2/15/95
Dhyey’s methodical approach to making a fire. Something he sees in and likes about Alec.
Alek thinking of himself as the Griot or a shaman(?-the soul catcher) His fondness for African tribal art and southern American (New Orleans combined gentile and voodoo traditions)
“Every profound spirit needs a mask” Nietzsche
Create a character like officer Marcus Keyonaise - specializes in occult graffiti in NYC This is important given Alec’s use of symbols he uses to communicate with Dhyey to locate his geocaches. (Geocached body parts?)
The two brother and (alluded to) sister characters, Alek and Neylan (change name), grew up in European Union somewhere. Scene with Alek and his sister running through long chicken “coup” and their first realization that trucks came at night and took the chickens away. Sister’s mysterious death(?) after she began to espouse free-range chicken-farming? Brother, Alek, was always trying to get her to stop talking about it. Conversations at the dinner table. Father getting mad and locking her in her room for days. Must have scene where the two children observe a snake with a live catch in its mouth; not necessarily a chicken - but this is to capture the superimposed theme of both physical and psychological birth/death in the title “Neuroboros.” ...also cosmic egg...
The story begins with Alek first person describing art school figure drawing class. ?Another student coming over and complimenting him but disrespecting the model.
“I didn’t go to art school to become an artist. I already am an artist.
“Man, that’s awesome - but how can you stand to look at her?”
We are given a foreboding sense that something is not right with him and that he might have done something to the transgressing “other” student.
Alek’s sister is actually dead at time of telling of story. ( Neylan means “fulfilled wish”) One narrative layer is him imagining her as if she were still able to respond, imagines their conversations - to keep her alive as it were but his conversation morphs into talking to an imagined fungus! (6/25/2019)
He was made to feel guilt for this early childhood trauma. Had she killed herself? which will turn out to be untrue later. This original childhood belief breaks his heart and sends him into himself and thus psychosis which Dhyey takes advantage of later. (6/25/2019)
Alec is given an incorrect diagnosis of PTSD later in life when in fact he is a semi autistic savant. (3/18/2020)
She had also been the original benefactor of the family chicken farm estate.
The father was a respected man amongst a small group of community farmers. A leader by their consent. An uncertain amount of trust fund money was left to Neylan and Alek. (NO, mother is still alive and in NYC) the Polish farm, discontinued Dairy function of the farm. The banks however managed to take it all away altogether. This is the impetus for some of the anger, the direction of it, and the motive for going after banksters, realtors (?) …, the bird theme: eating crow, etc, however is more developed. And the source for art-content: such as severed heads in large “egg-carton,” (which he titles “the Last Supper;” bird heads in eye sockets, mouths, and this is what he is excited to show Dhyey, not necessarily human victims yet. (6/25/2019)
Why birds? Their disarming freedom and unpredictability; their vulnerability when clipped of their wings. Alec did not kill the crows. Rather they represent for him the injustice done to birds and the vulnerable.
So, the therapy sessions take on new meaning in the last chapters. Therapist, Dhyey, is trying to get the Detective to realize she is not living anymore, we get to sessions that make this clear much later. Their sessions take place in an asylum office. But at first it is only understood by the reader that Alek (is it entirely him writing in this notebook?) is talking re an actual relationship with his sister, and that she is the real artist. Alek was a little jealous of her talent as a youth and later looks up to her. She got the artistic profession after all(?) (Where?)
The scene where Alek’s girlfriend catches him drawing, then takes on the true meaning that he is suffering (for the loss of his sister? - but we don’t know this yet), rather than being the disturbed artist. But really is angry at those who have been bullying him…
The family... “educating children to keep up with ultra-fast pace of new-world order, globally flattened civilization (Babylon) and re-parceled development (downsized, condensed and dumbed down), (force-fed hurried-child)” theme - behind the mass murdering facade of the chicken farm]: the parents: Catholics, father was a tinkerer and an alcoholic backslider and the mother a for-profit educational institution online “grad.”
She sold “organic” non-animal tested cosmetics on line. The one Influence on Neylan.
This is consistent with the cleansing that Alek needs so badly, the molting, the ablution of sin, the getting rid of the guilt and the memory of her death and the slaughter of chickens. (An obsession with a feathered coat or better the morbid discovery of pillows stuffed with feathers!
The dream-like sequences are Alek’s delirium and trance segments - killing or imagining his Age of Cruelty “works of art.” He’s not really gifted in the sense of representational work but more conceptually endowed - a twisted moralistic aesthetic.
Farm is in Europe. There had been pressure to modernize from EU and from Israel (CPIP-Poland Israeli Dairy Farming Project) and this is one of the reasons why farm was shut down. They refused to modernize the dairy or utilize GM seeds.
No, Neylan should survive into Adulthood. She goes to art school too; Alek had dropped out(?) yet followed Neylan to America. Becomes a photographer and works independently with investigative reporter.
No, Alek is nothing like Norman Bates. He’s a decidedly meticulous killer, a killer for revenge of his sister’s mysterious death back in Europe. She had been investigating the modernization of farms in Poland and dug up some animosity from all quarters including a Huge Global Corp that patents seeds (genetically altered plants) and manufactures pesticides. Since he was independent there are few who will help Alek find out what really happened to her.
Alek does live tattooing on select individuals he means to place in an ultimate work of “live art”, thus claiming copyrights to some live genetic material into his “art”. (or he tattoos body parts buried in geocaches?)
Alek is “discovered” by a couple of mischievous youtube video-recording boys walking through his “abandoned” chicken farm, they walk in on Alek doing his gruesome “work” on a live victim. He has opened a cavern in the abdomen of a man, such as might be seen on a cow.
Sister writes him from Europe. Letters as chapters? A letter about the time some girls came to see him but he balked and his sister chased them away. “I wasn’t doing you any favors was I? - chasing them away like that. I should have pushed you out the door. ”
The semi-Blind neighbor, Dhyey wanting Alek to go with him to Europe, presumably to help him visualize famous art and architecture.
Make therapy sessions into Detective’s sessions post trauma therapy through Department.
Petrie’s real name Petrus.
Alek’s name is really Nicolaus(?). Descendent of Copernicus (Polish); Alek’s interest in astronomy. His belief system dominated by concepts such as are espoused by videos like Zeitgeist, but more from books on archetypes and symbolism, as well every science book he reads! He is a sun and moon worshiper. He writes as if odes and hymns to Pan.
Gardner reading Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes’ stories - ref to “The Book of Life”, article re deduction and roots of profiling and investigative detective work. Alek’s “Common Book of Hourglasses.” The pigeon-holing of Alek by Detective as ?
Why Poland:
The Eagle (a native friend’s influence?) and the Serpent (Mishima’s phoenix and snake)
May 3/4, 2011: All this reading of peer review journals and writing of “research” papers, notating data from field notes into columns of journaling progress has got me thinking about my novel “Neuroboros” and how I might possibly separate the 3 voice/attitudes of one narrator/protagonist rather than superimpose separate protagonist narrations.
So where is story headed at this point? How is it changed? [Protagonist has become symbiotically joined with unidentified fungus which alters behavior rather than death (stops at point of causing meningitis) but some symptoms(?) continue sporadically like severe headaches.NO! Global warming aspect and evolutionary adaptation of, new species invades Pacific Northwest coast of US.]
Whoa: species effect on conceptual development in protagonist.
Seeing everything in terms of synapsida (panapsida) and his ultimate fascist proclivity is brought on somehow by this pathogenic/symbiotic relationship with imagined fungus. (He talks to this entity?!) He is host/body to new organism which unleashes enzymes(?), whatever, which reprogram his thinking, his temporal motivation and instinctive behavior such that he is becoming a beacon to other fungi to derail human evolution, an evolutionary mobilization to save earth. He is somewhat aware his thoughts are altering and at some point tries to find help. No one will listen to him as he tries to communicate this that something is taking over his mind. Specialists and practitioners of course just think this is neurosis.
Story can be a kind of adaptation of the “Body Snatchers” and such, but with the fungi as deforming- and synapsida as phylogenic-twist to intellectualize the plot a bit, make it more graphically believable.
Body from the morgue. Alek had a hospital connection - he paid the man generously.
Dhyey having to divulge limited info to the Detective after Smith gets a warrant to search Dhyey’s condo. First twist: Alek not a killer after all? He actually now works as a set designer for the film industry. His project in Poland is just a large warehouse-sized set for a psychological thriller movie about an ultra Hanibal-like character. (NO)
Second twist: Dhyey taking off glasses and writing in notebook from audio tapes of Alek and Smith. ? Alek’s slow carelessness and actions in Dhyey’s presence. (WHY?)
Final scene: Dhyey doing art therapy in penitentiary with mandalas.
The complications and ethics of outside observation of a practice. ?
5/6/2011 Is Dhyey infatuated with this perpetrator (on paper), not knowing it is his neighbor? No. Dhyey (as a CIA agent) is the “handler” of Alek’s eventual killing! But doesn’t anticipate the extremes to which Alek’s methods will develop. (6/25/2019)
Detective is infatuated with supposed dead sister of perpetrator (Alek) who is neighbor to his shrink, Dhyey? Sister is actually the imagined fungus that Alek is speaking to!!! (6/25/2019)
Visual to give Alek: Golem as a sporangium, separate elements gathering up to form a whole...
06/2011 Detective is patient to Dhyey much later in chronology of story, therefore need to refer to Napoleon as Retired Detective, Gardner/change to Smith. Something that Dhyey says about Gilgamesh sparks a memory in Detective Gardner’s mind.
{An artist’s name, Gilbert H-Games. Name was an anagram, though, not an alias. He finds a poetry website that utilizes some other mythology symbolism and this leads him to a reading of Neuroboros notebook and the killer.???}
What leads to Napoleon reading the notebook? Christian’s role in that?
Gardner bolting from Dhyey’s office... or lunging at Dhyey... either way Dhyey stands in the way of information that Smith needs or having been stated it he believes it is significant for his own enlightenment.
6/1-/2011:
[Main character misleads them to believe he has a brother named Seth(?). Seth is really his sister-self from Poland, whose given name was Neylan. In the central story-line, Alek becomes his violent “sister” on occasion when he needs to piece together his gruesome artifacts.]NO Prior to story line, as a child he was so effeminate his grandmother kept him dressed as a girl. When the family farm was threatened by outside modernizing forces (Corporate thugs - father was murdered by men hired to coerce him to stop organizing the other farmers to fight against the state imposed agricultural policy of modernization and the manufacturer of patented seed and pesticide) his masculine side is unleashed and he kills one of them, viciously, dismembering him with farm tools. The other gets away. Having traveled to America he assumed his real gender, thus the transformation without any real cosmetic surgery etc.
Showdown scene: Neylan escaping between cows having been seen after father is murdered. Then bloody scene in chicken coupe is a portion of Neylan’s killing event, where she kills the corporate hired thug. (Wait, who killed the thug? Alek or Neylan?
The basic story line as of 8/6/2011: Reader is to believe that ‘Alek’ was dressed as a girl as a child (in Poland on Farm) due to his supposed autism(?) he witnessed the murder of his grandfather who was organizing farmers against a corporation that was trying to force the farmers to modernize and concede to Genetic Modification and patented seed. One of the murderers is killed by the boy.
He is described as escaping via family to America. Where in the future he goes to college and ends up studying psychology and the fine arts and becomes an assistant to a blind psychologist.
Has access to patient information and appears close to Dhyey, as he is assigned to transcribing them.
Introducing retired detective Smith, who has past trauma and family separation to reconcile with and is required to be a patient of Dhyey. Over time the detective refers to his new love, the fine arts. This is fascinating for both Dhyey (‘blind’ but conforms to the normally inquisitive psyche) and the assistant (who later it is learned is visually a genius but psychotic).
Dhyey takes assistant to Europe to help him ‘get around’ (for he is not totally blind as it will become apparent) the great architecture there... and to Poland, (where reader learns later that death had come to some of the converted modernizing farmers there). Someone had slowly singled them out for their supposed collusion in the subversion of the family farms around the world.
Alek disappears [long before the detective finally realizes how close he was to this killer (he was aware of the bizarre nature of local murders through former partner in the department). Words and images exposed through conversation and snooping at the psychologist’s office had lead him to suspect the assistant. He believes the assistant had saved up for a real sex change but couldn’t follow through with it and having a break-down for the loss of his proper boy’s childhood, has resigned to mere disguise as a girl now as the fated alternative to escape once again. All are given to believe he ends his life this way.]NO
Detective’s suspicion is peaked after hearing the Psychologist on the phone with someone from Poland, whom could be Alek.
8/6/2011
The first narrator is Christian, Alek’s replacement. That is, Alek worked for the Psychologist, and after he disappeared from the US, the psychologist of course needed a replacement assistant. The narrator becomes the inheritor of Alek’s notebook, (finding it and thinking it something he is supposed to utilize?) of which he gains access to the life of its original owner and from which he proceeds to insinuate himself into investigation of it’s inference and put together the story - the story in other words does not literally end with Alek’s capture per se but rather continues from the disappearance with the new assistant settling in with the psychologist and thus reconnecting with and refashioning what the reader must later realize to be mutable truth.
Christian is made curious about Dhyey’s relationship to Alek.
[We are told that assistant is told that by his eyes and hidden observation of the client, Dhyey will able to gain insight into the responses of the patients. (?)
Christian becomes uncomfortable with the task, discovers early videos and ends up giving them to the Detective.
Ultimately, it is revealed that Alek was not the original exile from Poland, but an artistic nephew he is mentoring. The narrator thus has questions as to whether the nephew did in fact commit the US murders which have been in the news as curiously resembling some of the drawings and text in the notebook.]NO
We learn that the Psychologist’s blindness is not complete, nor congenital, and thus suspicion is temporarily fueled: And eventually Christian wonders whether Alek existed at all; that the missing girl/boy in the notebook might have originally been Dhyey. Christian then tries to get advice from the retired detective (inquires re missing persons reports?) whom while even in therapy is begins to observe the psychologist, which ultimately leads to both his outing and a revelation re Dhyey: the detective throws a pillow at the psychologist, who flinches and thus supposedly exposes himself. But Napoleon learns at this point the true nature of Dhyey’s partial blindness, the reliance on peripheral vision only due to disease damage.
Detective and Christian meet at a park where the detective tells him that Dhyey [confessed he was that child]NO did not kill anyone. Thus the reader and the Detective again shall be wondering about Alek whom they believe might be dead.
We are then brought to Poland where the supposed original assistant, Alek, as caretaker of a former farm property, has constructed a studio of some kind.
( later to be the site of atrocious ‘art’ from human parts )?
(Chronology?) The detective and the psychologist on a park bench where this story takes another turn. It is revealed through the detective returning the notebook (the detective has been reading it from earlier in the story - scene of Dhyey asking Christian if he had knowledge where his notebook went.) that the family farm still exists and is run by a supposed ‘sister.’
[The detective has an ahah. The sister is really Dhyey in drag. Story ends with the capture of the killer in Poland on his family farm and the discovery of a grotesque anatomic art installation in the barn.]NO
It’s Christian who gets the notebook for the Detective.
Christian moves to Seattle at the end of the novel having found a condo there on the Narrows.
Dhyey at some point must recognize the dreams and exchanges with Detective Smith as related to the notebook’s passages. And wonders whether the detective is trying to read him or cause him to make a mistake of some kind?
The reader must believe that there was no predecessor. That Dhyey all along who experienced and wrote the notebook’s entries? That he is the child that escaped Poland undetected and unharmed by his would be captors that murdered his grandfather, that escaped as a girl child then became a boy in America, yet preserved his polish identity (as the girl in the notebook who ultimately became the adult woman who was caretaker of the property in Poland.)
[There’s gotta be a scene where Dhyey has captured Napoleon and is mentally torturing, interrogating him as to the whereabouts of the notebook.]NO
The notebook as DHyey’s grand fantasy about his life’s meaningfulness…?
but how to resolve the discrepancies between the already narrated meeting between Alek and Dhyey...?
6/28/2012
No, Alek is real.
And he is accused of plagiarism in school…and even called a thief. And this completely demoralizes, sends him inward to find his only comfort his dead sister, and ultimately the impetus behind his determination to kill his tormentors.
Dhyey discovers Alek’s secret of committing violent acts, cleaning up after coming home from a killing.
