Help, please

[Glenn Scheper]

Natália asked:

> I'm reading CofL49 and it was a very smooth read so far,
> but now I'm stuck in this bit. I'm not a native speaker,
> so be condescendent.

> It is on p. 102 in my Harper Perennial edition.
> She is hallucinating all over San Francisco and in the dawn
> she meets this old man who asks her to drop a letter to his wife
> under the freeway, in the W.A.S.T.E. box. 

> ' "Under the freeway." He waved her on the direction she'd been going.
> "Always one. You'll see it." The eyes closed. Cammed each night out of
> that safe furrow the bulk of this city's waking each sunrise again set
> virtuously to plowing, what rich soils had he turned, what concentric
> planets uncovered?"

> This is absolutely incomprehensible to me.
> I loose the line of thought there and everything he says after
> doesn't seem to make much sense. Can anyone please explain it to me?


Well, I'm native and I can't make heads or tails of it.

First, I googled to correct the cammed typo,
but found out it is no typo: Quote atop a blog:

“Under the freeway.” He waved her on in the direction she’d been going.
“Always one. You’ll see it.” The eyes closed. Cammed each night out of
that safe furrow the bulk of this city’s waking each sunrise again set
virtuously to plowing, what rich soils had he turned, what concentric
planets uncovered? What voices overheard, flinders of luminescent gods
glimpsed among the wallpaper’s stained foliage, candlestubs lit to rotate
in the air over him, prefiguring the cigarette he or a friend must
fall asleep someday smoking, thus to end among the flaming, secret salts
held all these years by the insatiable stuffing of a mattress that could
keep vestiges of every nightmare sweat, helpless overflowing bladder,
viciously, tearfully consummated wet dream, like the memory bank to a
computer of the lost? She was overcome all at once by a need touch him,
as if she could not believe in him, or would not remember him, without it.
Exhausted, hardly knowing what she was doing, she came the last three steps
and sat, took the man in her arms, actually held him, gazing out of her
smudged eyes down the stairs, back into the morning. She felt wetness
against her breast and saw that he was crying again. He hardly breathed,
but tears came as if being pumped. “I can’t help,” she whispered, rocking him,
“I can’t help.” It was already too many miles to Fresno.
 -- http://www.chrislott.org/2003/08/page/2/


1.  cammed
(An automobile) equipped with an aftermarket, performance-enhancing camshaft or "cam". 
 -- http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=cammed


This explanation is clear as mud, but adds keywords,
as my text is sequestered in the house of the shrew:

Wilson, in a series of letter-essays to various correspondents that is itself an 
example of rhizomatic communication, has applied this concept of delirium as a 
kind of plowing to the scene in Lot 49 where Oedipa encounters the aged sailor: 
"Cammed each night out of that safe furrow the bulk of this city's waking each 
sunrise again set virtuously to plowing, what rich soils had he turned, what 
concentric planets uncovered?" "The sailor plows," Wilson writes, "but at 
diagonal angles to the furrows of official citizenry. Oedipa realizes the need 
to be out of the furrow, which is out of opposites, and out of opposition: 'Öand 
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' (Lot 49 182). Setting aside the tiresome use of 
'paranoia,' 'unfurrowed' is out of the opposites, in what must seem a delirium. 
Pynchon places Oedipa between opposites: on one hand, experience furrowed by 
opposites that can't be reconciled; and on the other hand, experience beyond 
opposites, out of the groove: 'Trembling, unfurrowed, she slipped sidewise, 
screeching back across grooves of yearsÖ.'" (Undated letter to Marjorie Welish, 
forwarded as an enclosure to Daniel Wenk, May 1998)
  -- http://www.electronicbookreview.com/thread/criticalecologies/machinic
  The Medial Turn - Joseph Tabbi


This reminds me of a schizophrenic loose-associating. For example,
when the police collected me from lotus position sitting rocking
on someone's lawn, and took me handcuffed to the VA Hospital, the
admitting doctor asked "What does a rolling stone gathers no moss
mean?" And I forget all the ideas I gave, of me being a stone, and
probably of begetting no offspring, but ending with how the earth
spins while orbiting around the sun. -- I was quickly admitted.
(Clear, no? earth =~ rock; spin/orbit =~ roll; moss =~ vegetation.)

So if we take selected segments of the quotation, they hang together
in parts, like in a narrow focus, although the whole becomes nonsense:


"Cammed each night out of that safe furrow"

A cam lifts up. So this seems to be the peoples'/or sun's rising.

"the bulk of this city’s waking"

here, it seems to be people

"each sunrise again set virtuously to plowing,"

getting up and going to work.

"what rich soils had he turned, what concentric planets uncovered?"

here, it seems to be the sun.

Although in first reading the post, I figured the speaker to O
had, by some act, uncovered rich soils for her schizo-theorizing.

"What voices overheard, flinders of luminescent gods
glimpsed among the wallpaper’s stained foliage,"
|
googling define:flinders:
fragments, splinters 
 -- en.wiktionary.org/wiki/flinders
|
"candlestubs lit to rotate in the air over him,"

here we have the gnostic conception of God as having shattered
into pieces, or into sparks which continue to propagate through
people, sparks of the divine.

I can add my experiences of seeing the devil's face in a rug;
and then very specifically, the Revelation 12 re-birth event
that I described in my web pages had pentagrams raining down
from my head, and a spinning circle float down from my head,
which resolved into some number of golden smurf-sized figures
chasing one another around a circle (seven stars/candlesticks).

"prefiguring the cigarette he or a friend must
fall asleep someday smoking, thus to end among the flaming, secret salts
held all these years by the insatiable stuffing of a mattress that could
keep vestiges of every nightmare sweat, helpless overflowing bladder,
viciously, tearfully consummated wet dream, like the memory bank to a
computer of the lost?"

here we move from sexual star/candlestick parts to likenesses
of them, cigarettes, phallic in one sense, but also in another
inverted sense, a vaginal opening into the world from which we
suck, and burning, as in flagrant passion, and being consumed,
like many symbols of destruction and death associated with sex.

and from cigs to the idea of falling asleep smoking and burning up,

and from there to many attributes of the flammable mattress stuffing.

Nurse, admit this man immediately!


Yours truly,
Glenn Scheper
http://home.earthlink.net/~glenn_scheper/
glenn_scheper + at + earthlink.net
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