were any further steps to be taken. Their design was “finalized,” and they could forget it. It means this War was never political at all, the politics was all theatre, all just to keep the people distracted... secretly, it was being dictated instead by the needs of technology... by a conspiracy between human beings and techniques, by something that needed the energy-burst of war, crying, “Money be damned, the very life of [insert name of Nation] is at stake,” but meaning, most likely, dawn is nearly here, I need my night’s blood, my funding, funding, ahh more, more... . The real crises were crises of allocation and priority, not among firms—it was only staged to look that way—but among the different Technologies, Plastics, Electronics, Aircraft, and their needs which are understood only by the ruling elite...
Yes but Technology only responds (how often this argument has been iterated, dogged and humorless as a Gaussian reduction, among the younger Schwarzkommando especially), “All very well to talk about having a monster by the tail, but do you think we’d’ve had the Rocket if someone, some specific somebody with a name and a penis hadn’t wanted to chuck a ton of Amatol 300 miles and blow up a block full of civilians? Go ahead, capitalize the T on technology, deify it if it’ll make you feel less responsible—but it puts you in with the neutered, brother, in with the eunuchs keeping the harem of our stolen Earth for the numb and joyless hardens of human sultans, human elite with no right at all to be where they are—”
We have to look for power sources here, and distribution networks we were never taught, routes of power our teachers never imagined, or were encouraged to avoid... we have to find meters whose scales are unknown in the world, draw our own schematics, getting feedback, making connections, reducing the error, trying to learn the real function... zeroing in on what incalculable plot?
Up here, on the surface, coaltars, hydrogenation, synthesis were always phony, dummy functions to hide the real, the planetary mission yes perhaps centuries in the unrolling... this ruinous plant, waiting for its Kabbalists and new alchemists to discover the Key, teach the mysteries to others...
And if it isn’t exactly Jamf Ölfabriken Werke? what if it’s the Krupp works in Essen, what if it’s Blohm & Voss right here in Hamburg or another make-believe “ruin,” in another city? Another country? YAAAGGGGHHHHH!
Well, this is stimulant talk here, yes Enzian’s been stuffing down Nazi surplus Pervitins these days like popcorn at the movies, and by now the bulk of the refinery—named, incidentally, for the famous discoverer of Oneirine—is behind them, and Enzian is on into some other paranoid terror, talking, talking, though each man’s wind and motor cuts him off from conversation.

Some words of wisdom from the seasoned veteran Prentice:

“You’re a novice paranoid, Roger,” first time Prentice has ever used his Christian name and it touches Roger enough to check his tirade. “Of course a well-developed They-system is necessary—but it’s only half the story. For every They there ought to be a We. In our case there is. Creative paranoia means developing at least as thorough a We-system as a They-system—”
“Wait, wait, first where’s the Haig and Haig, be a gracious host, second what is a ‘They-system,’ I don’t pull Chebychev’s Theorem on you, do I?”
“I mean what They and Their hired psychiatrists call ‘delusional systems.’
Needless to say, ‘delusions’ are always officially defined. We don’t have to worry about questions of real or unreal. They only talk out of expediency. It’s the system that matters. How the data arrange themselves inside it. Some are consistent, others fall apart. Your idea that Pointsman sent Gloaming takes a wrong fork. Without any contrary set of delusions—delusions about ourselves, which I’m calling a We-system—the Gloaming idea might have been all right—”
“Delusions about ourselves?”
“Not real ones.”
“But officially defined.”
“Out of expediency, yes.”
“Well, you’re playing Their game, then.”
“Don’t let it bother you. You’ll find you can operate quite well. Seeing as we haven’t won yet, it isn’t really much of a problem.”
Roger is totally confused.

And finally, amid all this darkness, in a superlatively dark book, some hope at last, to hold onto, that makes life worth living, and why I think that despite what many say, GR is not a nihilistic work at all (Tchitcherine, the born nihilist, is almost a parody of this position). It starts with Slothrop's awakening to nature:

Trees, now—Slothrop’s intensely alert to trees, finally. When he comes in among trees he will spend time touching them, studying them, sitting very quietly near them and understanding that each tree is a creature, carrying on its individual life, aware of what’s happening around it, not just some hunk of wood to be cut down. Slothrop’s family actually made its money killing trees, amputating them from their roots, chopping them up, grinding them to pulp, bleaching that to paper and getting paid for this with more paper. “That’s really insane.” He shakes his head. “There’s insanity in my family.” He looks up. The trees are still. They know he’s there. They probably also know what he’s thinking. “I’m sorry,” he tells them. “I can’t do anything about those people, they’re all out of my reach. What can I do?” A medium-size pine nearby nods its top and suggests, “Next time you come across a logging operation out here, find one of their tractors that isn’t being guarded, and take its oil filter with you. That’s what you can do.”