Dhyey in fact harbors him for a while, meaning to protect him, believing in him, for he alone has had lengthy, meaningful conversation with him.
Dhyey is also later responsible for sending Alek to Poland to caretake on his farm and from there also to dispatch CIA marks in the Ukraine. Alek eventually revolts because, as he eventually learns, the victims are not his personal enemies but in fact Eastern Ukraine rebels fighting against the “fascist” gov’t in Kiev that wants to frack for natural gas in the east as well as industrialize the family farms.
July 1, 2012
Alek’s six degrees of separation experiment in Poland: find contact with independent diplomats through local bureaucrats that favor Monsanto or GMOs and thus prove that even in developing countries there is a network between farmers and local government decision making on a very controversial issue to a wider arena of international debate on the subject and then attempt to answer the question of what is, or why is it a conflict for the locality vs the international community: ie, set up meeting by theme rather than by lobbying for specific countries or Corporations, for example, the Israeli NGO project to modernize east European agriculture. This is how Alek becomes involved in intrigue in eastern Europe. He has found a cause, and thus Dhyey is now also his enemy. The cold war is smoldering again, and the fire reversing its course...
With the Euro and high speed trading and the world economic crisis, you see the chaotic movement of people and their volatile funds moving unpredictably as well, literally, at a higher rate. Rich and more independent people especially moving their gains to shell corporations to escape taxation. And corporations as well hiding their billions everywhere but on the balance sheet. The lines protecting loyalty at any societal level are everywhere dissolving and thus there is no security or solvency anywhere either! The world is up for easy grabs then to the most stealthy aggregate of ignoble wealth.
Alek is hidden away as if by Calypso... ; Dhyey caring for him akin the sanctuary for recovery that was often afforded the upper classes of the 19th and 20th century West as opposed to institutionalization. Dhyey as well has a station chief in Odessa who provides a safe house for Alek when he is there. This chief also happens to be an eye surgeon specializing in Dhyey’s disease.
Alek referring to Judas, Brutus and Cassius of Dante’s “gnawing” on each other... is this the phrase that hits Christian as curiously familiar? re Napoleon’s killer’s clues(?)
Alek’s University tormentors have consumed his mental resources; a self-immolation by past self...
the masks donned by the “others” becomes his mask.... daily, relentless judgement as opposed to a predetermined sentence was suddenly an entertainment and consolation for him.
Alek’s mother? what is she? works for an NGO, having retired early from teaching. Makes more money, can afford to travel to Europe (with Alek) Does Alek have feelings of contempt for what she does, or perhaps for some of her associates or an acquaintance?
Alek’s ostracism otherwise akin the isolation of institutionalized materialism, the cutting off from the world… because he cannot go to the places he previously frequented without being harassed (a form of blacklisting that can occur in retail environments).
Dhyey offers Alek the opportunity to attain a new identity to escape his predicament... but there is a catch. [He has to become a woman in Poland. There is also the issue of what this would mean to the real Dhyey if indeed he should return.... the killers of Dhyey’s father.]NO
How does Alek first disappear? And with whose assistance? His mother? Or Dhyey? Dhyey’s family in India? to Poland first then to India?
Poland. Where his mother is attacked by her husband and defended by Alek. An unanticipated complication.
[Alek’s intended disappearance after that is made painful for him, having to abandon his mother... but realizing he can come back still disguised as a woman, he wonders how will she respond. He goes to India to avenge Dhyey his father’s murder as the girl Dhyey was disguised as when a child. Then Alek comes back to his mother in Poland who has since gone into a coma... where does Alek go then?] NO
Dhyey actually grew up in Poland. Father killed by nazi collaborator.
Dhyey has researched over the years Nazi war crimes assisting Czeslaw Pilichowski. Recognized killer and over the years fantasized retribution?
He sees in Alek a pathway to this. Alecs killing skill, etc...
Polish artist Zdzisław Beksiński 1978
need to hint at the mystical aspects of Alek's life. Obsession with alchemy (careful. this is an overused subtext. Must focus on clear HOURGLASS and uroboros visual references. Note: hourglass shaped park and garden landscapes) Alek is not a misfit for he is not awkward nor a nerd in any sense. His childhood: it was the transition to his adolescence that was obliterated, or rather the transition was abrupt. cf. Dhyey's astute intuitive perception though physically hindered v Alek's moral blindness (his hindrance) while functionally keen as a visual artist. The good eye vs the bad eye in a contorted way...
first scene Terms should be in reference to quarters of graduate study
July 14, 2012:
losing eye sight association with border conflict in India(?)
July 16, 2012.
The notebook as the longest suicide note ever
July 16,2012
Narration of the action will come from multiple protagonists, excluding Dhyey and Alek, who will only enjoy an omnipotent voice. Alek however will on occasion be heard through his notebook.
The notebook texts.
January 18, 2013
on the subject of innate ideas and whether we are a "clean slate" at birth.
it seems to me that before oral language begins to seep into the new born's mind the senses have already distinguished in the least an orienting force, such that there is a downward force (gravity), and an inward force (hunger). These first wave fronts of resistance spark the motile will of the psyche; we are thus immediately confronted with the duplicity of being --- of where we would be forced by external forces to go, which is very often contrary to where we would will to go. Predication, then, can be said to have not been laid down upon a clean slate but rather to have derived from the first formation of the will which is akin the elongation of the developing spine and brain stem!
January 19, 2013
So rather than say we are born with a single clean slate, we should be saying we will experience several initial slates, that it is inevitable we will hunger and therefore we are first motivated to clasp towards our freshly wakened field of view (that primordial frame wherein all experience is forever biased toward the retina as a slate) and herein we will likely find a destination to fix upon. This is the first line we draw with our bodies upon the surface of another body, and the breasts are the first lateral symmetry we might embrace.
Feeding from a bottle therefore is the first dissociative event after the actual cutting of the cord and the whisking away by midwives or nurses for that first real ablution, an event that most certainly will have awakened this second level of slates, the skin to the "idea" of the other as a destination and a means to another end. The breasts have become the first duality and the first split as it were in the will and therefore the origin of the potential power or disappointment of choice.
Jan 21, 2013
We must always be wary of that disorienting space between wanting and acquiring wherein seeking to persuade becomes imposing one's will. Manipulation is born of this vacuous space. And so too patience.
The lines we draw---where does "we" cease to hold that line most dear: a home, a community, your state or nation... earth? How many walls do you need to feel secure, stabile? What makes you feel "great"? (enough)
(See Jan. 22, 2013 through Feb 13, 2013 for more Alek notebook text)
[2/18/13
dhyey killed Alec out of jealousy of his brilliance and as a jilted lover? include visit to European art museum scenes. dhyey also stole some of Alec’s. work. this fact perhaps is what leads narrator to questions about dhyey honesty about Alec’s disappearance. ](NO)
2/18/2013 Author’s motivation, the psychology beneath the plot
Suffice to say my efforts in the least are meant to examine some corollaries and not so much to insist upon causal relations but only to suggest some curious apparent sequences and sigmoid analogues. However I will not maintain a positivist stance. It seems to me some small attempt to account for the mental state of wonder (for lack of a better word right now) should be made---a delving into the spiritual aspect of James' "empirical self" but more importantly I mean also to offer up an alternative triadic categorization as a fundamental integration of attitudes towards the world rather than implying, as Morton Hunt interprets from James' theory, a mind jeopardized by a split in the personality.
March 14, 2013 Notebook extract: Alek’s interest in fungi and lichen
frost and lichen as penetrating space, occupying surfaces in simplest form.
frost, upon impenetrable glass nearly shrieks, spikes where it can an objection to barriers and thus captures what foothold it can by imprisoning the vitality of water.
lichen, being penetrated itself and liberated by water [algae being symbolic of this resounding penetration] needs not to penetrate, rather is happy to take whatever form is sufficient for its stage of growth, bulbously fructiform or rhizomes lancelately weaving in any direction---squamulose, crustose, foliose, such expansions are enough to state its meagre case that these are the shapes of uninhibited becoming, or perhaps more importantly, of two becoming one. It could be said then that all who conjugate are thalli perched upon a cosmic tree.
June 27, 2013
Perhaps Dhyey actually was the one responsible for Alek’s failure or even his disappearance. again, a homoerotic aspect to this story should seem impending for the reader.
Dhyey saved by a Butcher relation’s wife, and it was she disguised him as a girl and kept him/her for a time before sending him off to America. What he had witnessed or seen while burgling[NO]
[August 30,2013 Developments:
Dhyey killed Alek; he had first become too close to Alek because of Alek’s presumed genius and an attachment . Dhyey’s sexual/love feelings toward Alek was unrequited and eventually loathsome to Alek. Dhyey had also discovered rather horridly what kind of art Alek was up to; Alek realizing this was about to kill Dhyey but he himself perished by Dhyey’s hand instead.
Dhyey’s “son” heard Dhyey revealing some of this to Christian and we are left to presume the boy took it upon himself to kill either or both Dhyey and Christian whom had resolved to quit Dhyey’s mentorship/employment as CIA agent?. The “son” however failed to injure anyone and in a scuffle he himself was fatally wounded.] ?
Nov 3, 2013
Notebook text?
Perhaps reflection, consciousness, ego---these are not advancements for any species but are rather more like conceptual embolic extensions of the skull entrapped brain. There is as yet however no escaping the boundary of being for a biped except through the advancement of the ability to deceive the other. Error and deception express themselves grandly in the homo sapiens more so than mutation. Dawkins selfish gene comes to mind for a moment... But what we are in for is a rude reawakening of the collective subconscious as our mistakes and natural catastrophic events begin to prove to be insurmountable.
If we represent anything it is the horrific extent to which life can go to promote itself. Life itself is a paradoxical proposition. Must life be fated to fail to preserve a stewardship of earth.
Dec 1
looking through the dining room window without his glasses it looks as though there are bodies struggling in the conifers, limbs tangled with limbs. winter is coming fast and the air bites at the face like microbial cats. They will be dining by the fireplace. Better to listen to the fire cackle too than hear that tree scratching at the window.
1/6/14
Neuroboros note:
I like the idea that Napoleon Smith the detective in my story has to discover later on that the female that he fantasizes about from Alek's journal, the supposed sister, doesn't actually exist , but does she?
1/7/14
Alek: Perhaps you could say that after what Europeans have been subjected to these past centuries it's natural that they would have developed little tolerance for abuses of power. Americans on the other hand, in spite of the social network, or rather because of it, we've disconnected from each other while keeping the appearance of relationships. The social bond has become no more meaningful than the byte. And the rift is likely to widen before it is sutured back together.
Feb 8, 2014
Alek?: More than becoming less humane we are becoming more predatory... consider that even government becomes predatory as it is either incapable of challenging or colludes with the merciless speculative aggregating powers that are destroying families everywhere on earth --- and the sustainability of life on earth for that matter! Mere hope cannot stop these beasts!
Feb 25
Dhyey’s chesterfield overcoat
March 25
Alek?: we are together at any one moment a new corymb of events, a plateau of openings and witherings, yet each a spathe to possibilities.
we like to imagine as well our history with our future all at once and claim proudly we stand upright as a sacred totem tree of life, while the earth and its stands of trees and every other distinguishable florescence shifts away toward the real sun... we are thus disinherited and alone with our imaginings.
Alek: ….regarding the shapes of our escape: the palmate is the taking-in-shape (cf dendrite or open hand) and the node or fruit (cf synaptic- or fist) is the giving-out or forward shape, and a transference of energy... this is the temporal series of event-shapes. There is as well a contiguous spatial series which expands and diminishes in a similar fashion yet as a spiral logical type, where the aforementioned neuronal visual sequence as a single unit flips and unfolds to greater transferences while at the same time bringing inward for the body and the mind the excitations of our environs as if we tumbled like a loosed dendrite across a massive terrestrial neurotransmitter. And such a meaning is especially implicit in the deciduous tree, where from-leaf-to- fruit can be seen as the manifestation of the above mentioned temporal series, and the tree itself, as an extrapolation of the earth-to-seed hierarchy, is an isolated manifestation of the spatial series qualified by the varied surrounding spatial temporal developments. The palmate of our being then we could say also aspires to take in the fullness of the earth's nodal substance through token and icon---since we can not possess all space and time much less ever say that our knowledge is complete. We can attempt however to intuit the fullness of this sense of completeness and even at times be satisfied with aesthetic or material expressions and/or be successfully consoled through spiritual reckonings that we extend securely into the future.
July 16
Narrator of Neuroboros, Christian, shall have a grand daughter named Quinn.
Did Dhyey gain Alek's loyalty/sympathy in order to get revenge for the theft of a family farm in Poland... a hatred of the NGOs and Corporate intimidation that brought conflict amongst the agricultural communities in Eastern Europe... technology, trading (food as commodity), the new mechanical equipment, chemicals and genetically engineered and patented seeds as a threat to their previously cohesive economy.
Alek kills a few of his persecutors, gets comforted by Dhyey after confiding this... Dhyey himself has enemies in Poland and enlists the disturbed Alek to avenge himself.
July 26
Christian gave Smith the notebook after he was asked by officers for any clues as to Alek's disappearance. It was a missing persons case. He brought it to the precinct later where he met Smith while waiting to speak to someone. Smith took his statement and notebook. This leads to Smith's first encounter with Dhyey later. (Might Dhyey as a professional confidant know of Alek's whereabouts, or what happened?)
Christian talking to Alek's mother. Another detective reports informally to Smith re their questioning of Dhyey. Curious discrepancies and vagueness.
July 28
Dhyey --- could he begin life as a girl on a farm traumatized then homeless newsboy in NYC. Traumatized in in jail with other arrested newsboys. Brought to Staten Island to Mount Loretto farm. Abused by a neighbor farm boy. Goes with Father Drumgoole to assist on his commute to Manhattan. Father dies from blizzard. Alek old enough to commute to Man for supplies.
Sees someone he recognizes as abusive toward newsboys. Follows him. Kills him.
Aug 4
Dhyey wears a Calabrian coppola
Aug 5, 2014, 7:42 PM
Neuroboros idea
crows and food caching
Aug 9
Alek’s motivation for switching loyalty.
Note that the US also sides with the Ukraine government which is bombarding citizens in the east Ukraine that are rebelling partly against fracking and the theft of their land for this resource. this has put us at odds with Russia and what we are doing in Israel puts us at odds with all the Arab nations & muslim people's around the globe---not to forget those who are sensitive to the human rights issues which we have recklessly abandoned.
Mon, Aug 18, 2014, 8:20 AM
http://www.emerging-europe.com/events/the-12th-international-academic-conference-prague,p220333386
put this in Dhyey's or Christian's agenda
rough the 19th century about the 1850s was one great migration
8/21/2014
neuroboros note re Poland/Russian and Jewish history
Polish Jewish history
"1772: First of the three partitions of Poland begins. The Jews of what had been Poland and Lithuania will end up in the Prussian, Austrian and/or Russian Empires. Ironically, the bulk of them will end up living under Russian monarchs who had committed themselves to keeping Jews out of Russia. " (http://m.clevelandjewishnews.com/mobile/cjnconnect/blogs/article_c48bc7f3-2bf5-5d96-9b80-ab22c002615f.html)
Aug 23
(?source?)
but believe they called it "transition towards the market" and it was it was the European Union's, Common Agricultural Policy to attempt to force our farms here in the East to buy their equipment, use their methods, adapt to the modern ideas of agriculture, high yield for profit not for food to feed our families or save for drought... they called us backward because we were impediment to their growth. you see really they wanted more than to metal in our affairs, they wanted to profit from our labor. ultimately they stole our land from us just like they did in America.
by 1990s ensconced in bank loans
European union henchmen The so-called nongovernmental organizations they were just the front office for the thugs that were intimidating us trying to get us to see their way of modern thinking.
we survive just fine alongside the larger farms and even better after the collapse of the communist regime we even took on extra workers lost their jobs at this hard time yet because we were doing so good they connived to draw us into the fold. if we wanted to grow now we had to do it by their new standards. if we want to export they took more from us at customs.
if we resisted they claimed it was because we were not intelligent enough to use their equipment
Agricultural Property Agency they call a selfish for using the farm to primarily for our own sustenance yet they did not know just how many mouths in the area we fed
2/3 natural farming. the buying up of smaller (5-15hectares) farms hastens
"nevertheless" they love to use that word when trying to justify in crime of implementing "European competitive production models" and "progressive vertical integration"
and then imports from other countries
Oct 13
On killing
To western ways of thinking extraordinary times or context justify what would ordinarily be thought to be irrational. The soldier for example must alter their citizen view of killing as murder into a sublime act of saving lives. There is the conundrum for such an individual of having to switch the moral code back to a citizen's view of killing, such that killing appears justified inly in extraordinary moments of passion when there is a threat to immediate family.
