More of a Reading of Lew Basnight, pt. 2

[Ian Livingston]

> Question of the Oracle: what could the sin(s) be that the
> psychobablle "experts" could answer with 1) past lives 2)future lives
> 3) Spontaneous hallucination  4) It hallucinating him..????
>
> Amnesiac Soul-travel? Apparitions he had?

Actually that part of the novel inspired my idea of a karmic
debt-collection agency. I'm sure people like Bill Gates owe great
karmic debts to me for things they did in past lives.

But, more seriously, is Lew's experience spiritual, or real, or is it
the experience of a psychotic paranoiac? Have you read, for instance,
Freud's analysis of the Schreber case, in which a psychotic paranoid
tells his story? Or Mark Vonnegut's Eden Express about his experience
of psychotic paranoid schizophrenia? The hallucinatory experience of
the psychotic is real to the subject. That was how I read Lew's early
experiences, how it happened that he came to be so at-odds in the
world. Hell, I've known people who were certainly not psychotic, but
they still believed in the negative things they thought others thought
and said about them. A little paranoia can really screw up an
individual's life, make it a very lonely place.


On Thu, Feb 25, 2010 at 7:23 PM, Mark Kohut <markekohut at yahoo.com> wrote:
> Lew was denounced in the local papers. What do newsboys shout about that is in newspapers? Violence and scandals, I'd say. Murder and sex to pin it down.
>
> Lew sin both ways? No link to violence here early so,
> I'd say his sin is 'sexual'...lotsa hints
>
> Question of the Oracle: what could the sin(s) be that the
> psychobablle "experts" could answer with 1) past lives 2)future lives
> 3) Spontaneous hallucination  4) It hallucinating him..????
>
> Amnesiac Soul-travel? Apparitions he had?
>
>
>
>
>
>



-- 
"liber enim librum aperit."