Help, please

[Michael Bailey]

yes, indeed to all you've said, Glenn.

and yes to JT's words on "delirium" which as we AtD scholars know, is
a concept that P explicitly spells out in the early Basnight section,
doncha know...
Pynchon's prose often renders me delirious.

a word on "cammed":  I was working on a car with a buddy back in the
day and the instructions for replacing the points talked about a cam.
He goes, "the cam - wait, that's down underneath in this car."

In every respect he was a better mechanic, so it was about the only
time I was able to bring my English lit skills to bear and tell him
something.

"That's the camSHAFT."

The oval raised places on the camshaft are actually the cams (it's a
shaft full of cams) and as they rotate, they push the pushrods up.

As the shaft rotates further the (concentric) ovoid's irregular shape
first pushes the bottom of the pushrod and then doesn't - so the
pushrod is allowed to retract (pushed down by the springs atop the
rod) -- so the concept of "cam" is a raised surface on a rotating rod.

So in the distributor that we were working on, there was a similar
raised place on a shaft with a similar purpose: to convert rotary into
reciprocating motion and to slave this motion to the rate of rotation.

Now if the old dude is rising every night, in rhythm to the rotary
motion of the earth, there is some cam-type thing or concept that
pushes him up out of the furrow.

I will probably rant on this some more after pondering it.