Heresy [spoiler]

[Robin Landseadel]

Later on in the book we run into Japonica Fenway, young, smart cute  
and stone crazy, most likely cammed out from Lysergic overindulgence.  
Note that Chryskylodon is described as a nut plantation. It is also  
the same institute that Sloane mentioned and showed a publicity photo  
of to Doc in the previous scene. When Doc runs into Japonica on page  
171 she's just escaped from the loony-bin wing of the Chryskylodon  
foundation.

On Sep 12, 2009, at 2:48 PM, Ian Livingston wrote:

> Didn't Stan Grof do some experimentation with LSD and the mentally ill
> back in the 70s?  I know he tried to re-classify LSD as a
> psychotomimetic drug, for its apparently psychotic manifestations in
> some folks.

He also developed alternate modes of altering consciousness:

	"It is an inherent potential in these states for us to reclaim our
	cosmic status."

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mA1hDI5IiJQ

http://www.holotropic.com/about.shtml

http://www.holotropic.com/

> Also, Mark Vonnegut, Kurt's kid, wrote a book about his
> experience of moving through drugs and into a full-blown manifestation
> of paranoid schizophrenia.  Interesting depth of recall, as I
> remember.

it is called "The Eden Express."

It is very much on point:

	One of the many worst things about being nuts was being so
	goddamned important. Who was I that such powerful
	mysterious forces were buggering around with my life? One
	team would come through cramming my head full of new
	knowledge, the next would sneak in and erase all the new stuff
	plus a lot of the old. I'd be crucified and resurrected several
	times a day.

	If I died lots of wonderful things would happen. If I died lots of
	awful things would happen. I was a rag doll between two bull
	mastiffs with very little way to know which one I wanted to get
	me, let alone have any say in the matter...

	Well, so here I am in a mental hospital. It took a while for it to
	sink in. In a way, I knew it all along. Simon and my father had
	talked about it and I had been able to pick up on some of what
	they were saying. The nurses and orderlies, the little room, the
	needles in the ass, it all added up: a mental hospital. It took a
	while before I was able to pay much attention to the fact. I was
	taken up with voices, visions and all. I vaguely knew I was in a
	mental hospital but it wasn't any different from being anywhere
	else. Where I was was beside the point.

	Little by little, with the help of massive doses of Thorazine in the
	ass and in my milkshakes (which was all they could get me to
	eat), little by little it started mattering to me where I was and
	what was going on.

	For a while I was convinced that the whole thing I was going
	through was my father's way to help me give up cigarettes. Here
	I was, thinking the end of the world or worse was happening
	and what was really going on was all about cigarettes. It was
	like the Trafalmadorians [other- wordly beings in some Kurt
	Vonnegut novels] getting the earthlings to build the Great Wall
	of China to send a little message to a second-string messenger
	carrying a message that just said hello.

	Some lesson. "Cigarettes, Dad?" "Cigarettes, Mark." "Shit, Pa,
	who would have guessed?" "Well, it took you quite a while,
	Mark." But then, when I said I wouldn't smoke any more and
	they still wouldn't let me out of my little room, I got suspicious
	that cigarettes weren't the whole story. Little by little it sank in.  
It
	was all on the level. This was a real mental hospital with real
	doctors and nurses. It wasn't some weird put-up job designed
	by my father or anyone else.

	The only weird thing about this hospital was that I was a patient
	here. Everything else made sense. All the other patients fit
	nicely into my idea of what mental hospitals were about. They
	were all victims one way or another. They had been dealt lousy
	parents, lousy jobs, lousy marriages, lousy friends, lousy
	educations. They hadn't had breaks. No one really loved them. I
	just picked up bits and pieces, but it all kept adding up the
	same. I'd see a husband or wife or mother come in to visit them
	and I'd wince in pain as the various pictures of what their lives
	had been came together. Their craziness, their being in a
	mental hospital, was so understandable. Good, brave people
	who had done the best they could until it was just all too much.
	What was my excuse? What more could I have possibly asked
	from life? For them there was some hope. Call it therapy. A
	change of job, some understanding of themselves and the
	people around them: given half a break, these people could
	make it. Maybe if they got 80 acres back in the mountains or
	something.

	Most of the patients were older. I was the only one there with
	long hair or a beard. Some discarded old people, a lot of
	middle-aged people who had gotten messed up with alcohol, a
	few junkies, plus a few other misfits. I worried some that my
	being so different from the others meant they didn't really know
	how to deal with whatever my problem was. I had been put in
	the wrong bin. In a way it was the same for me, but the only way
	I could get to feel the sameness was by stretching definitions
	quite a bit. It felt lonely.

	This is an edited extract from The Eden Express by Mark
	Vonnegut, published in a new edition this month by Seven
	Stories Press

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2003/jan/25/featuresreviews.guardianreview29