For a radical islamist there is apparently no ordinary time or rather the extraordinary context of jihadism is sustained such that there is no promise of relief in this carnal state. The individual must not switch off the moral code which prescribes killing and further being killed as the only way to switch off the code which in turn also releases them from an immoral material existence.
It might be said that the extraordinary time of killing is repugnant in the former case while it is ordinary to be passionate about killing in the latter.
Oct 24
Neuroboros note
recurring theme nothing is as it seems
Dhyey not fully blind, can’t see the center of his visual field, only periphery.
Alec want to work for Dhyey to gain forgiveness for something he truly did as a child he put out the girls eye. Not a plagiarist but in fact a genius.
Detective not in fact an artist or lawful detective but a thief of ideas. Also becomes an observer of Dhyey!
The gender or sexual proclivity of Dhyey?
Dhyey is a Spy...
But he has his laundry done by a service
A great dragon fight is at hand.
Fri, Nov 28, 2014, 11:16 AM
"After its enormous financial, security and economic investments in a region surrounded by EU member countries, Europe must choose. It wants a non-EU “hotbed of unrest, instability, semi-authoritarian regimes and nationalism” or fully integrated and consolidated, stable democracies."
from: http://www.friendsofeurope.org/future-europe/post-big-bang-expansion-eu-overcorrecting-western-balkans/
Nov 29
?perhaps Alec just appeared because he discovered the Dark side of D is supposed blind psychiatrist mentor who perhaps he discovered two was a CIA agent involved in establishing supposed terrorist cells and Eastern Europe as well as intimidation of local and family farmers into acquiescing to the intrusion of market seeking nongovernmental organization's which represented actually Agribusiness' chemicals, seeds, machinery and technologies. he was indeed somewhat like I'm Allen Dulles.
Dec 6
"[...]The collective shadow is particularly bad because people support each other in their blindness --- it is only in the wars or in hate for other nations that an aspect of the collective shadow reveals itself." (Marie-Louise von Franz)
Dec 11
"Whether the squeamish like it or not the United States must know what goes on in those dark places of the world where our overthrow is being plotted by communists."
(Saturday evening post 1954)
Van Huebner <van.huebner@gmail.com>
Wed, Dec 31, 2014, 10:18 AM
The following is Alek’s eventual take on eastern Europe:
Seems to me there's a lot of logical fallacy at work with regard to who is to blame & who to trust on the topic of the Ukraine crisis.
For example, wanting democracy or independence from either America or Russia isn't bad in and of itself --- that is, unless what you plan to do as a democracy includes the same abandonment of all consideration for the environment ( such as frack and destroy arable land and ground water forever ), human rights, or the fate of communities that wish to preserve local control of their natural agrarian methods (bioregionally appropriate yield) versus allowing The West (including both gov & NGOs of the EU --- including Israel btw) as a tool of Agribusinesses such as Monsanto to basically steal the small farm for an ailing global marketplace ( ie, increased profit for the more powerful producers of consumable goods and technology which btw is dependent upon the very inscrutable manipulation of public information through, yes, logical fallacies! and appeal to human vanities and greed) or the intimidation from Russia especially since its aggressive taking of Crimea.
So, the question becomes both who has what to gain and how do each of the protagonists propose to go about establishing and maintaining their goal when examining such issues as the fate of this territory. As long as one purports to be talking about Nationhood, a listener should recognize a deeper fundamental issue at stake: the very use and abuse of land and communities (stewards) more in touch with the soil. This indeed makes the Ukraine a greater focal point for discussion regarding "who's to blame" for the despoliation of arable land versus who is getting in the way of the expansion of Global Industry and its appropriation of wealth by profiting from the natural resources in the territories of yet to be manipulated others.
March 10, 2015
include a cryptography expert at Johns Hopkins University’s Information Security Institute.
secret annual CIA conference called the Trusted Computing Base Jamboree . Jamboree was held at a Lockheed Martin facility inside an executive office park in northern Virginia.
Van Huebner <van.huebner@gmail.com>
Thu, Mar 3, 2016, 3:54 AM
Neuroboros screenplay : “for cryin out sideways” scene soundtrack
- man on all fours scrambling through construction debris nearly getting up, falling several times,
- then cowering looking up in fear
- a tarp thrown over his point of view
- cut
May 14
Christian (who comes off as full of himself— he has a stroke later and must listen to Dhyey in his hospital bed without being able to respond)
“as often happens in my profession I find myself having to reevaluate my notes on the development of a given client's condition. such was the case with Alek though of course he was not my client but only now had become an obsession for me because of his disappearance, and even a sort of test case, a means to challenge my own qualifications, my presumption of authority on my calling. Alek was a puzzle flung into the sea and I wasn't at all confident I could even swim yet. And the pieces were swiftly becoming water-logged and beginning to sink.”
5/21/16
Revised plot.
Dhyey the psychologist killed Alek because Alek discovered Dhyey's secret.
As child Dhyey witnessed murder of fam member on farm in Poland escaped as a girl. as a man later as a professional advisor to government officials on social engineering.
Goes back to Poland, E Europe ostensibly w Alek as assistant & ostensibly to get Alek's visual descriptions of art and country side but secretly Dhyey is getting info on the activities of CIA targets,
while Alek is assembling his frames and armatures for his living art sculpture.
NGOs intruding (how/why exactly?) eventually discover the studio of horrors but cant trace it to him right away.
[Alek at some point discovers this connection and even toys w Dhyey. Then he pleads with Dhyey to let him help Dhyey with his "project" but Dhyey is too fearful of Alek's possible defection so in a moment of embrace he kill's Alek.]NO
Dhyey is not completely blind.
Promotes NGOs involved in expansion of agribusiness in Poland and thus is somewhat responsible for Alek’s loss of his installation.
Local NYC killings. Students primarily. The when, and how.
The notebook? Dhyey knows it is missing? or that it is in Christian's possession but not about the detective having it? Who really composed it?
Handwriting analysis at some point after Detective notices curious discrepancies of fact as well as inexplicable similarities between Alek's supposed written words and Dhyey's.
Detective finds Alek's former girlfriend. Her info is also helpful in revealing truths about Alek that contradict the notebook.
Only because of Detective's fascination with Alek's supposed sister does he begin to suspect something other than Alek's apparent morbid obsession w a dead sister.
[ultimately it is really Dhyey's alter ego, his phantom former trans self as a child which helped him to escape death at the hands of his family's killers in Poland) that infuses the notebook with supposed evidence Alek's psychosis.]NO
The recurring color red, images of blood and feathers, flight, assembled body parts.
The present narrative: The dead university students. What were they studying: foreign policy, economics, marketing in eastern Europe (Poland, Balkans, Ukraine…)? and the dead person in the park (an anti-capitalist activist?) Because of the similarity between death of an activist and students the police focus on the radical right for suspects.
Was Dhyey's personal conflict: father killed because he was thought to be along the "Ratline" safe route for murderers of Jews in Poland? The arrest after April 1945 of young Germans by the Polish Security Police (Elusive Justice) led to the beating of Dhyey's father which actually caused his untimely death. Vengeance for NAZI war crimes took a bad turn (and morphed into attacks on potential communists sympathizers too) in a few instances and led ultimately to Dhyey's resolve to continue the vengeance against those that sought to destroy Poland's sovereignty from Russia via EU political (NGOs) market pressure and ironically through Israel.
Tuvi Manheim
Vienna?
Cold War barriers?
IRC. international red cross pass port. How can blood play a part in Alek’s mother’s role in Europe prior to emigrating to America? Her work in Poland? Her University and its relationship to US.
rebaptismal document , Vatican assisted war criminals who travelled to Latin America (Argentina)
Sun, Jan 1, 2017, 4:57 AM
I woke up with some imagery for neuroboros and this imagery is science fiction like so it's possible that the story might be best featured as a graphic novel. Alec at some point in the story envisions a pathway—what I drew of the self as a neuron in a scaled uroboros/hourglass connecting all such patterns of escape.
Van Huebner <van.huebner@gmail.com>
Sat, Mar 11, 2017, 4:52 AM
NGOs and East Indian development
http://www.financiAlekpress.com/archive/foreignaided-ngos-are-actively-stalling-development-ib-tells-pmo-in-a-report/1258034/
re pub perception of GMO cotton
http://www.financiAlekpress.com/archive/three-cells-to-be-set-up-to-improve-public-perception-of-bt-cotton/1257937/
http://naasindia.org/
http://www.icar.org.in/en/node/305
Van Huebner <van.huebner@gmail.com>
Sat, Mar 11, 2017, 5:23 AM
Neuroboros novel ref re agriculture
https://www.ars.usda.gov/
http://m.scidev.net/global/agriculture/
http://www.fao.org/economic/ess/ess-wca/en/
Van Huebner <van.huebner@gmail.com>
Sat, Mar 11, 2017, 5:23 AM
"Solidarity and Partnership Initiative (SPI) which promises new collaboration in special operations, air and missile defense, air operations, cyber, and other realms."
http://www.atlanticcouncil.org/blogs/natosource/special-summit-series-poland-and-nato
July 27, 2018 plot update:
More than one and diverse targets
Alek has access to info re Drs reports of anxiety w regard to what?!
[taking part in injuries from vaccines and medical device implants as well as info re]NO
corporate and market pressure... Dhyey’s targets but Alek’s personal targets.
Previous episodes of murder were students and activists in US and in Ukraine…
but then at some point promoters of pesticides and NGOs in E Ukraine and e Europe.
Who was responsible for the loss of properties in Poland?
Van Huebner <van.huebner@gmail.com>
Sun, Aug 5, 2018, 5:47 AM
Looking at a topographical map of Ukraine I couldn't help but notice it appeared to me a wounded creature attempting to crawl from the steppes in the east up through forests to the Carpathians in the west.
8/17/18
Neuroboros note:
Dhyey more knowledgable than Napoleon re fine art even though he is blind ( not necessarily due to traveling with Alek to Museums. Dhyey is very well educated in the fine arts and Architecture)
Van Huebner <van.huebner@gmail.com>
Sun, Aug 19, 2018, 5:15 AM
It is significant and an irony that the good doctor Dhyey of Neuroboros becomes blind because of his obsession with the history of glass, mirrors, lenses, microscopes and hourglasses. A particular love of frames and ornate as well.
Van Huebner <van.huebner@gmail.com>
Fri, Aug 31, 2018, 7:57 AM
I have Alec in ODESSA in the most current scenes having studied in the Ukraine and found himself eventually employed at the Filatova institute of eye diseases as a pathologist.
Concept is: Dhyey had a progressive(? angle-closure glaucoma?; cytomegalovirus retinitis; primary intraocular lymphoma; Ischemic optic neuropathy) disease which eventually blinded him. Dhyey now has Charles Bonnet Syndrome.
Dhyey is friends w someone at the University of Ukraine in Odessa (how?) whom he introduces Alek to help him establish himself there.
Where did mother receive college educ? for what?
Alek(?) used an egg timer type of hourglass for timing responses from his torture victims
Oct 11
“You and I are a little like alchemists are we not, Christian, pouring a little of ourselves into one another, to see what distills out, to see what’s left⏤ultimately whether friend or foe in… crystalline form. One merely has to ask, are we worth our salt?”
{the scenes with Dhyey and Christian talking in Dhyey’s office are spread out in the narrative but actually fall together as one conversation chronologically at the end of the story, where Napoleon, other detectives and officers come to arrest Dhyey.
Van Huebner <van.huebner@gmail.com>
Tue, Oct 16, 2018, 5:19 AM
It is significant and an irony that the good doctor Dhyey of Neuroboros becomes blind for he later is obsessed with the history of glass, mirrors, lenses, microscopes and hourglasses., even depictions of the use of glass in fine art which Dhyey has at some point Dhyey relying on Alek as an escort to museums to describe for him some paintings.
I feel Alek’s attention turns toward avenging wrongs done to Dhyey(?) whom later we are led to believe kills Alek(?) But it is in fact Alek’s mother that kills Dhyey for she had discovered Dhyey’s “amoral” love for Alek. And it was Dhyey that killed Alek. NO.
Van Huebner <van.huebner@gmail.com>
Wed, Oct 24, 2018, 3:56 PM
Gisela prequel to Neuroboros ends on the steps where she meets Dhyey.
Chelsea as a reporter as well as a daughter (or QUINN grand daughter) to Christian necessarily picks up the story where Christian’s telling is cut short because he was murdered and being that Alek disappeared too, Dhyey becomes suspect. But it was Gisela that killed Christian in error thinking it was Dhyey... Whom we find on a park bench as Napoleon approaches?… NO Christian hospitalized from a stroke.
Van Huebner <van.huebner@gmail.com>
Wed, Nov 21, 2018, 9:40 PM
Neuroboros...
“Willful blindness”
Possible names for Alek
Matuzek, Nowak
“Physical pain does not simply resist language but actively destroys it, bringing about an immediate reversion to a state anterior to language, to the sounds and cries a human being makes before language is learned.”
(The Body in Pain, Elaine Scarry)
Van Huebner <van.huebner@gmail.com>
Mon, Nov 26, 2018, 5:12 AM
The fate of Eastern Europe is threatened by the destruction of arable land by Western (EU, as in global corporate influence) market industry interests. Fracking and agribusiness products will be it’s final ruination!…
And now in June 2019 MERCOSUR EU Latin America trade deal finalized after 20 years. And what of Brexit.
All forms of governance are mere provisional means of maintaining the cooperation of the laboring populace. What’s more important is whether or not the quality of land, water and air is taken into account. Nor can the growing human population be ignored...
......But Malthusian cataclysm will take care of that (in the name of one nation’s self interest or another)! While the sustainability of life on earth should always come first, sadly, it does not.
Van Huebner <van.huebner@gmail.com>
Sat, Dec 22, 2018, 12:15 PM
Neuroboros Sherlock
Can it not be that Alek’s obsession w the hourglass is a repeating clue to finding him? What is opposed to the heads being severed? Their position in terms of their industry? In terms of the “hourglass model”? Describe Dhyey’s connection to hourglass. The hourglass schematic in business graphics? (And all board and arena games! ) Is it an elite game theory cult of sociophysical control (and distraction) of the masses for the sake of the marketing pressure of the big producers of wood, steel, other electronics mineral rights and fossil fuel industry?! CIA and the Military Industrial partners are the jackals!
Van Huebner <van.huebner@gmail.com>
Sat, Apr 6, 2019 6:05 AM
Neuroboros note:
Dhyey’s blindness due to an infection after medicinal treatment for macular degeneration.
Van Huebner <van.huebner@gmail.com>
Tue, Apr 9, 11:05 AM
From Black Sea to the Baltic was a trade route. research that!
Van Huebner <van.huebner@gmail.com>
Wed, Apr 10, 1:14 PM
Neuroboros note:
Let the mother and sun traveling vaguely along the medieval Varangian trade route make use of a bed at two YMCA’s (Warsaw and Łódź) just before they were banned in Poland 1949 by the communists... (the smashing of jazz records. Jazz was greatly relied upon for entertainment since there was rarely access to books or movies).
Van Huebner <van.huebner@gmail.com>
Mon, Apr 15, 6:24 PM
a quick reworked outline of Neuroboros:
Neuroboros outline by parts:
First narrator, Christian introduces the mysterious notebook, murders and most characters involved.
Christian’s grand daughter Quinn narrates Christian’s story, his obsession with the notebook and sudden stroke. Her encounter with Napoleon. And meets Alek’s mother while visiting Dhyey to thank him for seeing her grandfather.
Alek’s mother Gisela narrates, discovers what Dhyey was doing with Alek in the Ukraine (but misconstrues and we are left to wonder how this may have played out).
