AtD (37) p.1057 Discussion alert! Major meaning section, ?? thinks Host

[robinlandseadel at comcast.net]

         MK:
         Trying to catch this ragtag assembly of humanity is the 
         ongoing crime?  This some W.A.S.T.E.-like motley group 
         of human beings, 'displaying scars and tattoos, etc." all 
         'having survived some calamity" ??  

         Or is Lew 'unreliable' in his reflections here?

         So, once Lew recognized that it was a 'crime' to chase 
         the preterites, as it were, then he is no longer on the side 
         of the Elect?  No longer a believer in the Church's/Society's 
         way of judging, so his 'mortal sin' is to not believe.?(THAT 
         cuts one off from one's Christian God while one is in that 
         state, fer sure).....

         It is this that got him unambiguously dynamited into his 
         new life. ???  Comments sought, please.

"It's too late," he said. "For me?" 

"For me." Before she could ask what he meant, he'd hung up. 
She had no more coins. . . .

. . . .Suppose, God, there really was a Tristero then and that she 
had come on it by accident. If San Narciso and the estate were 
really no different from any other town, any other estate, then by 
that continuity she might have found The Tristero anywhere in 
her Republic, through any of a hundred lightly-concealed 
entranceways, a hundred alienations, if only she'd looked. She 
stopped a minute between the steel rails, raising her head as if 
to sniff the air. Becoming conscious of the hard, strung presence 
she stood on knowing as if maps had been flashed for her on the 
sky how these tracks ran on into others, others, knowing they 
laced, deepened, authenticated the great night around her. If only 
she'd looked. She remembered now old Pullman cars, left where 
the money'd run out or the customers vanished, amid green farm 
flatnesses where clothes hung, smoke lazed out of jointed pipes. 

Were the squatters there in touch with others, through Tristero; 
were they helping carry forward that 300 years of the house's 
disinheritance? Surely they'd forgotten by now what it was the 
Tristero were to have inherited; as perhaps Oedipa one day 
might have. What was left to inherit? That America coded in 
Inverarity's testament, whose was that? She thought of other, 
immobilized freight cars, where the kids sat on the floor planking 
and sang back, happy as fat, whatever came over the mother's 
pocket radio; of other squatters who stretched canvas for lean-tos 
behind smiling billboards along all the highways, or slept in junkyards 
in the stripped shells of wrecked Plymouths, or even, daring, spent 
the night up some pole in a lineman's tent like caterpillars, swung 
among a web of telephone wires, living in the very copper rigging 
and secular miracle of communication, untroubled by the dumb 
voltages flickering their miles, the night long, in the thousands of 
unheard messages. She remembered drifters she had listened to,
Americans speaking their language carefully, scholarly, as if they 
were in exile from somewhere else invisible yet congruent with the 
cheered land she lived in; and walkers along the roads at night, 
zooming in and out of your headlights without looking up, too far 
from any town to have a real destination. And the voices before 
and after the dead man's that had phoned at random during the 
darkest, slowest hours, searching ceaseless among the dial's 
ten million possibilities for that magical Other who would reveal 
herself out of the roar of relays, monotone litanies of insult, filth, 
fantasy, love whose brute repetition must someday call into being 
the trigger for the unnamable act, the recognition, the Word. How 
many shared Tristero's secret, as well as its exile? What would 
the probate judge have to say about spreading some kind of a 
legacy among them all, all those nameless, maybe as a. first 
installment? Oboy. He'd be on her ass in a microsecond, revoke
her letters testamentary, they'd call her names, proclaim her 
through all Orange County as a redistributionist and pinko, slip 
the old man from Warpe, Wistfull, Kubitschek and McMingus in 
as administrator de bonis non and so much baby for code, 
constellations, shadow-legatees. Who knew? Perhaps she'd be 
hounded someday as far as joining Tristero itself, if it existed,
in its twilight, its aloofness, its waiting. The waiting above all; if 
not for another set of possibilities to replace those that had 
conditioned the land to accept any San Narciso among its most 
tender flesh without a reflex or a cry, then at least, at the very 
least, waiting for a symmetry of choices to break down, to go 
skew. She had heard all about excluded middles; they were bad 
shit, to be avoided; and how had it ever happened here, with the 
chances once so good for diversity? For it was now like walking 
among matrices of a great digital computer, the zeroes and ones 
twinned above, hanging like balanced mobiles right and left, ahead, 
thick, maybe endless. Behind the hieroglyphic streets there would 
either be a transcendent meaning, or only the earth. In the songs 
Miles, Dean, Serge and Leonard sang was either some fraction of 
the truth's numinous beauty (as Mucho now believed) or only a 
power spectrum. Tremaine the Swastika Salesman's reprieve 
from holocaust was either an injustice, or the absence of a wind; 
the bones of the GI's at the bottom of Lake In-verarity were there 
either for a reason that mattered to the world, or for skin divers 
and cigarette smokers. Ones and zeroes. So did the couples 
arrange themselves. At Vesperhaven House either an 
accommodation reached, in some kind of dignity, with the Angel 
of Death, or only death and the daily, tedious preparations for it. 
Another mode of meaning behind the obvious, or none. Either 
Oedipa in the orbiting ecstasy of a true paranoia, or a real Tristero. 
For there either was some Tristero beyond the appearance of the 
legacy America, or there was just America and if there was just 
America then it seemed the only way she could continue, and 
manage to be at all relevant to it, was as an alien, unfurrowed, 
assumed full circle into some paranoia. 

CoL49, pages146/151