not reversible

[Joseph Tracy]

Good quote. As a conservator of leaded glass, and as a typical fucked up human being, the idea of what is  reversible, restorable, the idea of  the conservation of memory, utility, originality , intent and beauty are all important to me. 
On Dec 12, 2011, at 5:58 PM, alice wellintown wrote:

> 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