Then Dhyey’s narration.(while visiting/comforting Christian in the hospital who has suffered a stroke and is catatonic—) Talks of his partial blindness, from disease etc and his obsession with all things glass and reconstructing the visible world from a real split in his visual field, (which is a reverse of Alek’s world, a split world as real from psychic illness and that there was no real sister. That Alek had been disguised as a girl, then back to a boy after they emigrated. {this is Dhyey opening up as though he is Christian’s patient, telling the presumed comatose Christian that he has finally found his soul mate at “my advanced age”—Alek— and that they mean to continue to travel Europe together}
Napoleon visits Christian, mentions the notebook and that with Alek still missing he’s the primary suspect for college student murders. But Christian can’t communicate to Napoleon, who still thinks there was a sister, that he needs to find Alek’s sister for questioning (but really Napoleon is infatuated with her from envisioning her from this notebook (?).
Then Christian watching a TV news report about the murdered Dhyey realizes she (who?) killed Dhyey — but did she kill others(?)
Alek’s mother being interviewed. She concedes Alek’s schizophrenia and his troubled upbringing but denies he murdered anyone. {Of the original escape from violence in Poland in the (?80s?) A little more family history re German/Polish/Ukrainian cultural dichotomies.}
Christian’s grand daughter gets romantically involved with the much older Napoleon. She finds the notebook and confronts him about it. She takes it and goes to return it to Alek’s mother. While there she sees a one-way flight itinerary for two which leads her to believe what her father believes... that maybe she killed Dhyey. And relates that back to Napoleon (?) who is slow to see it.
But Napoleon decides to stake out her place and follow her.
Leads to Alek but he loses them.
On an airplane, mother and son are together and talk of the family farm in Ukraine that Alek has prepared for their return and shows her a blueprint of the compound he had been developing with Dhyey’s financing. Dhyey had been duped, having fallen in love w Alek into believing that he and Alek would rendezvous there.
Some more character development:
Van Huebner <van.huebner@gmail.com>
Thu, May 9, 1:26 PM
Dhyey (the “shrink”) is tasked w scrutinizing the mental health of covert CIA assets as well as his cover as department psychologist and University Head. {His eye disease causes a split in his vision—the missing central portion of the field of vision—disallows him very conveniently from recognizing a face; he can only see peripheries.
Dhyey learns of Alek’s murdering someone (Alek and plagiarism); takes him under his wing after convincing Alek he can do this for his country(?) but the assassinations can’t look like assassination. So Alek is tasked with the assassinations of marked individuals.
Alek gets too into it (and mentally fucked up?) and it becomes a kind of art-form for him—ultimately a psychopathologic end.
Their trips to the Ukraine (ostensibly for Dhyey’s vision treatments) present the possibility of a place to retire for Dhyey yet also a place for Alek to escape to (hide out)—and his mother’s desire for family revenge for the communists murdering her family and her loss of her home ultimately not the fault of communists but because of NATO (EU) pressure on Ukrainians to give up land in the east for fracking and modernized agricultural means of production to accommodate profiting markets in the West. (The pesticide problem, and the targeting of foes of Agribusiness is a conflict for Alek who has a deep loyalty to his mother and their family history.) This is his crux. And he realigns with the CIA targets.
***
Alek
Add a scene:
classroom
Alek sitting down Having just read something in class
Teacher “ did you write that really I find that quite difficult to believe” (and the teacher thinking, having just said that, “well that was perhaps a poor choice of words”) and then says, again:
“ I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to challenge your authenticity, or maybe I should, but that was quite good.”
This class episode in effect leads to student rumors of plagiarism.
Alec then is not literally expelled but verbally abused and accused by students who have been misinformed and are convinced that he was indeed a plagiarist.
***
Why/how is it Alek is in contact with Dhyey? For psychiatric evaluation. How does that work unless it’s the same University? NO.
***
More Dhyey:
In a sense, because of his disease, Dhyey experiences the opposite of wearing blinders; he is forced to mind nothing but his flanks and can but only imagine what lies ahead and therefore deliberate caution is preeminently his condition.
Often he falls prey to inattention and reverie and has at times had to mask this fault, rather than apologize, by asking his client to stop and recount what he or she has just said, but in a novel yet more succinctly forgiving way.
He would tell them too at times that the use of cliches mask the real impressions one has and stifles creativity as well, that they are a poor excuse for not being observant, for not building one’s active descriptive vocabulary. What is vocabulary after all, he would say, but proof of one’s level of awareness of their world. One is shallow because they barely perceive the surfaces themselves that they encounter. One is deep because another cannot fathom so deeply. And ultimately one is truly alone when surrounded by others who cannot fathom further than “mark twain”. One is nearly adrift without their cognizance as if the coast were all at once obscured or removed entirely. He laments that while common human beings can no longer navigate by the stars they can only fail further by remaining too close to shore.
Van Huebner <van.huebner@gmail.com>
Sat, May 11, 2019 6:42 PM
It was a time of songbirds scattering upon the crackle of a twig, of alighting all at once again upon the intruders distal silence, landing nearly where they had been before as if the intruder had been spliced out of a 16mm film. It was an air that caressed with wafts of freshly cut basil, and yet assaulted, burdened as it was with the starch of boiling tubers. Linens longingly waved and children raced exploding chickens between them. But it was a time too of violent vengeance. Of havoc over jagged horizons, of gutted tenements and carcasses of shredded metal. It was not a time of leisurely afternoons upon a multicolored meadow. It was not a time to ponder at length, no. Nor was it an easy time for careful observance of ritual or routine of any kind. Routine in fact was rare, with the exception of fear and reservation. All hopes and desires were dear but kept close to the patient bosom. All expectations had been drown like trapped rats.
Find Mayflies Story!
July 23 2019
Dhyey’s father an Indian had found himself in France ? still with the hope of fighting for India’s freedom (from the British) but there was conflict and dissent among his battalion and when there was an opportunity he decided to desert, fled and sought asylum with the French resistance.
Oct 9, 2019
Alec contrives and commits murders to observe Dhyey’s reactions to the crimes {this before he is enlisted as an assassin(?)}
Nov 1, 2019
Murder scene must come first (in both novel and script!)
Then daughter narration
Christian’s original narration it is later intimated is him telling it to his daughter in his mind as he is still prostrate and silenced by stroke.
Christian’s daughter does cross fit and studies forensic psychology in night school while in training for NYPD? Does she know/meet Alec?
“[…] you may feel as though you are being cheated out of a good story but I promise you I’ll make it worth your time.”
Jan 28, 2020
Spinoza, the lens grinder
1/30/2020
“proxemics” - Edward T. Hall
2/28/2020
Neuroboros must begin with murder scene;
then Christian’s daughter nar;
then Dhyey and Christian scene;
then Dhyey/ Leonardo;
never Alec who is only alluded to through journal
3/13/2020
synesthesia; is Alec as a savant? How to avoid him sounding like rain man (no dialog!)
March 14,2020 loss of love for humanity mono
3/15/2020
I need to define the relevance of the archetypal symbols in the notebook (why the hourglass/tree, toroid/uroboros?… keep it simple yet allude to complexity ( Alec’s synesthesia not a mystery.)
3/17
If Alec is indeed a savant and has total recall… how he connects the hundreds of thousands of hourglasses, arbiforms, toroids and such might overwhelm him and cause him to operate in a kind of trance state or numinous state of higher consciousness, empower him to develop an arrogance…(?)
Why however would he need to kill? Still a social child and vulnerable like a child… unable to control frustration when events become adverse or out of his domain or as with autistic children, he needs order and a pattern to follow. A pattern not unlike the aforementioned shapes to give him a foot path so to speak.
Did Dhyey have an inkling of this? Why would he involve Alec in espionage? Unless there was an NGO connection that involved his mother? And who actually would feed Alec a motivation if not his mother?!
How do/will these shapes lay out a destination if any? Does Alec foresee an endpoint, a terminus? Is it more like a fruition as with a ripened fruit, sporangium? or more like an expanding toroidal continuum or apical meristem?
Does he require these shapes in order to move forward as if walking and avoiding cracks or within the decorative patterns of laid brick or stone?
Is there even any subjective conceptual framework really? Or is it all based on a mere objective like treading water, staying afloat. In which case a pool would be like a nightmare for him, or worse, sensory deprivation.
How, if in any way, would Dhyey benefit from Alec’s synesthesia? Is he studying it surreptitiously or openly? Wouldn’t Alec’s mother be protective of him and perhaps distrust letting Dhyey spend much time with him? Unaccompanied?
Does the notebook resolve any plot issues and how? Who is the actual author of it?
3/18/2020
Alec transitions from killing because of being ridiculed to … blaming a professor for not stopping it and accusing him of plagiarism?
Confronts the prof.; follows him home to confront him more and ends up killing him, accidentally(?)
Dhyey does not know about the murders. But incidentally is obsessed w Alec’s photographic memory and contrives to utilize him to memorize confidential/sealed information (from a meeting?) How does he get security clearance? Through Dhyey?
Alec develops a pattern for communicating w Dhyey which he lays out in geocaches mapped via riddles.
Dhyey becomes frustrated, then annoyed by this and realizes he’s created a problem for himself. Alec after all is still somewhat adolescent emotionally/socially.
Dhyey unwisely gets upset with Alec whose anger then is redirected towards other administrative and academic individuals and eventually to NGOs(?) that have plagued his mothers profession.
Is it Detective Napoleon or Leonardo?
3/24/2020
Olfact of life lifted
No, memory will no longer dwell
in palette, nostrils wide
To glistening spring winds
Laden with sycamore, sweat
Broken by passing joggers' stride
No memory will rise like leaf
From woody path or marble foyer
Nor wildly spin from revolving doors.
This blessed past will come no more
For only void curls inward now
No sweet eddies unfurl
No aster, spruce, lily, nor
Any living breath. The wave
Of history sheds no longer
Cleft not to hidden pearly caverns
Nor teases this saddened node
With no coy glance, nor tempts
With feasts, but deathly hints
Perfumed blush prematurely looks
askance. Only camphor, eucalyptus
Find a sultry way in to stave
The hush'ed peel that sachet of pus
Is nearer still than the cedar sap
Perverts the epistemological crown.
The divine of unknowing sense
As all shadows bloat, taps
Into a cloaked but reaking grave.
Time has stolen all redolence.
4/08/2020
Neuroboros:
Targeted students are those that conspired & participated in a mock Thematic Apperception Test ”haze-grilling” of Alec’s ideas he exposed in a paper (or classroom discussion?) wherein the accuse him of plagiarism. [Henry Murray = Harry Murphy]
He had made the mistake of relating his photographic memory and ability to see his universal shapes in any event or thing. It is a kind of madness they counter, using terms like schizophrenic... tin hat etc Ridiculed for his of the synesthesia proposition (diagnosis) of his mental processes.
4/30
is there any relationship between the Hebrew apostles as origin of Western Christianity and the Hellenist disciples that "fled(?)" via Paul (since he spoke Greek) to the east being the origin of the Orthodox Christian church—is there a relationship between that and the differences between the Latin and Greek languages as shown by the use of the morpheme meta- that there is a terrestrial/tangential relationship. the "against" and the "with" aspect of being in proximity with another
5/09
A brief passage from Neuroboros, in reference to Dr Dhyey.
In a sense, because of his disease, Dhyey experiences the opposite of wearing blinders; he is forced to mind nothing but his flanks and can but only imagine what lies ahead and therefor deliberate caution is preeminently his condition.
Often he falls prey to inattention and reverie and has at times had to mask this fault, rather than apologize, by asking his client to stop and recount what he or she has just said, but in a novel yet more succinctly forgiving way.
He would tell them too at times, and perhaps unwisely, that the use of cliches mask the real impressions one has and stifles creativity as well, that such devices are a poor excuse for not being observant, for not building one’s active descriptive vocabulary. What is vocabulary after all, he would say, but proof of one’s level of awareness of their world. One is shallow because they barely perceive the surfaces themselves that they encounter. One is deep because another cannot fathom so deeply. And ultimately one is truly alone when surrounded by others who cannot fathom further than “mark twain”. One is nearly adrift without their cognizance as if the coast were all at once obscured or removed entirely. He laments that while common human beings can no longer navigate by the stars they can only fail further by remaining too close to shore … reading horoscopes.
5/14
For destroying the neurological development of hundreds of thousands of children; for the suffering of their families; for the criminal neglect foisted upon physicians & nurses; for taking away our financial livelihoods to save your reputation—you deserve every bit of rage and court convictions that come your way!
5/18
Instantaneously picks up sign languages
Dhyey’s discovery of Alec’s gift of synesthesia and eidetic memory—too aggressively seeks to study Alec, which annoys Alec, then animosity… then his disappearance.
5/20/2020
I started to serialize it a few years ago and posted chapters for friends on FB... but after a while the plot needed serious changes which pretty much put a stop to the serialized version. as of today I still have rewriting of those chapters to do. I feel confident today however that I've worked out the kinks though so as soon as I can clear my head after dealing with all these frickin financial problems (unemployment insurance fraud! unbelievable!) I'll get some momentum going again. Anyway, what is it about? Sure I can share that, could be a good way to exorcise any demons in it. Speaking of which—managing an ambience for writing—my soundtrack music in part serves that purpose, provides a mood which I can control simply by hitting the loop button.
So let's see... on the surface it's about the disappearance of a synesthetic individual who was an assistant to a psychiatrist. More deeply it is the character development of five basic protagonists who each represent a type of self-absorption.
With the exception of Alec, whose whereabouts are somewhat the object of the plot, each of the these four characters narrate the story line.
ALEC, the vanished assistant is synesthetic. His presence is mostly in the narrative of the other characters' voices. In some instances however his voice is textual, as in quotes from a notebook he labeled his "Common-book of Hourglasses". It is known first that he has a photographic memory, then progressively becomes more synesthetic. More on that later.
DHYEY, the psychiatrist, has macular degeneration (has lost most of his focal vision) and relies on his assistants greatly because of this; but his role is broader than this. More on him later.
Father (CHRISTIAN) is Alec's replacement. At some point he is in a coma. Some of his narration is from within this neurological state.
CHELSEA Christian's daughter, is a firefighter though she has a psychology degree and narrates a portion of her father's perspective from his own unfinished writing (of a novel he intended to call Neuroboros) based on Alec and the notebook he found while working in Dhyey's office.
And a detective (NAPOLEON SMITH), who aspires to be something other than a law enforcement officer... more (or less) on that later.
Ultimately the changes I made lead more directly and unhindered to how to explain the schism between Dhyey and Alec and the reason for the whole story in the first place: self-absorption and detachment. Dhyey becomes more personally obsessively interested in Alec's synesthesia and this becomes annoying to Alec.
Alec thus is alienated and turns inward to put it simply (and physically vanishes). His reality becomes more & more detached from the so-called normal 3 dimensional reality of others. His notebook only explicates the beginnings of Alec's entrance into a multidimensional awareness of what he sees as a grand set of universal shapes, a space that he veritably swims in. The shapes described in it are crucial to making believable his surreal condition, while the challenge being to avoid the cliche, comic bookishness of mysterious, pseudo-scientific nonsense, the common factor of sci-fi these days. It's a psychological novel of ultimate self absorption (and hopefully elicits only an allusion to a numinous spiritual point of view that could never be put into words, short of asking the reader to accept a shamanistic message, but rather a philosophical problem, the paradox of the self as subject/object). But the story is meant also to suggest medicine and science misdiagnose individuals such as Alec's incommunicable gift as schizophrenia only because of another philosophical problem...(the word for this escapes me for the moment. I'll add it later) And we are led to believe Alec indeed ends up just as cut off from our world as Christian (later in a coma his thoughts are part of the narrative where we see too this possibility, Alec's new separate but expansive reality ) for it is at last revealed he has already been in prison (murder) for the criminally insane… and his mother(?)
So that's a huge spoiler! Two characters cut off from the world but extremely psychologically openly involved and self-knowing; while two others, Dhyey (can’t see the full picture only the artworks’ borders and frame) and the detective (presumes to be able to see all facets of a thing as an amateur sculptor), are self absorbed in a shallow way of needing a defining recognition from a group of authorized others; one very wanting but only capable of seeing contexts, what delimits core realities (Dhyey), and the other also incapable of recognizing his own barriers, his lack of talent or aesthetic vision (the detective). The daughter then is the only one who is grounded, not self-absorbed. Her voice is the most colloquial of the narratives.
5/23/2020
Notes from Morton Hunt’s Story of Psychology.
