Help, please

[Bekah]

Like David and Robin,  I'd also be interested in a group reread of  
COL49.

Bekah

On Nov 12, 2008, at 1:20 PM, David Morris wrote:

> 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 thre!
>  atening 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, wh!
>  ere 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.
>