VLVL II: Allergy to the medicine

[lorentzen-nicklaus]

° Brock Vond's musical taste is "outlawed by the Geneva convention"
(273); of sex he is actually "scared to death" (276); and, perhaps 
most telling, he does have a real problem with LAUGHTER,
its healing anarchist strength:

"Once, not too many years ago, sober, wide awake, he'd begun to laugh
at something on the Tube. Instead of reaching a peak and then tappering
off, the laughter got more intense each time he breathed, diverging 
toward some brain state he couldn't imagine, filling and flooding him,
his head taken and propelled by a supernatural lightness, on some course
unaccounted for by the usual three dimensions. He was terrified. He
glimpsed his brain about to turn inside out like a sock but not what 
would happen after that. At some point he threw up, broke some cycle, 
and that, as he came to see it, was what 'saved' him --- some component
of his personality in charge of nausea. Brock welcomed it as a major 
discovery about himself --- an unsuspected control he could trust now
to keep him safe from whatever his laughter had nearly overflowed him
into. He was careful from then on not to start laughing so easily. All 
around him in those days he was watching people his age surrendering to
dangerous gusts of amusement, even deciding never to return to regular
jobs and lives ... " (278f).

This is, obviously imo, answering a corresponding passage in Ken Kesey's 
One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest (pp. 237f, Penguin Books edition):

"While McMurphy laughs. Rocking farther and farther backward against the
cabin top, spreading his laugh out across the water --- laughing at the 
girl, at the guys, at George, at me sucking my bleeding thumb, at the captain
back at the pier and the bicycle rider and the servive-station guys and the
five thousand houses and the Big Nurse and all of it. Because he knows you
have to laugh at the things that hurt you just to keep yourself in balance,
just to keep the world from running you plumb crazy. He knows there's a 
painful side; he knows my thumb smarts and his girl friend has a bruised
breast and the doctor is losing his glasses, but he won't let the pain
blot out the humor no more'n he'll let the humor blot out the pain./
I notice Harding is collapsed beside McMurphy and is laughing too. And 
Scanlon from the bottom of the boat. At their own selves as well as at
the rest of us. And the girl, with her eyes still smarting as she looks
from her white breast to her red one, she starts laughing. And Sefelt and
the doctor and all./ I started slow and pumped itself full, swelling the 
men bigger and bigger. I watched, part of them, laughing with them ---
and somehow not with them. I was off the boat, blown up off the water and 
skating the wind with those black birds, high above myself and the rest of
the guys, see the boat rocking there in the middle of those diving birds,
see McMurphy surrounded by his dozen people and watch them, us, swinging
a laughter that rang out on the water in ever-widening circles, farther and
farther, until it crashed up on beaches all over the coast, on beaches all
over all coasts, in wave after wave after wave ... " 


Does anybody here remember Laughter? Kai +