“higher-level mental process supplied transitions between the successive pictures” (Wertheimer ref in Story of Psych)
Alec’s brain like a stroboscope … tachistoscope
the phi phenomenon “psychological short-circuit”
“[…] organized unity with a meaning of its own.Wertheimer called such an overall perception a Gestalt, a German word that means form, shape, or configuration but that he used to mean a set of sensation perceived as a meaningful whole.” p.320 Story of Psych kindle version.
[co-variables]
“Zeitgeist of 1910 […] physical sciences and technology.”
“[…] mind interprets the sensations to mean what it knows the objects to be.” p.322.
Alec is a savant w strong photographic memory coupled with his synesthesia he ‘sees” them enacting together his event shape images (the arbiform and the toroid) and calls it at one point the shape of escape, but eventually a universal he calls the mother meristem in his Common Book of Hourglasses.
Is it Christian or Dhyey that has in their possession the 4’ x 8’ wall chart of these?
5/27/2020
how it all ends.
Alec appears after 40 years… not in hiding.
If the story ends with Christian in the hospital at 45 years old Alec would also be that old. And Dhyey would be at least 85 years old when he visits Christian.
Alec visits Dhyey.
5/28/2020
last chapter heading:
“The light has entered the cave. Io! Io! /
The light has gone down into the cave, /
Splendour on splendour! /
By prong have I entered these hills: / […]”
Ezra Pound, from Canto XLVII (in The Voice That Is Great Within Us)
5/29/2020
Alec is a little like the savant physicist Mitchell Feigenbaum (theoretical “T” division at Los Alamos) “[who] thought about turbulence in liquids and gases. He thought about time—did it glide smoothly forward or hop discretely like a sequence of cosmic motion-picture frames.” James Gleick Chaos. p. 2.
07 14 2020
Christian’s daughter will now begin the novel
also at a much later point it will be intimated that there has been a sexually charged relationship between Dhyey with Christian as well as with Alek and the possible reason for Alec’s disappearance.
07 15 2020
The difference between Dhyey and Christian:
C is narrow focused and micromanaging as in his perfectionism in writing
D has far reaching big picture vision regardless his macular deterioration which denies him a literal focal point
C knows his math
D knows his history
C is fastidious
D requires an assistant
C appears ignorant of the implications of the hourglass notebook
D was there and encouraged it’s development
Alec progressively lives in a virtual reality
C and D are grounded in physical reality, C micro, D contextual
07 18 2020
Other motives for Alek being a killer: protecting his mother? A mother and son dynamic needs to be established as well as a threat. From what? Better to have Alec reappear with intent to kill Christian (see 07 24).
07 24 2020
Christian knew Alec; and Alek knew that he had actually been partly responsible for his fate, his presumed disappearance. Christian, like Dhyey, had been infatuated with him and jealous of his mind and had actually stolen the notebook while visiting Alec at work in Dhyey’s office. He took advantage of Alec’s absence by ingratiating himself to Dhyey for his position as assistant.
His daughter Chelsea finds his diary and the notebook hidden amongst his things as well as a pistol.
07 27
2020
Alec intuited visually that the cosmos folds or rather circles back in terms of scaling upon the microcosm as a wave that the microcosm “feels” as a greater washing-over stroking force. This was Alec’s intuition that connected the forces, of quantum mechanics and relativity, particle/wave theories; of Bohm’s “implicate-“ and “explicate order,” that the two supposed views of reality were actually a single system, a processes of exchange, in human reality it was played out in the cyclic nature of the arbiform and physiological events. Alec’s experience of his visual field was sensitive to this, to what are called Bohm’s “hidden variables” and “pilot waves”. All this was not explicitly stated in Alec’s notebook as mathematical formulas but intuitively drawn out as plans for an animated schema. He claims only by animating this connection between the forces as paradoxically nested in each other in this process of unfolding/enfolding, never circling back to a final permanent resting state, could one mind “conceive of” much less utilize in any sense what Bohm called “wholeness” as well as “infinite potential”. It is the ultimate crisis for science, that to maintain the observer and the observed are separate is particular only to human consciousness and this was akin to all the problems and suffering of simply being a contemporary human—and the only way forward for humanity is to let the universe “enfold” into consciousness, to aspire to exist in a numinous unquestioning awe of reality, our visual field no longer being the limitation of our process of living an individual life — becoming one with our surroundings as the highest achievement… ironically.
Did Alec believe he had a mission? To do what? To violently disassemble, eliminate human self consciousness. From Shiva and Uma to offspring Ganesha (“Destroyer of worlds”).
What are the Agori of India?
Like Arjuna to Krishna: “Drive my chariot and stop between the two armies, so that I can see these warriors whom I am about to fight[….] no good can come from killing my own kinsmen [….] we should turn back from this evil. ”
Yet a problem is explicit in “Arjuna’s Despair”: the ban on intermixture of castes as the cause of evil and the corruption of the family.
08/24/2020
Considering even more of a close relationship between Christian and Alec. A kind of rivalry for Dhyey’s attention or… or what? A competition of sorts?… to see who could create more chaos, more clients(?) for Dhyey to see!? Scenes of clandestine meetings between the two of them.
I am reading Putin’s Russia right now. I like Politkovskaya’s voice as a voice for Christian’s daughter, Chelsea.
I need to decide once and for all whether there is any need for international intrigue or whether it is best simply as a psychological mystery.
Is Alec’s implied sister actually a pet name for Christian? Whoa! Or is it his alter (female) ego? Wasn’t Alec dressed as a girl at some point as a child? Why? Is there a need for this split? Does it inform in any way his self absorption (as in referring back to the ouroboros archetype)?…
09/01/2020
Alec needs a background story. WHO is he? Was it merely anger over how he was abused? No.
In Christian’s notes Chelsea finds descriptions of Alec’s past, because Alec revealed his past to Christian.
Alec had Dewey Body deterioration of his brain, but also an abnormality due to a childhood injury: a concussion from a dirt-ball to the head.
Christian and Alec were room mates. We need to see this back story.
09/02/2020
Chelsea:
“…I don’t think I can speak in my father’s voice…that is, trying to think like him, I can’t do that. All I can do is try to decipher his notes and the occasional passages, the dialogs.
I can tell you this, though, that he and Alec were more than merely consecutively employed by Dhyey as assistants; they were also room mates before all this craziness. And certainly that is how my father came to acquire a position as Dhyey’s assistant but also to have Alec’s notebooks in his possession…”
09/03/2020
Alec visits Christian in the hospital
I need to adopt this daughter as the the voice of the book.
Discuss in narrative: the difference between perceiving relationship of figures or lines with healthy eyes as a unity, while with macular degeneration the objects of one’s gaze are in opposition, alienated and incapable of reconciliation.
Also, have Christian recall a day when he was scolded by Dhyey for continuing to shift his relative position to accommodate Dhyey’s better periphery. Of course he did this without realizing that Dhyey would be annoyed by it, him having himself to adjust to Christian’s position… somewhat like two cars on the freeway each trying to anticipate the other’s desired lane.
Neuroboros...
“Willful blindness”?
Possible names for Alek
Matuzek, Nowak
“Physical pain does not shimply resist language but actively destroys it, bringing about an immediate reversion to a state anterior to language, to the sounds and cries a human being makes before language is learned.”
(The Body in Pain, Elaine Scarry)
Dhyey (the “shrink”) is tasked w scrutinizing the mental health of covert CIA assets. {His eye disease causes a split in his vision—the missing macular central portion of the field of vision—disallows him very conveniently from recognizing a face; he can only see peripheries.
Dhyey learns of Alek’s murdering someone (Alek and plagiarism); takes him under his wing after convincing Alek he can do this for his country(?) but the assassinations can’t look like assassination. So Alek is tasked with the assassinations of marked individuals.
Alek gets too into it and it becomes a kind of art-form for him—ultimately a psychopathologic end.
Their trips to the Ukraine (for Dhyey’s vision treatments) present the possibility of a place to retire for Dhyey yet also a place for Alek to escape to—and his mother’s desire for family revenge for the communists murdering her family and her loss of her home ultimately not the fault of communists but because of NATO (EU) pressure on Ukrainians to give up land in the east for fracking and modernized agricultural means of production to accommodate profiting markets in the West. (The pesticide problem, and the targeting of foes of Agribusiness is a conflict for Alek who has a deep loyalty to his mother and their family history.)
***
Add a scene:
classroom
Alek sitting down Having just read something in class
Teacher “ did you write that really I find that quite difficult to believe”(and the teacher thinking, having just said that, “well that was perhaps a poor choice of words”) and then says, again:
“ i’m sorry I didn’t mean to challenge your authenticity, or maybe I should, but that was quite good”
This class episode in effect leads to student rumors of plagiarism
Alec then is not literally expelled but verbally abused and accused by students who have been convinced that he was indeed a plagiarist.
***
Why/how is it Alek is in contact with Dhyey? For psychiatric evaluation. How does that work unless it’s the same University?
***
In a sense, because of his disease, Dhyey experiences the opposite of wearing blinders; he is forced to mind nothing but his flanks and can but only imagine what lies ahead and therefor deliberate caution is preeminently his condition.
Often he falls prey to inattention and reverie and has at times had to mask this fault, rather than apologize, by asking his client to stop and recount what he or she has just said, but in a novel yet more succinctly forgiving way.
He would tell them too at times that the use of cliches mask the real impressions one has and stifles creativity as well, that they are a poor excuse for not being observant, for not building one’s active descriptive vocabulary. What is vocabulary after all, he would say, but proof of one’s level of awareness of their world. One is shallow because they barely perceive the surfaces themselves that they encounter. One is deep because another cannot fathom so deeply. And ultimately one is truly alone when surrounded by others who cannot fathom further than “mark twain”. One is nearly adrift without their cognizance as if the coast were all at once obscured or removed entirely. He laments that while common human beings can no longer navigate by the stars they can only fail further by remaining too close to shore.
this
The fate of Eastern Europe is threatened by the destruction of arable land by Western (EU, as in global corporate influence) market industry interests. Fracking and agribusiness products will be it’s final ruination!...
All forms of governance are mere provisional means of maintaining the cooperation of the laboring polulace. What’s more important is whether or not the quality of land, water and air is taken into account. Nor can the growing human population be ignored...
......But Malthusian cataclysm will take care of that (in the name of one nation’s self interest or another)! While the sustainability of life on earth should always come first, sadly, it does not.
Neuroboros (Sherlock)
Can it not be that Alek’s obsession w the hourglass is a repeating clue to finding him? What is opposed to the heads being severed? Their position in terms of their industry? In terms of the “hourglass model”?
Neuroboros note:
Dhyey’s blindness due to an infection after medicinal treatment for macular degeneration.
Neuroboros note:
Let the mother and son traveling vaguely along the medieval Varangian trade route make use of a bed at two YMCA’s (Warsaw and Łódź) just before they were banned in Poland 1949 by the communists... (the smashing of jazz records. Jazz was greatly relied upon for entertainment since there was rarely access to books or movies).
Neuroboros:
Dhyey’s father an Indian had found himself in France still with the hope of fighting for India’s freedom from the Brittish... but there was conflict and dissent among his battalion and when there was an opportunity he decided to desert, fled and sought asylum with the French resistance.
Neuroboros:
Alec contrives and commits murders to observe Dhyey’s reactions to the crimes {this is before Alec is enlisted as an assassin(?)}
Neuroboros:
Reqarding litigation of murder charge & toward a valid argument for or against the “insanity” defense: use my ordinary/extraordinary graph.
An Executioner as an individual prioritized as a proxy for a group (society—the greater good). He acts on behalf of a Group.
Is it not mere vengeance?!
Neuroboros:
Murder scene must come first (in both novel and the script?)
Christian’s original narration it is later intimated is him telling it to his daughter in his mind as he is still prostrate and silenced by stroke.
The daughter’s narration: is pieced together on her own? And from his journal.
Christian’s daughter does cross fit and studies forensic psychology in night school while in training for the NYPD? Her father’s influence perhaps... did she know Alek?
“[...] you may feel as though you are being cheated out of a good story but I promise you I’ll make it worth your time.”
Neuroboros note
Spinoza the lens grinder
Neuroboros
must begin with the murder scene, then Christian’s daughter narrates, then Christian, then Dhyey or Leonardo, never Alek who is inly alluded to or his journal quoted.
Neuroboros:
Targeted students are those that conspired & participated in a mock Thematic Apperception Test ”haze-grilling” of Alec’s ideas he exposed in a paper (or classroom discussion?) wherein the accuse him of plagiarism. [Henry Murray = Harry Murphy]
He had made the mistake of relating his photographic memory and ability to see his universal shapes in any event or thing. It is a kind of madness they counter, using terms like schizophrenic... tin hat etc
Neuroboros
synesthesia
Finally figured out how to explain the schism between Dhyey and Alec and the reason for the whole story in the first place. Dhyey's excessive interest in Alec's synesthesia becomes annoying to Alec. And Alec turns inward to put it simply. His reality becomes more & more detached from the the normal 3 dimensional reality of others. His notebook only explicates the beginnings of Alec's entrance into a multidimensional awareness of of a grand set of universal shapes, a space that he veritably swims in.
I just have to avoid the cliche of mysterious and comic bookish psychic nonsense, the common factor of sci-fi these days. It's a psychological novel of ultimate self absorption, & hopefully elicits a numinous spiritual point of view that could never be put into words. thus the protagonists in natural world of medicine and science misdiagnose Alec's incommunicable gift as schizophrenia and he ends up just as cut off from our world as Christian, who was Alec's replacement and who at the end of the story is in a coma ( his thoughts are part of the narrative and it is he that "sees" this possibility of Alec's new separate reality ). So that's a huge spoiler! Two characters cut off from the world but extremely psychologically aware and self-knowing; while two others, Dhyey and the detective, are self absorbed in a shallow way of needing a defining recognition from a group of authorized others.
Yes, I actually considered the graphic novel idea—because of the notenook imagery involved.
One thing I forgot to mention was is Alec is a savant, has Asperger's on the autism spectrum, with a photographic memory that escalates in combination w the synesthesia.
Anyway, there is plenty of stuff happening in the real world of the plot that weaves them in and out of each other's narratives.
Alec, for example is misjudged by other college students to have been plagiarizing and this sets him off, sparks a violent response.
There is a murder which the reader is led to believe he is responsible for, especially since he disappears... thus the need for a detective in the story. And the daughter of Christian provides a lot of subplot grounding in the mundane life of a female aspiring to be a firefighter. She, after all is thrust into the intrigue having found her father's unfinished, too academic for her taste manuscript which she attempts to follow through on. There is a bit of poignancy when she learns her father has had the stroke and is in the hospital with a coma and she must visit him.
I started to serialize it a few years ago and posted chapters for friends on FB... but after a while the plot needed serious changes which pretty much put a stop to the serialized version. as of today I still have rewriting of those chapters to do. I feel confident today however that I've worked out the kinks though so as soon as I can clear my head after dealing with all these frickin financial problems (unemployment insurance fraud! unbelievable!) I'll get some momentum going again. Anyway, what is it about? Sure I can share that, could be a good way to exorcise any demons in it. Speaking of which—managing an ambience for writing—my soundtrack music in part serves that purpose, provides a mood which I can control simply by hitting the loop button.
So let's see... on the surface it's about the disappearance of a synesthetic individual who was an assistant to a psychiatrist. More deeply it is the character development of five basic protagonists who each represent a type of self-absorption.
With the exception of Alec, whose whereabouts are somewhat the object of the plot, each of the these four characters narrate the story line.
ALEC, the vanished assistant is synesthetic. His presence is mostly in the narrative of the other characters' voices. In some instances however his voice is textual, as in quotes from a notebook he labeled his "Commonbook of Hourglasses". Alec progressively becomes more synesthetic. More on that later.
DHYEY, the psychiatrist, has macular degeneration (has lost most of his focal vision) and relies on his assistants greatly because of this; but his role is broader than this. More on him later.
CHRISTIAN is Alec's replacement. At some point he is in a coma. Some of his narration is from within this neurological state.
Christian's daughter (whom I haven't given a firm name yet), is an aspiring firefighter and narrates a portion of her father's perspective from his own unfinished unfinished writing (of a novel he intended to call Neuroboros) based on Alec and the notebook he found while working in Dhyey's office.
And a detective (NAPOLEON SMITH), who aspires to be something other than a law enforcement officer... more (or less) on that later.
