Help, please

[David Payne]

These images and metaphors (e.g., mattress as computer, delirium and furrows, lights and spheres, etc.) are extended few paragraphs later when Oedipa is surveying the sailor's room:
 
She remembered John Nefastis, talking about his Machine, and massive destructions of information. So when this mattress flared up around the sailor, in his Viking's funeral: the stored, coded years of uselessness, early death, self-harrowing, the sure decay of hope, the set of all men who had slept on it, whatever their lives had been, would truly cease to be, forever, when the mattress burned. She stared at it in wonder. It was as if she had just discovered the irreversible process. It astonished her to think that so much could be lost, even the quantity of hallucination belonging just to the sailor that the world would bear no further trace of. She knew, because she had held him, that he suffered DT's. Behind the initials was a metaphor, a delirium tremens, a trembling unfurrowing of the mind's plowshare. The saint whose water can light lamps, the clairvoyant whose lapse in recall is the breath of God, the true paranoid for whom all is organized in spheres joyful or threatening about the central pulse of himself, the dreamer whose puns probe ancient fetid shafts and tunnels of truth all act in the same special relevance to the word, or whatever it is the word is there, buffering, to protect us from. The act of metaphor then was a 7 thrust at truth and a lie, depending where you were: inside, safe, or outside, lost. Oedipa did not know where she was. Trembling, unfurrowed, she slipped sidewise, screeching back across grooves of years, to hear again the earnest, high voice of her second or third collegiate love Ray Glozing bitching among "uhs" and the syncopated tonguing of a cavity, about his freshman calculus; "dt," God help this old tattooed man, meant also a time differential, a vanishingly small instant in which change had to be confronted at last for what it was, where it could no longer disguise itself as something innocuous like an average rate; where velocity dwelled in the projectile though the projectile be frozen in midflight, where death dwelled in the cell though the cell be looked in on at!
  its mos
t quick. She knew that the sailor had seen worlds no other man had seen if only because there was that high magic to low puns, because DT's must give access to dt's of spectra beyond the known sun, music made purely of Antarctic loneliness and fright. But nothing she knew of would preserve them, or him. She gave him goodbye, walked downstairs and then on, in the direction he'd told her. For an hour she prowled among the sunless, concrete underpinnings of the freeway, finding drunks, bums, pedestrians, pederasts, hookers, walking psychotic, no secret mailbox. But at last in the shadows she did come on a can with a swinging trapezoidal top, the kind you throw trash in: old and green, nearly four feet high. On the swinging part were hand-painted the initials W.A.S.T.E. She had to look closely to see the periods between the letters. 
 
On Wed, 12 Nov 2008 (11:17:27 -0600), fqmorris at gmail.com wrote

> I'm thinking the rich soils are those of *dreams* and *magic*, the old
> man representing a kind of shaman of the downtrodden, plower of dream
> worlds, the places where reality is transformed and deeper levels of
> consciousness (concentric planets), even down to the level of an
> ancient Jungian pre-consciousness.
> 
> On Wed, Nov 12, 2008 at 10:31 AM, Michael Bailey
>  wrote:
>> g) but, "what concentric planets?" - huh? (or, rudely, wtf?)
>> what kind of farmer turns up planets in his acreage?
>> 1) planetary gears? (more mechanical allusions?)
>> 2) archaelogical folklore, "farmer plowing his field turns up a lost civilization",
>> or, "traces of a vanished world" - which of course links the Tristero
>> to conspiracies, cults, mystery religions back thru time
>> (like Ishmael Reed wrote: "The history of the world is the history
>> of the warfare between secret societies")
>> 3) still, what kinda synecdoche or metonymy is it - planet-> earth-> soil?
>>
>>
>> So, I'm still getting cammed out by
>> a) the rotating candlestubs
>> b) the concentric planets
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