And then, after Slothrop's harp makes its trip down the toilet, and through all of the darkness of the book until that point, where does it next show up? After he draws a rocket mandala, scrawls Rocketman was here on a wall, after the sequence with the Magician using black magic and a mandrake to multiply money, and a delegate from the Committee on Idiopathic Archetypes shows up to visit:

Crosses, swastikas, Zone-mandalas, how can they not speak to Slothrop? He’s sat in Säure Bummer’s kitchen, the air streaming with kif moires, reading soup recipes and finding in every bone and cabbage leaf paraphrases of himself... news flashes, names of wheelhorses that will pay him off enough for a certain getaway... . He used to pick and shovel at the spring roads of Berkshire, April afternoons he’s lost, “Chapter 81 work,” they called it, following the scraper that clears the winter’s crystal attack-from-within, its white necropolizing... picking up rusted beer cans, rubbers yellow with preterite seed, Kleenex wadded to brain shapes hiding preterite snot, preterite tears, newspapers, broken glass, pieces of automobile, days when in superstition and fright he could make it all fit, seeing clearly in each an entry in a record, a history: his own, his winter’s, his country’s... instructing him, dunce and drifter, in ways deeper than he can explain, have been faces of children out the train windows, two bars of dance music somewhere, in some other street at night, needles and branches of a pine tree shaken clear and luminous against night clouds, one circuit diagram out of hundreds in a smudged yellowing sheaf, laughter out of a cornfield in the early morning as he was walking to school, the idling of a motorcycle at one duskheavy hour of the summer... and now, in the Zone, later in the day he became a crossroad, after a heavy rain he doesn’t recall, Slothrop sees a very thick rainbow here, a stout rainbow cock driven down out of pubic clouds into Earth, green wet valleyed Earth, and his chest fills and he stands crying, not a thing in his head, just feeling natural...

And later:

Slothrop moseys down the trail to a mountain stream where he’s left his harp to soak all night, wedged between a couple of rocks in a quiet pool. ... Through the flowing water, the holes of the old Hohner Slothrop found are warped one by one, squares being bent like notes, a visual blues being played by the clear stream.
There are harpmen and dulcimer players in all the rivers, wherever water moves. Like that Rilke prophesied,
And though Earthliness forget you,
To the stilled Earth say: I flow.
To the rushing water speak: I am.
It is still possible, even this far out of it, to find and make audible the spirits of lost harpmen. Whacking the water out of his harmonica, reeds singing against his leg, picking up the single blues at bar 1 of this morning’s segment, Slothrop, just suckin’ on his harp, is closer to being a spiritual medium than he’s been yet, and he doesn’t even know it.

There's hope after all, and I think it's reflected in how much more positive all his later works have been. Thanks so much for reading, I hope it was at least vaguely interesting, not too much of an unstructured ramble. Also, this is such a great subreddit, really I love the community here. My very best to you all!

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For the buyer, it has been nothing but a revelation, shrinking the world, and making it easy to buy multiple items from various places with a click of a button while lounging in their living room.
Another benefit that has emerged over the last decade is the process of paying through EMIs. Since online portals give out discounts on a regular basis, if a customer sees something they like, online payments allows them to not only buy the item instantly but also pay for it over time.
Online Casinos
The simplicity of online payments is the backbone of online casinos. The industry has developed in such a fashion that gamblers can pay to play however they feel comfortable. With this luxury comes safety wherein inscription technology and confidentiality make transactions secure so people can enjoy games without worrying about anything else.
Online payment methods range from bank transfers to credit cards and bitcoins to select payment gateways. Moreover, the manner in which consumers use to deposit money can then be used to take out money, giving it a holistic approach that is helpful for beginners as well as professionals. The icing on the cake is that online payment consists of little or no transfer charges, making it all the more profitable from the start.
Money Transfers
Online payments aren’t always about buying and selling. They bring joy and happiness to friends and family in unique ways. No longer does grandma has to hide money in a birthday card for a grand child who is in a different part of the world.
Online payments make it simple to transfer money to bank accounts, payment gateways or even someone’s mobile account.
Money transfers now take place while on the move through mobiles, and once again when it comes to emergencies, this is more than helpful.
Making Money
To make money you need to invest money, and online payments present that option right in the palms of your hands.
Feel like a winning streak coming while playing online slots or maybe you want to invest in stocks predicting the market will go up in the next hour, online payments simplify the entire process and lets you go about making money in a relaxed manner.