Ultimately the changes I made lead more directly and unhindered to how to explain the schism between Dhyey and Alec and the reason for the whole story in the first place: self-absorption and detachment. Dhyey becomes more personally obsessively interested in Alec's synesthesia and this becomes annoying to Alec.
Alec thus is alienated and turns inward to put it simply (and physically vanishes). His reality becomes more & more detached from the so-called normal 3 dimensional reality of others. His notebook only explicates the beginnings of Alec's entrance into a multidimensional awareness of what he sees as a grand set of universal shapes, a space that he veritably swims in. The shapes described in it are crucial to making believable his surreal condition, while the challenge being to avoid the cliche, comic bookishness of mysterious, pseudo-scientific nonsense, the common factor of sci-fi these days. It's a psychological novel of ultimate self absorption (and hopefully elicits only an allusion to a numinous spiritual point of view that could never be put into words, short of asking the reader to accept a shamanistic message, but rather a philosophical problem, the paradox of the self as subject/object). But the story is meant also to suggest medicine and science misdiagnose individuals such as Alec's incommunicable gift as schizophrenia only because of another philosophical problem...(the word for this escapes me for the moment. I'll add it later) And we are led to believe Alec indeed ends up just as cut off from our world as Christian (later in a coma his thoughts are part of the narrative where we see too this possibility, Alec's new separate but expansive reality ).
So that's a huge spoiler! Two characters cut off from the world but extremely psychologically openly involved and self-knowing; while two others, Dhyey and the detective, are self absorbed in a shallow way of needing a defining recognition from a group of authorized others; one very wanting but only capable of seeing the boundaries, what inhibits reality (Dhyey), and the other incapable of recognizing his own barriers, his lack of talent or aesthetic vision (the detective). The daughter then is the only one who is grounded, not self-absorbed. Her voice is the most colloquial of the narratives.
Neuroboros
Is Alec making his way back, to finding Neylan in Europe, to avenge her death(?)... but is Neumann real? readers must be left with this question!
Neuroboros
Aleck is not a psychology major, he's an Art History student
Neuroboros
Does Alec presume to have united the forces?!
Neuroboros ?
Color is a chord, a combination of wave reflections; a meadow of wildflowers is a sonata, your grandfathers' bees the publishers of great works, the score of the spheres interminably re-arranged for dwindling venues, interpreted by the green minds of modernity only to meet with prepared piano and disinterested passers- and samplers-by. How, or where must the players resolve alight without sublime notation? I fear the music is fading.
Neuroboros
The blinds like failing
dams crack against the
cracked open window I am
reading poetry lamenting
the glare of city lights:
silence is a stream
where words pause
like sickened salmon
underneath a sheen
broadsided by unfaithful
flow, and the rocks, ever there
though only temporary relief,
foreshadow bleached coral
and beached ponderous tales.
Neuroboros
Alec:
brain damage from concussion
develops visual acuity as an artist ( drawing from memory)
early in life he is diagnosed as having PTSD and aphasia yet with eidetic memory, but later a type of aphasia — a highly intuitive synesthesia is the ultimate result.
I don't know what you're worried about Chris
Professor: "did you write this?"
Neuroboros
Alec sees the implications of everything that happens over and over in the day to day through visual layers of lateral and oblique branching of an aboriginal arbiform that he calls the mother meristem and this is the fulcrum of more than his epistemology, this hourglass/toroidal continuum is his road map to an inevitable future.
Neuroboros
There's a crack in our logic dear Liza...
Neuroboros
When I was a little girl after my parents divorced I used to write stories to make me feel better about being alone not wanting to think about missing them my daddy called me CC my name is Chelsea but he would call me sissy
when I was a little girl after my parents divorced I used to write stories to make me feel better about being alone not wanting to think about missing them my daddy called me Cici my name is Chelsea but he would call me Cici
Neuroboros:
general public's social distancing post pandemic, combined w higher % of autistic adults, sets up a sociopathological context for new "norm" of common human relations, a heightened peer pressure to conform to corporate-like dutiful culture.
Neuroboros
This is where the title of my novel/script comes from as well as the idea of the eidetic protagonist. Neuroboros is what the character coins as his connection to a universal shape of events (and experiences a numinous awe yet a "divine apatheia"[Samuel Becket's Lucky])... but from the perspective of others is merely exhibiting Aspergers, synesthesia or schizophrenia. Could this sort of thinking ever be coherently expressed?!*
[There was a time when there was no "self" as we know it, to be be involved with. There was no ego,—just a visual field, food sources, water... What disrupted that field? How, why was the attentiveness of that first creature turned back upon itself? What made it self aware? Pain? lack? Error where suddenly the past and potential future rush in?
It's not an original concept that that disruption was a crack or shadow on a cave wall that resembled the outline, the silhouette of a familiar animate figure.]
That crack was also a first expansion of that bubbling of aesthetics, the frame that we circumscribe the artwork with—which eventually engulfed the gallery (the Wrapped Reichstag - https://christojeanneclaude.net/artworks/wrapped-reichstag/ ) and made inclusive the natural terrain (Running Fence - https://christojeanneclaude.net/artworks/running-fence/ ) and thus involuted as a return to earth as the artist's undisturbed palette and "ground" (Andy Goldsworthy - Leaning into the Wind - https://www.amazon.com/gp/video/detail/B07BBX6138/ref=atv_dp_cnc_red_1_1 ) —a closing of the crack that drew out self-consciousness, a renunciation of the ego.
Thinking of humanity's emergence here you might note that it is firstly nested within the corpus earth then contemporarily scribbles upon the external surface of that spherical nest. Consciousness as an organic geode.
*One broad difficult question is whether the "shapes of events" visually implied above, are consistant with all cultural views and whether this concept of consciousness and its evolution are even recognized or accessible through any audible or written languages—hieroglyphs may have been the earliest/closest a set of images has come to intelligibly articulating a statement... but perhaps languages have but to continue to explore fully the potential for expanding descriptive vocabularies being challenged by the fundamentally required visual thinking. Mathematical schemas such as covariant matrices come close fo finding universalities but this domain of thinking escapes many of us early on in life. And this is one main reason I harp about teaching descriptive vocabularies and mathematics—and therein lies our potential for generating a path back to sustaining life on earth.
Neuroboros
My Neuroboros' main protagonist's (Alec) use of and significance of his hourglass graffiti: we (civilization) are running out of time. Resource depletion, population growth, economic and environmental effects of the plunder leading to extinction events. (Thesis critical of humanity is derided and his being accused of plagiarism pushes him to emotional pathological crisis)
He wished to flip it, so to speak, so out of frustration and demoralization but now his psychic force is unleashed—he conspires to kill all those he perceives as representing, or propagators in any way of, declining humanity.
There is irony in the story in that his global travel freedom is financially supported by the growth of index investments!
Neuroboros.
Alec changes his major to medicine—(eye surgery?) The other source of his finances.
Neuroboros -
the multiple narratives talking about Dhyey
like Merleau-Ponty's composite perspective by rotating an object in one's hand
Neuroboros
"term fovea comes from the from Latin foves 'pit'"
It is as if the core of reality falls into a pit for Dhyey.
Due to his macular degeneration Dhyey is drawn to
Dante
black holes
silhouettes and shadows (shadow puppetry?)
Freud/Jung Dream interpretation/archetypes, mythology
Neuroboros
wave/particle paradox
light as particles are quantum
quantum mechanics
Copenhagen interpretation
entanglement
spooky action at a distance
7 25
NEUROBOROS?
The brain/mind is the field/force that completes the forces (currently described by physicists) by a spiral logic that comprises beyond human comprehension the numinous dimension of combining the forces any better than saying nothing is more perfect than apical evolution yet nothing is more beautifully self-destructive than our species! WE COMPLETE THE INVOLUTION OF LIFE ON EARTH!
Entropy is sublime. And that's as close as I may ever get to "elucidating" what I'm thinking in words beneath everything else that comes out of my mouth.
In that sense while assuming sustainably preserving life on Earth should be fundamental to everything we say or do—all our means, our technologies are counter-productive.
How's that for fatalism!
Neuroboros
in search of lost confidence
relentless visceral rage
7/29
Infinity or Stop
self-reference ☞ paradox
the mother meristem is an hourglass
Neuroboros
Alek morphs from self-absorption to presuming to have reached a mystical pinnacle he wishes during midlife to bestow upon humanity but at life's end & remembering uncontrollably horrible childhood events and enduring accusations of plagiarism and fraud in college goes violently mad and lashes out at specific individuals.
(Alek's Synesthesia/eidetic memory is of the rarest kind. It causes any perceived visual shape to call to mind an entire set of its occurrence in nature as well as recursive concepts and events as if he were between opposing mirrors.)
8/25
Neuroboros
Alek morphs from self-absorption to presuming to have reached a mystical pinnacle he wishes during midlife to bestow upon humanity but at life's end & remembering uncontrollably horrible childhood events and enduring accusations of plagiarism and fraud in college goes violently mad and lashes out at specific individuals.
(Alek's Synesthesia/eidetic memory is of the rarest kind. It causes any perceived visual shape to call to mind an entire set of its occurrence in nature as well as recursive concepts and events as if he were between opposing mirrors.)
8/30
Neuroboros. the hourglass of all things—the lambda of mass and the wiggle of space (gravitational waves)
The artifact Book of Hourglasses in my novel Neuroboros has origins in the hour glass as a reduction of time & the arbiform into one token (symbolic of this powerful archetype) for the internal clock of mass & gravitational waves as the mere "wiggle" of the passing of time. (9/18)the biological clock, recursive, spiral logic (steps and branching) of life in the uroboros archetype.
The Commonbook of Hourglasses:
cf. to the Sefer Ha-Zohar (the book of Radiance)
Alek makes this connection.
Not a book but an encyclopedia of shape in 3 columns interlinearly comparative by attitude (perspective) across all disciplines.
The hourglass of course alludes to the sefirot.
Is the self divine comparatively to the universe of all events?!
Alek asks: Can this esoteric visual epistemology inaugurate a greater understanding of being a steward of earth? Where does this question come up? In conversation? In Christian’s mind? In the notebook? Ie., why and for whom did Alek pursue this level of cognition?
9 16 2021
Sub plots
father/daughter
homicide investigation
Alek and librarian friend
consciousness: concepts of categorization: visual (Alek) vs textual (Douglas)
one character is a librarian science academic implying he categorizes paths to information.
Alek categorizes concepts, objects and events by specific shapes.
The librarian character, Douglas, is how we enter Alek’s world. He can extrapolate on their commonality and the notebook(?). Is he narrating, or merely conversing w Christian (?).
The question is how do we find him. Through Christian who became friends with this person after Alek went missing, or the detective(?) investigating a murder. How are they connected.
9 / 17
Christian meets Douglas in the cafeteria Are you Dhyey’s new assistant?
Douglas brings up Alek’s Commonbook which he and Christian then look for
9/18
What if Chelsea at one point thought her father was inventing this Alek and his visual gift for a story, that Alek’s existence didn’t matter for the story stood alone… but later Christian’s behavior became erratic and paranoid and he was at some point diagnosed/institutionalized w schizophrenia just before his stroke?
Chelsea discovers that her own father may have contrived the story as a means to convince himself of a new reality, that he had not killed Alek out of jealousy, that Alek had indeed existed.
We are shown then that Christian was responsible for Alek’s disappearance/had killed him… and little did he know that Alek had as well become a monster, which we only discover at the end…. the hourglass shape made from human circulatory systems.
Chelsea has met the detective on a homicide scene(?) or because he det is a temp patient of her father’s.
How does Alek or her father’s book come up? Her description of the book sounds oddly familiar to detective, a case wherein an Alek did indeed disappear.
Enter Dhyey!
9/17
Neuroboros
novartis and roche become targets for Alek(?) Blames them for Dhyey's worsening wet macular degeneration and the exorbitant charges
9/20
Cambrian explosion?
Neuroboros
Hesychasm of Eastern Orthodox Church
"prayer of the heart" 👉 Jesus prayer:
"Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy upon me (a sinner)"
The kingdom of God is within you - Luke
9/23
Neuroboros
does Alek's gift overwhelm his oral ability to speak or comprehend words? (aphasia) Is he believed to have become catatonic?
apophenia
pareidolia
athambia
9/29/20121
Neuroboros
"So what makes you think it's okay to be dismissive much less reprimand your father? Maybe you just can't wait for me to be too old and slow to respond or defend myself so you can vengefully verbally abuse me... maybe even beat me—for what?! Was I truly that awful to you? On second thought, yes perhaps I was—by my standards at least, yes, I failed to endow you with patience and tactfulness...so...do what you must!”
10/20
Neuroboros
Illusion of ascending pitch—Shepard tones and expansion of like pattern—Mandelbrot fractals
together in his experience
10/21
I’m begining to feel drawn towards Neuroboros as more than a psychological thriller; that it is becoming more like a supernatural story. Therefore absolutely must resist any genre cliche. No ghosts, no paranormal detectives, no worm holes, mirror or forest thresholds, nor alternative beings. The humans in this story are humans only … yet with a narrative allusion to Alek as possessing a mystical-like power to see an overlying visual all-time encompassing universe. All events as he sees them are described (by Douglas) as embedded in bubble-like vestibules, that at any time in history there is a wave-like wall of these vestibules that washes and crashes contiguously as humans relate to each other, go about their narrowly perceived quotidian bubble-place in time and space.
However the idea of “bubbles” suggests there must be a bursting of sorts. A spilling out of Alek’s visualizations, his higher vectorial position into someone else’s(?) mundane and flat linear timeline.
If it becomes a graphic novel it most assuredly will be read as supernatural.
The following is Alek as described by Doug.
We had several classes together. Biology, psychology in undergrad and then at Johns Hopkins we were in the pre med program… so we had a lot of classes together. More than I can remember but we had this one ethics class that really stands out in my mind. I remember the professor reacting to something Alek said… we were outside on the grass that day and the discussion was on Aristotle, virtue and practice. Alek said something, while gesticulating with his hands, that seemed to stun the professor. After a few seconds she quietly said his name and just sat there looking at him, apparently processing what he said, or what he had done with his hands, and then she just kind of exhaled his name again. I wish I could remember his exact words but all I can remember is he had this visual idea that human actions were a kind of continuum akin intertextual thought where by recursive influences continually invade and throw off the now, that we never leave the past pure and clear. I’m making it seem simplistic but frankly I didn’t follow it exactly. It was him trying to explain what you will discover I guess was his eidetic synesthetic conception of our consciousness of time and events and how it all is shaped a prior our description of it. I like to think he was becoming trapped in his hyper-visual blender… going a little insane.
10/23/2021
Neuroboros
aphantasia !! Oye, the opposite of Alek’s cognitive ability. Perhaps this condition is highly prevalent in the west? cf to the Chinese/Japanese(?). Do we have a way to monitor this? Has it been studied already?
How many individuals cannot see things in their mind based on education or upbringing? (nature/nurture, cf deaf communities).
Suppose that Dhyey besides suffering macular degeneration also is limited by aphantasia! And thus his attraction to Alek is beyond natural infatuation or love, more and above needing an assistant. He is drawn to him as a pilot fish is drawn to a predatory creature like the shark. He can become fearful of the loss of such an individual, jealous of Alek’s other friends,(?) loss of Alek’s companionship! Dhyey then is highly vulnerable to manipulation from Alek.
10/27
Christian: "It seems since we all differ greatly on so many health issues I may have to reconsider whether to designate either of you as having power over my living trust's health directive—in other words what to do if I am deemed permanently cognitively incapacitated—unless having read the revised directive you can agree to my terms. The documents have yet to be completed but you will be required to read and sign them once finished.”
A painful distance had developed between Christian and his son, but not so much with his daughter prior to his coma. Explore this history of conflict. Enter the son.
The children as a duality. One (the son) is myopic, the other (Chelsea) open minded.
The son knew from early on in his upbringing he would “follow in his father’s footsteps” and seek a science degree ( a hard science that is, as a pathologist, rather than a soft science such as was his father’s ) and therefore his single-minded ambition to achieve a better life as well as a respected profession.
11/16
St Andrews. bone a reliquary
11/28/2021
Alek’s father had been writing communist propaganda, which he had learned at the Comintern School, but soon became disillusioned and sought to deflect the demands of his managers(title?). He became suspect finally and just before they caught up with him he met his end by patricide.
