The Eden Express_ A Memoir of Insanity - Mark Vonnegut [68]
Perfectly awful. Perfectly wonderful. Heaven. Hell. The intention changed, the next effect changed, but never the awesome symmetry, the dazzling perfection of it.
The further down the road I went, the more dazzling the perfection and symmetry. I was riding an exponential curve. I reached critical mass.
It started when I was a little kid. The all-absorbing rush of seeing something just right. Just-right Mommy things, just-right Daddy things, round things, red things, tree things, food things. And they acted like seed crystals. One just-right red thing led to more and more and the crystals grew and grew. And the bigger they were, the more things fit and the faster they grew. These ever growing crystalline perfections were every bit as much a part of me as my arms and legs and infinitely more precious.
Now the crystals were growing at a fantastic rate and all piling into each other. The Bible, concrete poets, and nuclear physics crystals collided, made perfect sense, and became one. The Simon crystal piled into the Virginia crystal into the Zeke crystal ad infinitum. It was like a monster seventy-five-car accident on the New Jersey Turnpike in heavy fog. And they all made such dazzling beautiful sense together. No more dry spells. No missing links. Punctuation became more and more difficult and then just plain silly.
When we got to the Stevens Street apartment raw materials still mattered some. Toward the end a Donald Duck comic book, War and Peace, a Ravi Shankar album, the weather, my father, a hockey game on TV, all became interchangeable parts.
There was an international cast. André from France, Sankara from India. Being the only nonwhite, he had to fill in for Puerto Ricans, blacks, Chicanos, American Indians, etc. It was a heavy load but he did pretty well with it.
There were two Jews, which was useful. “Sunshine Movers” came in handy. There was a pretty good collection of records and a fair-to-middling library. Unfortunately, all they had for musical instruments was a second-rate guitar and a couple of handmade bamboo flutes that, while being very groovy, didn’t play for shit.
No non-Swarthmore people and no women, which made things a bit tricky, but like I said, the raw materials mattered less and less.
WHAT WAS REALLY GOING ON. All I was catching was itty-bitty snatches. A word here, a sentence there. A funny smell, a funny face. Now and then a whole vignette. Putting it together was like trying to make a movie from a bunch of slides that had nothing to do with each other.
Why is Simon turning green? Why is Sy beating me up? What’s that awful smell? Why is André winking at me? Why won’t they let me go outside? What the fuck is going on?
What was going on was several people dealing as best they could with a very difficult, unfamiliar situation: a friend gone psychotic.
Apparently suffering a great deal. Incoherent most of the time. Incapable of understanding anything said to him. Moaning, screaming, smashing things. Completely unpredictable. And the cherry on the whole show—he doesn’t sleep. Some six-day house guest.
What was really going on was Simon’s job. I had other things to do. But when I did manage to check in, that I was very different from other people and being treated very strangely, and in a great deal of physical pain and not hearing, seeing, smelling, tasting, walking, or talking right, was hardly delusional.
What could they do? Putting someone in a nut house isn’t a nice thing to do to someone. There are lots of pressures in the hip community that make that sort of decision even harder to come to than normally. Doctors don’t know anything, mental hospitals are repressive, fascist, etc. Hippies are supposed to be able to take care of their own. “Schizophrenia is a sane response to an insane society.” “Mental illness is a myth.” The Sanskrit word for crazy means touched by the gods.
I vaguely remember Sy’s threatening