Hi everyone,
as there isn't any guide on AL, I decided to write my first ever attempt on one. I've been playing Idle Heroes and other similar games for some time and I am at lvl 101 now at AL. So I know what I am talking about, but I am no expert or mastermind.
Feel free to add, suggest or correct.
15.10.2017: Minor update. Added Ashes aura, changed my mind on using brooms in volcano expedition.
18.12.2017: Minor updates.
Quick tips:

• Don't get too excited about getting some "S" heroes early. They are very expensive to promote /star up and will come into play a lot later in the game. Focus on A first
  
• Ignore all D and C heroes, focus on 2 good B heroes up at first. A heroes will be your backbone for quite some time. If you get a good S, only level up one, ignoring the others at first. Use your 2nd S when you can get it to 2 stars and unlock the 2nd skill.
  
• Promoting (star up) unlocks new skills and improves stats. Max level of B heroes is only lvl 75, but they are very cheap to promote (star up). The max of A heroes is lvl 100, but they take about 5 times longer to star up (5 B shards = 1 A shard). Max lvl of S is 125, but again 5 times more expensive to star up (5A = 1S). Costs of leveling up are the same!
  
• The game has a lot of hidden sub-menus. Look around to know where everything is located.
  
• If stuck at certain levels, use manual fighting and time your skills. Usually it's not wasting skills at the last enemies of the first wave, keeping them for the 2nd.
  
• Don't use magic brooms for the early stages in the volcano expedition. Use them for getting the extra rewards or skipping stages when facing Olivia.
  
• You will need the brooms for leveling up the heroes' equipment, which you'll only get using brooms. Later on, you can spend more on expeditions.
  
• Hero shards can leveled up using "Fuse". 50 shards=1 hero. Lower tier shards can be combined to higher tier.
  
• Inscriptions can be leveled up using "Fuse". See artifacts which ones are needed.
  
• Relics can be leveled up in the hero menu or the bag menu. Only use purple and higher, don't level up blue ones. 3 purple or better unlock lvl2 of the aura, 3 orange lvl 3.
  
• When upgrading Relics, the colour doesn't matter, only the stars. So use your useless green and blue relics for that (or duplicate purple)
  
• Artifacts are very important. Try to get unique artifacts for your main heroes at the casino, market or tavern shop. Otherwise level up your highest artifacts that match best. Pay attention not to give a physical dmg artifact to a magic hero and the other way around.
  

BUILDINGS
Casino
Visit daily. Nothing special to add here. Your goal should be to get "Book of an Era" or to get unique artifacts for your used characters. If no interesting items are listed, use free refresh.
Dungeon
Visit daily. Stating the obvious, but try to get as far as possible. You'll get money and exp potions and some hero shards. Use manual skills on difficult levels.
Arena
Visit daily.
Peak arena

• Don't put your best heroes at the first spot. Either evenly distribute to not lose against lower heroes, or put them in 2nd and 3rd line.
• Attack weaker enemies or ones who put their best ones into the first row.

Kingdom League
Visit daily.

• At first try to get some tickets, that you can always fight when you want to (around 10). You will also get one time bonuses for reaching a higher league.
  
• Always get the 1st win bonus and also get the 4th chest if possible. After league regrouping or if you've made a big step forward by leveling up key heroes, march all the way to the 9 wins and get the free summon scroll. Trying every day will fail, as you will climb leagues and get strong opponents.
  

Ruin
Visit daily. Cost to reveal tiles goes up with every unopened chest on the table (1, 2, 4, 8, 16.). So if you have enough keys, open the chest right away and then continue. If not, just crack open and continue.
Volcano expedition
Visit daily.

• As said in the general tips, it's usually not a good idea to use brooms at the early stages.
  
• Use them to get the next big reward, Lvl 12 should always be your aim.
  
• Use your own heroes for the first levels, trying not to lose anyone. At around level 5-8, use 1 of your friends' heroes, which should get you to the top. Don't be angry if you don't.
  
• When facing Olivias, you will most likely lose on of your heroes because of her mind control skill. Either put a low level hero in the back, or skip the stage completely with brooms.
  
• There is a shop, where you can buy missing inscriptions
  
• Use these shards to upgrade hero artifacts.
  
• You can upgrade the shards in the "Fuse" menu.
  

