Help, please

[Heikki Raudaskoski]

It's from Oedipa's contemplation on DT and metaphor.

The old man is having regular fits of delirium tremens, Oedipa
presumes. The etymology of "delirium" is "off the furrow". In
Oedipa's contemplation, that's what he does during a nighttime
DT fit of his: gets cammed out of

	To cam out (or cam-out) is a process by which a screwdriver slips
        out of the head of a screw being driven once the torque required
        to turn the screw exceeds a certain amount.

the run-of-the-mill course of daytime life. Oedipa tries to
imagine what the old man experiences when he's off the beaten path,
in the shady, untraveled DT spaces of his own.


Heikki


On Tue, 11 Nov 2008, Natália Maranca wrote:

> 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?
>