not reversible

[alice wellintown]

Oedipa later reflects back on the "massive destructions of
information" essential to the Nefastis machine, and discovers this
"irreversible process" of erasure herself (128). She conceives of the
destruction of memory in the recycled bed of an old dying alcoholic
sailor: "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" (128). This irreversible
destruction of memory, emerges again as Oedipa considers that the
Tristero could be Pierce Inverarity's attempt to escape erasure: "he
might even have tried to survive death, as a paranoia; as a pure
conspiracy against someone he loved" (179). Perhaps, the entire story
of COL 49 is the struggling memory (if Pierce indeed left this great
conspiracy to torment Oedipa) of a dead man, desperate to endure
annihilation.

http://www.pynchon.pomona.edu/entropy/col2.html

see
Hysteron Proteron in
Gravity's Rainbow
Steven Weisenburger