More Neuroboros plot development introducing Oedipus relationship of Alek and his mother—his mother's disdain for Dhyey's sensual adoration and favoring of Alek plans to poison Dhyey but instead mistakenly poisons Christian. (thus the flip of one metaphorical nested hourglass—the mother/son)
Thus the new subtitle: Neuroboros, The Commonbook of Nested Hourglasses.
...and: Alek disappears because Dhyey has killed him (when, how? the European art trip etc? more on that and Dhyey's deteriorating eyesight )—because Alek might have exposed his past. (his past!?) Alek's mother wished to kill Dhyey because of the sexual implications of his fawning of Alek, her beloved son (the Oedipus complex factor in effect).
correction:
The icing on my book's set of character narratives is that Alek was a synesthete with an eidetic memory—the factor that initially drew the partially blind Dhyey to him, but also is the theme of Christian's fascination with his "missing" friend Alek via the notebook he was briefly in possession of (the "Commonbook of Nested Hourglasses") revealed in Christian's unfinished book, his daughter's finishing it and Christian's coma narrative.
December 31
While enticing, this is the most challenging narrative in the project. It is necessary that Christian recognize his shut in state whether he can hear his visitors or not, whether they can hear him, and how he non-physically expresses(?) it, much less perceives his conceptual space. The definition of perception is demanded here! (some rereading of M. Merleau-Ponty is required)
What then anchors him, what footholds shall he provide for himself in this condition? That is, how to maintain sanity and hope. Hope of return, desire for being heard!
Is isolation as an ethos sustainable? Must it breakdown, to chaos or self-dissolution?
"The following is Alek as described by Doug.
We had several classes together. Biology, psychology in undergrad and then at Johns Hopkins we were in the pre med program... so we had a lot of classes together. More than I can remember but we had this one ethics class that really stands out in my mind. I remember the professor reacting to something Alek said... we were outside on the grass that day and the discussion was on Aristotle, virtue and practice. Alek said something, while gesticulating with his hands, that seemed to stun the professor. After a few seconds she quietly said his name and just sat there looking at him, apparently processing what he said, or what he had done with his hands, and then she just kind of exhaled his name again. I wish I could remember his exact words but all I can remember is he had this visual idea that human actions were a kind of continuum akin intertextual thought where by recursive influences continually invade and throw off the now, that we never leave the past pure and clear. I’m making it seem simplistic but frankly I didn’t follow it exactly. It was him trying to explain what you will discover I guess was eidetic synesthetic conception of our consciousness of time and events and how it all is shaped a prior our description of it. I think he was becoming trapped in this hyper-visual blender... going a little insane I suppose... Oh I remember now, he called our cognitive continuum a nesting of hourglasses.”
12/27/21
thinking of having Alek appear lastly in France as an obscure poet…
1/10/22
Reduce Detective Napoleon Smith to no narration and brief appearances to tease the reader with gruesome murder & graffiti. No need to connect to Chelsea or Smith in therapy. His story is unnecessary.
The story ostensibly is about the disappearance of a grad student in the early eighties and the influence his life and an artifact have on those telling their stories.
1/13/22
I see the beginnings of consciousness (& language) as an either/or question.... left or right breast, for example (the visual field); the origin of consonant/vowel order (in terms of utterance—cf. mom or uma: english v japanese; as well as ape/gorilla voicings).
Is Humanism an elitist moral system?
1/13/22
the realization that causes Alek to abandon any idea that humanity is redeemable. it is not genetically possible! And therefore he retreats to boardgames (?)
https://news.mongabay.com/2014/12/tribal-violence-comes-naturally-to-chimpanzees/news.mongabay.com/2014/12/tribal…
this is the event, reported by Jane Goodall herself years ago, which gave me the concept of social crisis from predictable source of sustenance, gain, pleasure...memory too, in other words, leads to deception and social breakdown. War over natural resources then is an inevitable unavoidable evolutionary occurrence!
which harkens back to what I insist is misinterpretation of the warnings in ancient texts with regards to not eating "the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil"—in other words, once it is remembered where that fruit is & the path retraced, society both begins & ends!
Do I need some scenes of dialogue between Doug and Alek?
1/17/22
Physical reality recedes for Alek the way representation for Mondrian evaporated over time into pure form and then mere line and primary color. The color green disappeared altogether too in Alek's world. Nature as we are accustomed to it became unavailable to him and so he sought to have it in an un natural way, to dig for it, carve it out of living beings the way humanity sought the veins of precious metal deep in the earth.
1/19/22
Change Doug's name to Scottie and make him physics major
1/22/22
Du champs wife supposedly glued his chess pieces to the board.
1/28/22
How can I fit the exiles of Shanghai in this story. And the port near Hamburg which is not far from Gdańsk...
The Japanese reception (occupied China at the time—1939?)
What is it that Dhyey confesses to Christian? His real history and identity?
Does Dhyey kill Alek for discovering it?
letter addressed from P.o. box___; 138 Ward Rd; Shangahi, China
where was the French Concession where many Russian immigrants resided
Resentment toward Dhyey for how easily he made it to America (via Shanghai) & his associations w drug trade, while Alek's mother suffered an arduous journey to Gdańsk.
The Butcher of Warsaw's threat to Jews in all nations (stateless)
Alek blows glass, hourglasses filled with eyes and testicles in formaldehyde.
1/29/22
there are days that I believe what I have been doing is genius... and then there are days when I am filled with despair and just want to end it all.
2/4/22
Should I begin Chelsey's story narration as her adolescent period? a coming of age story?!
4/25/22
Dream:
two middle school age boys walking to school
smaller one has drained an account (so he claims) to give money to his companion who is somewhat distraught having just shared his family needs money for him to go to college but he doesn’t want to go anyway. younger(smaller) compassionate boy has balled up some bills in a bit of debris from under a bush and pretends to do magic in front of the other boy, hands the bundle to boy (younger boy tries to console him to go) but boy is floored but realizing the ruse demands the younger now return the money to his father whom he presumes he has stolen from knowing him to be dealing drugs? (because really it’s his fathers money which boy has stollen)
*brake*
new scene
On the way to school the younger boy becomes shamefully overwhelmed, can’t continue to school, runs off (home we assume)
Boy continues to school and while inside breaks down for the sheer emotion of it at his school locker (failing to open it) launches into a monologue of pure heart felt prose which a teacher? hears from inside a classroom.
*break*
new scene
younger boy on the way home is accosted by two separate menacing strangers, having just been picked up by his older brother (who has parked) and passed out having smoked something lethal in the family car and the boy has given up waiting for him to finish; we watch as the second deranged derelick attacks the boy and we are left to believe he has done him fatal harm.
*break*
new scene
Older boy having difficulty getting into locker leaves school in a rush to find his friend, feeling guilty he has abandoned/hurt him to catch up with him, finds the brother dead from overdose in the dad’s car, then failing to find friend goes to his home hoping he has reached it only to find father also unconscious inside. Wakes him up in a mad rush, father goes out with him having heard the broken story of the rolled up cash (realizing it is missing, he is angry but fearful for his son) and they begin to look for the boy.
break new scene
At school, the teacher is relating over lunch what he heard to another teacher. they are amused at the youthful attempts at literate pathos
*end*
4/25/22
Re the Street and the Frame:
Ultimately what I mean to show in these Panapsida chapters is that beginning with the moment of self awareness, the moment an adult(?) individual born into a numinous space now self-conscious discovers within the walls of a cave, or what have you, like an artist’s ground, a likeness appearing like an extension at the moving tactily engaged hands of this individual… and this likeness on the wall as a ground with the peripheral cave as the frame escapes such that the membrane of this corpus of creation expands like a bubble until far in the future of humanity past the Wrapped Reichstag, fenced landscapes and sandcastles such that the veritable sky becomes the frame at the last to join with the dome of heaven as ground and the horizon the first frame. This is the domain of the creator.
The infant however is in miniature the first bubble of self-awareness, creation as it traverses up the belly toward choice. Which breast. A duality which defines the first line between two points in the field of view, on the body as ground, and the arms of the mother as frame. The expanse is thus further buttressed and reaffirmed.
4/25/22
Perhaps human utterance is merely like a peptide, a bubble of incomplete meaning, a corpus that may burst prematurely, the last engulfed terminus of differentiation; a word is an organelle.
5/4/22
Alek's mother meets someone (in Eastern Berlin?)—need a way to get her to New York, but gain a profession/skill first (not immediately from Gdansk) Use Dr Poiger's Spring 2001 HSTEU434 compendium of xeroxed articles and chronologies for settings.
6/3/22
Dates as Chapter headings will solve the timeline ambiguity
10/25/22
"I have decided that as I write I will incorporate my notes [Chelsea's] thinking about trying to write from my father's perspective but obviously I cannot help but make this my own story now.”
3/31/23
Narrative should regress psychologically in the sense of progressive senescent loss of names and words for things ... until eventually he is tracing images in the ceiling. Indeed perhaps the two narratives of father and daughter should predominate both in length and significance. They are writing as one as it were anyway.
4/11
Neuroboros
Attribute the glass throwing event and clay dirt ball concussion event to Christian and have these events roll over and over like cinemascope for him as he lays there trapped in his mind
4/17
Panapsida
determine authority on a given practice by defining a ratio of pleasure and pain as a value for virtue for individual versus group(?) (why medical ethics is plagued by paradoxical conflict)(conflict of interests)
neuroboros
events requiring vengeance:
Avengers loss of fraternity (anonymity), an overwhelming transition to outsider, and "hauntings" (PTSD);
avengers anticipation;
confrontation w victim;
partial execution;
completion via chance or clever sleuthing;
justice served;
peripeteia/anagnorisis (passage from ignorance to knowledge)
— Salgādo, Aristotle in John Scaggs' Crime Fiction.
Neuroboros
Alek's mother performs in Forefathers' Eve;
Alek recalls waiting for her in the theater;
(?) Possible development for suspense and exodus (continued travel north to Gdańsk): Alek's father has followed them (?)
Finish reading Soviet Soft Power in Poland
6/25/2023
Neuroboros
There is a cultural quadrangulation at the outset—German, Polish, Russian and Jewish—that is the context for Alek's original plight. Violence, that of familial as well as criminal (Odessan) events and the post WWII crises in eastern/central Europe (nationalism, communism in particular) dominated Alek's adolescent life—with the exception of a fascination for the theater which for a time salved and fed his sensitive nature and bonded him further to his mother as they fled from the many dangers.
7/7/2023
My father was writing something. Couldn’t care less or rather at first I didn’t. I guess I care a little more now, having taken it on as my own. When my bother and I were adolescents we used to tell him to shut up on the bus. After his stroke he was locked in a coma. Lately I have nightmares of having cursed him… so I guess finally finishing this is my punishment or perhaps I should think of it as me telling him “I’m sorry… go ahead and talk now daddy.”
7/17
Neuroboros
"Surely he felt imprisoned and therefore I had to liberate him in any way I could"
See Nausea (Roquentin: "one shouldn't make something strange out of nothing")
diary as a mixture of accounts amounting to nothing(?)
also: the traducing of Alek as a plagiarist!
7/19
Neuroboros
Christian's written narrative about Alek's notebook is already written. His daughter takes it upon herself to comment on it…
8/10
Neuroboros-
Eventually Christian focuses on Chelsea in his “locked-in state” and laments what he believes was his neglect while conscious. Thus the novel takes on a tragic irony, he is prevented from expressing this love to his daughter! While Alek roams free to to… what?
Appositional themes:
hourglass shapes
sightedness/blindness
miopia/revelation
violence/creation
bitterness/forgiveness (Chelsea/Christian)
synesthesia / locked-in
…
Neuroboros
Alek's attitude re academia and his obsession toward hidden reality and meaning (outwardly mistook/diagnosed? for schizophrenia) transitions from jealous feelings of the blind Dhyey's condition (believing he would be that much closer to realization of his hidden reality if he were blind) to ... violent psychosis?
Doug’s (his librarian friend) words cause Alek to need to denounce or destroy the influence of Dhyey on his trajectory (?what does he want?). His disappearance ensues after failing to be rendered sexually victimized by Dhyey (through sexual abuse?) Ambiguous as to who initiates… how do they part?
What becomes of Alek then/where does he go/how does he sustain himself?
Glass blowing (hourglasses!)
We don’t need to explain how he gets there…
Narrations:
Chelsea
Christian before coma
Doug, Alek's librarian friend
Dialogues:
Chelsea to Christian
Dhyey to Christian
Christian "locked-in"
The problem of narrative closure becomes the readers problem (of ambiguity)?
Neuroboros Narration problems:
Primary narrative frame. Describe the “master plot”.
Embedded narrative(s)?
Voice: Christian, third person.
Chelsea, first person
Agency:
Dheyey☞ Alek☞ Doug☞ Christian☞ Chelsea☞reader’s vantage point (including interpretive gaps)
Define the actions. Constituent events. Chronology.
How to introduce Doug into the novel. Was he responsible for giving Alek’s notebook to Christian?
Conversation with Christian? Or Chelsea?
Who are the intradiegetic heterodiegetic narrators(?)
Who is the extradiegetic heterodiegetic narrator?
Novel must end with a dialog. Not an omniscient author/narrator!
8/11
Neuroboros
protagonists motivations
what was unique :
Dhyey acording to Christian
Alek according to Doug/Christian
Christian according to Chelsea—did her feelings change after reading his work?
Alek's mother supplementary origins
10/04/23
Neuroboros
What does Alek's mother gather up from home to trade or sell as they traverse West? Father's tobacco, a bottle of alcohol, lace doilies, candles... a playbill with her named as a performer in Dziady (Forefathers' Eve) by Adam Mickiewicz, and a copy of his Pan Tadeusz
10/27
There is a hum, the song of softening the hide of my soul with cooked human brain.
Sweet Medicine reminds me I am the stranger, I am the child of despoilers, not healers!
11/02
Our American history of deception and deregulatory greed.
articles of culpability:
1) The Same sort of CDC data manipulation (deviation from the analysis plan of a specific study: by DeStefano, Bhasin, Thompson, Yeargin-Allsopp; and Coleen Boyle) that William W. Thompson, PhD, exposed—is occurring today.
2) And the same censure by the CDC and the captured " front line" that parents of suddenly regressing children suffered and that Brian Hooker and others like Del Bigtree experienced covering the rising prevalence of autism (which was allegedly caused by the MMR trivalent vaccine at an early age of exposure)—occurs today with regard to the COVID mRNA injection on a global scale thanks to the collusion of the FDA, the World Health Organization, the CDC, the pharmaceutical industry and the main stream media.
3) These agencies of the US government have continued, since at least the Reagan administration, to protect proprietary programs over patient's rights of informed consent—this is their standard of care, the prioritization of allopathic medicine, as opposed to genuinely preserving patients' natural health!
4) Not seeing these as crimes against humanity is shameful willful blindness.
11/10/23
neuroboros
Alek as an elderly man visits Christian in hospital and encounters Christian's daughter. She doesn't realize at first who he is. Nor does he recognize her. Great scene to end novel on.
Chapter One
Brain surgeon Dr Robert Klein slowly approaches his patient’s daughter and extends a soft hand to her.
“Chelsea?”
“Yes…”
“So… your father is stable for now…”
Chelsea begins to sob once again, and can barely speak. “Can I see him?”
“Well, yes, but not just yet. We haven’t moved him yet from surgery. But soon…we’ll let you know.”
Chelsea slumps back into her chair.
“He was very fortunate… you know, to have collapsed here on campus. That by itself is why he is still alive Chelsea.” He pauses a moment to gauge her response, her readiness for more detailed information. “I must tell you however… it is very unlikely he will regain consciousness… at least not as we may discern.”
Chelsea looks up at him with tears still streaming. “What do you mean?”
“It appears he may have had a serious form of stroke you see… what we call a Basilar Artery Occlusion… meaning that the upper portions of his brain may not have been affected dramatically… but most certainly he is paralyzed from the brain stem down.” Dr Klein is about to put his hand on her shoulder but stops as she stands up.
“Wait, so… you are saying his mind is alive but he can’t communicate? I want to see him please!”
“Yes, but no… hang on, I totally understand⏤we can’t know for certain what will happen but just give us an hour or so okay. We’ll have him in a private room where you can stay as long as you like, okay.” Chelsea looks at him through glistening eyes and after a moment of gaining composure nods an okay. “Should we expect any other visitors?” he asks.
