Help, please

[David Morris]

Nice.  Thanks for taking the time to type this all out.  It is
beautifully written.

It's been a long time since my one and only read of COL49, which was
just after my first read of GR, way back in the late 80's.  I thought
less of COL49 back then because, after all. how does one compete w/
GR.  In comparison I thought it a one-noter all about paranoia
projections vs. reality:  one vs. the other.  I probably didn't give
it enough consideration.

Like Robin, I'd be open to partaking in a P-list group read of it sometime soon.

Also I'd like to thank whoever it was that said Auto De Fe would be
one of his "desert island" books.  I'm only at the 4th chapter now,
but really liking it!

David Morris

On Wed, Nov 12, 2008 at 2:24 PM, David Payne <dpayne1912 at hotmail.com> wrote:
>
> 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 m
ost 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.