A pool table is a terrible thing to WASTE ...

[Dave Monroe]

   "'Then,' Oedipa concluded, 'something must have
happened in his personal life, something must have
changed for him drastically that night, and that's
what made him put the lines in.'
   "'Maybe,' said Bortz, 'maybe not.  You think a
man's mind is a pool table?'"
   "'I hope not.'" (Lot 49, Ch. 6, p. 154)

Cf. ...

"Last night, she might have wondered what undergrounds
apart from the couple she knew of communicated by
WASTE system.  By sunrise she could legitimately ask
what undergrounds didn't.  If miracles were, as Jesús
Arrabal had postulated years ago on the beach at
Mazatlán, intrusions into this world from another, a
kiss of cosmic pool balls, then so must be each of the
night's post horns. For here were God knew how many
citizens, deliberately choosing not to communicate by
U. S. Mail.  It was not an act of treason, nor
possibly even of defiance. But it was a calculated
withdrawal, from the life of the Republic, from its
machinery.  Whatever else was being denied them out of
hate, indifference to the power of their vote,
loopholes, simple ignorance, this withdrawal was their
own, unpublicized, private. Since they could not have
withdrawn into a vacuum (could they?), there had to
exist the separate, silent, unsuspected world." (Lot
49, Ch. 5, pp. 124-5)

http://waste.informatik.hu-berlin.de/Trystero/Trystero9_e.html

That "I hope not," anxiety over the mechanistic,
deterministic, Newtonian, what have you causality
Bortz perhaps means to to imply, or over those
miraculous  "intrusions into this world from another"?
 

Either way, what caused Randy Driblette not only to
change that couplet, to speak the unspeakable (again,
the anxiety, the terror of the unrepresentable, the
sublime) in The Courier's Tragedy, but to "walk into
the Pacific" (p. 152), to "take a Brody" (p. 153) as
well?





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