Bounty mission
Visit daily. You can do 10 missions daily. Pick the ones with hero shards, casino chips, purple and orange relics and hero tomes. Use free refresh to clear the unwanted ones. You need to be online twice to complete all 10 missions.
Daily battle
Visit daily.
Tavern
Visit daily. Use your scrolls for new heroes and shards. Unwanted heroes can be dismantled to get shards, which can be fused to higher heroes.
Hidden shop inside tavern: Your best buy is probably the unique artifact of your best heroes. They are difficult to get otherwise (also at casino). The 2nd best pick would be to buy shards of heroes you desperately need/want.
Campaign
There are 2 areas inside campaign. Normal decides the level of auto-explore, where you gain stuff automatically. "Adventure" is hidden here, where you can get hero shards attacking other players. Visit daily!
RELICS
There are several types of relics you can equip. 3 of the same type unlock an aura. The aura can reach lvl 2 when you use only purple or higher, lvl 3 is orange only. Stars only account for the stat bonus for the character, not the aura. There are unique auras, which can/should only be equipped by one hero. The non-unique usually target only the wearer. I would get the 5 Unique auras and pick the last one which suits you best, usually warpath or rupture.

• Ashes

Once per battle. THE aura for your tank! Most of the time, it revives your tank, which can make a big difference in tough battles.

• Dauntless

UNIQUE. Good protective aura for the whole team, based on the HPs of the wearer. 3 Attacks are negated/lowerer per hero, sounds ok. Equip on some high HP char.

• Immortal

UNIQUE. Boosts defense for heroes affected by control effects. Sounds ok to me. Equip on support chars.

• Focus

UNIQUE. The wearer has a 45% chance to be control immune for 5s after an evasion. Used to be on my tank, but Ashes is way too powerful in comparison.

• Warpath

2% more attack each time they hit, stacks up to 20 times, lasts 20s. Great on your damage dealers. Not unique, so you can equip multiple times. I use it on my main dmg dealer.

• Anthem

UNIQUE Any team member gains 75 rage after casting an active skill. MUST have!

• Spiritual Bound

UNIQUE The other team doesn't get rage in the first 5s after the battle starts. Also MUST have, you can get lots of dmg without being interrupted.

• Shield Dance

Once per battle (per char) When the Wearer's HP drops below 25%, 3 random allies gain a shield. Sounds mediocre to me, but could be used on your Tank though.

• Rupture

90% more damage to the first target hit when using skills. Sounds very good for single target dmg heroes. Don't use it at the moment, but a good pick.

• Fortitude

Boosts defense if the wearer's attack is higher than its defense. Not a big fan, you only boost one char, who shouldn't get hit in the first place.
HEROES
I will take a break here and add more later.
S

• Monta

Don't like him too much. Very fragile, useless if it's your first S, depended on good team. High dmg against 1st row.

• Rainbow

High damage, very good finisher. Low HP and defense.

• Alice

Great hero. Probably the best single target dmg, which spreads if killed.

• Heaven

Fragile but very high dmg. Damage on all enemies, but cant focus on one..

• Star Titans

OK tank. I prefer Knut.

• Moonlight

Got nerfed a little, but still very OP. Great hero with high dmg and sealf-heal, almost unbeatable if maxed out.

• Destroyer

Can one kill your tank, even Knut while regenerating.

• Olivia

Extremely annoying in PvP. Her Mind control can kill your best hero while not taking much dmg during the time themselves. Ouch.

• Phenex

Great allrounder. Heals, decent dmg, good pick at first S to level up.

• Shine

Don't own, but high dmg and great debuff.

• Iron Faith

Tank, but don't like him.
A

• Light Mirror

Great. Damage + mass silence

• Knut

Best tank! (Almost) invincible during self-heal. Focus on first skill, a few points in the 2nd, ignore the 3rd.

• Naive

Used her for a while, hoping to make her a longer term A. Back row damage is too low to actually kill something. Only use if you have a 2nd hero targeting the back.

• Mad Scientist

One of the best dmg dealer of the As. Very high dmg+stun.

• Hot Sergeant

Good dmg, burn, lowering armor. But weaker than scientist or favored.

• Favored

Very high dmg divided to all chars, but focusing on just one if it's the last. Great pick.

• Ansonte

Strange support hero. Totally useless as tank, as he could even backfire and kill your fragile heroes.
B

• Bloodblade

Good single dmg

• Metal Doll

Used her as my 2nd B hero. Damage is OK, and got a crit buff. Was the first to replace though..

• Snow Queen

Low damage but good supporter.

• Frankenstein

OK tank for the start.
C/D
Don't bother. Dismantle+Fuse