Help, please

[robinlandseadel at comcast.net]

Possibly my favorite scene in Lot 49:
 
          "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 those 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 to 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. 

Context helps. By the time I first read CoL49, I had already left Fresno 
[for the first time]. I'll take Michael Bailey's word for it as regards camshafts, 
but both camshafts and furrows point towards staying in line. 

Like CAKE sez:

When you sleep where do your fingers go? 
What do your fingers know
What do your fingers show
Where do your fingers go

When you sleep
Do they tremble on the edge of the bed
Or do you fold them neatly by your head
Do they clench like claws against your own skin
When youre living your day all over again

Cammed out and unfurrowed, the self-destructing, dt-ing alcoholic is no longer 
engaged in consensus reality when the sun goes down, the quotidian day of 
engagement in the work ethic, of furrowed fields and functioning camshafts, 
twin idées fixes of Fresno. There is the insinuation of a Viking funeral, set 
off by a random cigarette, of elder gods in the flinders of luminescent gods but 
there is also Oedipa's assumption of the role of the Madonna, holding this 
train-wreck of a man near the nexus of the homeless and hopeless by the
Transbay Terminal. Pagan preterition meets Catholic redemption.