Chelsea shakes her head. “No, just me today.”
Chelsea’s Intro
When I dream he speaks to me. Maybe that’s why it’s still such a disappointment that when I visit him he does not. He’s been in a coma since his stroke a few months ago, they say it’s locked-in-syndrome, so I continue to believe he can hear me, see me, when I talk to him. I tell him about my day, about how the sun feels when I draw the curtains open, all the while thinking maybe he will literally be moved to join me at the window. As I rotate the small cacti on the window sill I utter things I feel in my heart will draw him out. Things I can visualize him responding to in reality, or rather a better reality.
I tell him too that I haven’t given up finishing his book for him and not to worry. I read a few passages each time I visit praying this if anything will awaken him. He’s such a perfectionist, and so… so not like this… prostrate.
For as long as I can remember father had been working on what I thought was a paper as he called them. This latest however was a book, this book, the book I am attempting to finish for him. The more I delve into it though it becomes more and more my own story I suppose… so call it a memoir then. And I pray he’ll forgive me for that. Strange though, how this field of psychology⏤psychiatry resembles mine in a way. I’ve been a firefighter and an EMT after that for more than fifteen years now. Saving people and property from devastation isn’t entirely like being a therapist but you get the idea. It’s a far more dangerous profession for one thing but I imagine failure might be just as painful for the therapist⏤to learn for example of a suicide of a client⏤as it is for us to discover that someone has succumbed to smoke inhalation or worse, burned alive. Whether immediately at the site or afterwards, we are keenly aware of the immediacy, the results of our actions. What could I have done differently or faster? Might my father too harbor as he lay there, perhaps still cogent, the memories of failed treatments, of lost lives? I can’t even imagine what that would be like, sealed in an interminable PTSD of his own without the succor of sharing his torment, nor the release of tears… thus… I cry for him… often.
As an adolescent my tears were an entirely different sort of tears though for he was always so busy, and sometimes cruelly so. Don’t get me wrong, he said he loved us quite a bit so we got the required hugs after meals or before bedtime, but in between⏤in between, something was wrong, missing. It was as if he needed more. Something to fill the gap in his selfish esteem. More than us. More than mother. More of something. So, I suppose you could say his book provided that something more. Something to take him elsewhere. On occasion he would say things that implied he resented his domesticity, and by implication… us. We all could tell he grew weary of mother but my brothers and I were all on our own by the time their marriage was finally dissolved so we were spared the ultimate alienation…me not so much, perhaps because I was the youngest. It hurt. Really hurt.
Years ago when I told father I had passed my CPAT and about the new friends I’d made through cross fit training it took him more than a week to question me more about it, to show sincere interest. He eventually did come around to a sustained interest when I was literally saving lives. I just didn’t know then though what had really gotten its hooks into him, what he’d been obsessing over, a cohort’s infernal notebook, the origin of his book. I feel a bit like the first narrator in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, listening to Marlowe dredge up dark discovery from under the canopy of a frightful jungle, to what end for you will I finally attempt to fathom is uncertain. But today as I write I am forebodingly aware that my father continues to wander alone in a much darker place, an elsewhere he hadn’t anticipated.
***
So, again, call this a memoir if you like, me trying to circle back to what might have gotten under his skin, and thus onto my laptop⏤this thought in itself would amuse him given his obsession with the uroboros. And you may be wondering what on earth inspires a first responder to write a book, much less what gives her the authority to craft it. Well, don’t get your hopes up on that front but I have been keeping a diary my whole life. I even intended as an adolescent to be a writer, but, you know, like they say: Life happens.
Okay, so how to do this then… and why.
Sorry if you’re confused but his self-absorbed narrative may just be too much for me to slog through. It’s not boring, no, rather while I am determined to finish it, his voice is in my head, distorted though like a Beta fish in too small a bowl. And every time I get in there with him it’s a fight. I guess I need to close the book as it were, his book maybe, seal off this den along with all the sour and cloudy memories. For example I can barely get passed the lingering aura of his breath…
As a first responder, like a news reporter, I am trained to lead with the big stuff and not procrastinate. So? The beginning?
11/12
Neuroboros
Douglas revised 12:11
Douglas
Alek as described by Doug.
We had several classes together. Biology, psychology in undergrad and then at Johns Hopkins we were in the pre med program… so we had a lot of classes together. More than I can remember but we had this one ethics class that really stands out in my mind. I remember the professor reacting to something Alek said… we were outside on the grass that day and the discussion was on Aristotle, virtue and practice. Alek said something, while gesticulating with his hands, that seemed to stun the professor. After a few seconds she quietly said his name and just sat there looking at him, apparently processing what he said, or what he had done with his hands, and then she just kind of exhaled his name again. I wish I could remember his exact words but all I can remember is he had this visual idea that human actions were a kind of continuum akin intertextual thought where by recursive influences continually invade and throw off the now, that we never leave the past pure and clear. I’m making it seem simplistic but frankly I didn’t follow it exactly. It was him trying to explain what you will discover was his eidetic, synesthetic awareness of our collective construct of time from it’s original shape to immediate events and that he imagined it was akin the ever involuting and pervasive around us as the gravitational waves that comprise dark matter, that this mother of all meristems was the missing force physicists were longing to visualize and define mathematically . I think he was trapped … long before his present condition…
12/9/2023
Neuroboros
the gradual refining power of individual consciousness and its final years of regressing certitude is surely a kind gentler natural event than we realize. Imagine how traumatic it would be if this drawn out neuroohysiological coming-to-be were vivid from start to end—A snapping fully open of the mind's shutters at the start on a bright sunny day and then the universal anticipation of the collapse of the sun to end it all!
But perhaps an unanticipated end would be the kindest event of all... an absence of all eventfullness, not even a mouthed whimper nor silhouette of pain...
to live in numinous awe of being in earthly paradise... that would be a dream come true.
12/9/2023
Neuroboros
so the self-involvement idea in the story of Neuroboros is the contrast between two characters: one who in a coma thinking about almost having grasped a visual depiction of self consciousness contrasted with another character Alec's actual depiction of being as a mere ideation of reciprocal visual reality.
5/18
Neuroboros
Alek's brain as a stroboscope
Dhyey, after discovery of Alex's gift of synesthesia, too aggressively seeks to study him which eventually annoys Alec and thus animosity and his disappearance. Alek's mother relates to Dhyey diagnoses of aphasia following knocked unconscious.
4/20/24
Alek has an astounding level of synesthesia which Dhyey sought to investigate. Alek however was reluctant to volunteer
5/14
Alek's mother collects small glass window panes and trades them with a family of gypsies along her route north to Gdansk.
Caravans of families in the kumpania in separate routs
Hard top caravans w narrow glass windows.
Traveling Polish gypsies left signs at crossroads called shpera
5/25
You might think a white wall is an invitation to paint...
However it can become only a sliver of what once was, how painfully emptied you are, how little beyond grunts you have to offer anymore.
A bright room is a dark place...
Books lining the wall are a parapet against ignorance, a horizon of hope. Every book is a conversation starter!
Otherwise an empty room is a dungeon no matter how much sun gets in.
8/8/24
You may recall I once wrote about how Erasmus was responsible for turning Pandora’s jar into a box and artists ever since then have had their way with that box.
It is not surprising that artists have played a rather large part in fashioning for us a literal picture of many significant icons described in historical literature, including the bible.
Christ’s “crown of thorns” for example is particularly challenging given even during Jesus’s time there was no visual representation from which to secure an identification of the exact species of thorny plant the Romans placed upon Jesus’ head.; thus we find ourselves having to be satisfied with the thorns and thistles artists have chosen to depict over the centuries.
Turning to another literary problem I refer to Plato’s Critias wherein he provides a brief and unfinished(!) account of the fabled city of Atlantis. Critias is quoted in the dialog saying:
“ all statements made by any of us are, of course, bound to be an affair of imagery and picturing[….]” and here after Atlantis’ fate must rest within our imagination for how “to depict human life impressively is hard” where it is couched in the “celestial and divine.”
Who else but our gifted progenitors might take up the task of crowning Christ with the thorniest of thorns or describing a city lost to indescribable oceanic cataclysm.
Strangely, it may be the case that today science armed with a technologically celestial view is close capturing what indeed happened to the ancient civilization of Atlantis; but in the mean time artists again will continue to visualize it for us.
8/21/24
Yet, it was the nature of being constrained to sedentary life that made open territory appear like an infusion of contagious drug like freedom—and the nomadic existence of indigenous culture appeared to be a wasteful life. The establishment of settlements … merely continued the constraints of their previous wall-latticed territory. Their destiny after surviving the Atlantic was not so much manifest by will or ordained by a Christian god but rather to meet another kind of neighbor’s wall, the undeniable forbiddance.preordained by nature the community of nations must submit to, the oceans. (a note from reading White Trash)
The Blackened Plume of the Golden Flower, a paper on Dhyey’s desk.
8/22
The original epic poem I wrote was meant to be read as if it were latin (sans breaks, punctuation or Capitals) but further the morphems often acted like round-abouts, having multiple symbolic meanings, not just as syntactical digressions but rather like couplings between railway cars—allowing the reader to choose what meanings might be transported .
[define/reveal which motive (5 classes of motivation)
critical decisions of protagonists
forensic discovery
organization
location
nature of dismemberment
psychopathy] from Sue Black et al. "Criminal Dismemberment"
draft story outline and time line;
Alek
Dhyey
Christian
Chelsea
Doug - "Alek's type on the spectrum of synesthesia is beyond but incorporates the more typical groups. He doesn't merely associate colors with letters or sounds and so on... he's beyond that. He perceives—one might say literally sees material shapes in the events that occur around him. And these shapes combine to form a vast 4 dimensional ocean of concepts. I think it's as if he is afflicted with the ghosts of human history... He doesn't control it. He says it's not his ideation. He did not make it as if it were a field map for battles. It is at war with him like a general placing him where he needs to be, not just to survive, or succumb to it but... to surface and sail to victory... or home. He is bound like Ulyses was forced to bear witness to the sirens."
including:
police
coroner/ pathologist
family
media
promeristematusprimus
promeristematusmater
9/8/24
"It is interesting to note Freud was disinclined to speak about Americans in his Civilization and its Discontents but presaged the thought of their predicament with a coinage of phrase the psychological poverty of groups.
What do you think Christian?"
All the "wars" in other nations' territories where we have been and are still engaged in... we created the conditions for. Ssk yourself do you see any foreign soldiers on our streets? Even if you consider drugs gangs or cyber attacks as "wars" we brought the violence everywhere around the world... and their vengeful suffering is heading this way.
peace is a dream
9/24
Shall Alek be seeking his twin in Europe? Their synesthetic differences?
Shall this sister even exist—might Alek have imagined her?
Difference in perceived cultural artifacts between the twins due to separate early childhood environments.
Define the end of their story (relationship imagined or real) and work towards that.
Christian writes in a coma?
“Am I Roma…a city…within a wall…
am I aroused? or amused?
I didn’t answer this call.
such a place was this abused
by procureur, tyrant and pall.
I wait to waken or spy the ruse.”
9/26
Neuroboros
"pictures of realty" indeed.
The reader of Neuroboros is told this is presumably what Alek attempted — to create a visual epistemology. His personal success or failure in this is left for the reader to distill from layers of psychological intrigue and multiple narrators.
Oscilating scheme between body of water, body of land; between the sand and the hourglass... these must come forward in the story, not just in Alek's words. Is he escaping for example via train or ocean vessel?
That language is a dangerous game or rather defines in the least impending fatality. There is no such thing as infinity, only uncertainty; nor is "future" a "reality"! It evaporates the moment a question is posed. You can not enumerate nor qualify void. (this puzzle is depicted in the hourglass images) And the Commonbook in the subtitle is a suggestion that like the Book of Thoth for example his belief and ritual offerings are an attempt to lay down what would be a proper attititude (law?) of respect, reverence and even awe or submission toward the numinous space that envelopes all the seen—that which is behind even what we call "nature." In this Alek approaches a shamanic posturing.
Jung and mandallas; subconscience and the cave
Nested hierarchies
Bk of Thoth "chamber of Darkness"
Neuroboros
Shall Alek be seeking his twin in Europe? Their synesthetic differences?
Shall this sister even exist—might Alek have imagined her?
Gender identity crisis?
Difference in perceived cultural artifacts between existing? twins due to separate early childhood environments.
Define the end of their story (relationship imagined or real) and work towards that.
9/27
Neuroboros
re influence of Leibnitz (according to Alek's friend Douglas)
see The Yale Leibnitz
"only geometry" he wrote in 1676 " can provide a thread for the Labyrinth of the Composition of the Continuum, of maximum and minimum, and unassignable and the infinite, and no one will arrive at a truly solid metaphysics who has not passed through that labyrinth".
[Leibnitz planned an Encyclopedic work, of which 2 were the Theodicy (on free will and origin of evil) but never he accomplished the second Labyrinth of the Continuum on time place motion atoms the indivisible and the infinite.]
{...substance and motion flicker together as a wave and as for Leibnitz's continuum neither is interrupted as such by "rests" but rather together infinitely flicker between substance and motion, neither perceptibly separate but advance as wave of particulars. Of course this not so (Doug explains Alek
10/6
Neuroboros
Christian's narrative.
He thinks he's having an out of body experience... in shock until awareness of prone position perception (more shock?) and voices... but he can't see
The Plenum and the Vacuum.
{Id as plenum and "world" as a vacuum} ?
prima porta (first doorway) from arch of aquaduct to Rome like grafitti tags of street gangs porta fine (last doorway) or portae inferi ( the power of hell)
What is true or real if I cannot test it, compare it to a something else... or rather just courses on like chaos?
Chelsea: You'rve got me talkin to you now... to myself. If I do it enough maybe you'll answer. I could beat on your chest? You hear me don't you? Answer me!
Dad? You wouldn't pretend would you? Make like you can't hear me... like when you would make me wait at your office door... wait for me to go away?
I won't give up you know.
Chelsea's brothers call Israel an "Orphan State"
Is Doug actually Alek?
The public is afflicted with cognitive dissonance where trust in many professions is concerned. Traditionally we want to trust but are leery of sales people, services and auto mechanics. Today the chapter incorporates much more grave fears than the nuisance of car breakdowns—we have been accustomed to trust our family doctors. Yet since the onset of COVID, the isolation, mandates and worse the purging of professionals from the ranks of trusted healthcare providers we find the fabric of cognition being torn apart and families as well in crisis of disbelief and in dire need of someone to turn to for truth. We are whipped about in a torrent of warring public figures and alarum. Desparate for equilibrium some clasp firmly to traditional authorities while others forge ahead against what they perceive is a tainted inveterate orthodoxy.
A woeful uncivilzed plateau ensues as many an accustomed authority figure is exiled from level headed discourse.
What shall a child do when he or she discovers the father has lied or worse is a crook? Or a partner's criminal past resurfaces to ruin a joint venture.
Over time we might succumb to denial or alternatively we might become bitter and unreliable ourselves. Is this where we are today? Is this what had become of the so-called civilized world we live in—a treacherous sea of unbelievable facts and toothless theories? Are we to drown in a popular disdain of evolving science? There is still so much to learn.
Now is not the time to claim anything is settled.
Neuroboros
Chistian's thought pattrn should shift overtime by tenses and lessening confidence:
start with present;
then past;
then present perfect;
and lastly past perfect (questioningly)
see, saw, have seen, had I seen
Gregory in an email to Christian:
Hi Christian,
I know we had hoped to get together and talk about Alec I thought perhaps I would send you an email since I'm a bit strapped for finding time to travel this month and actually I think I might be able to cover more detail this way anyway so here it is.
Christian's internal dialog:
he purposefully constructs it like a memoir to "keep his mind fresh" in case he is freed from his locked in prison.
Neuroboros: The Commonbook of Houglasses
The novel has four narrators one of which is in hospital silenced by stroke and locked-in syndrome.
The others are Chelsea, his daughter;
Dhyey, a retired psychiatrist colleague and friend of the locked in Christian;
Alek, who Christian replaced at their university, and had gone missing;
and Douglas whom Christian had corresponded with (about Alek and a notebook in Christian's possession) before his stroke.
So, the mystery is who is Alek, where did he go, and how does this "commonbook of houglasses" fit in the story?
The contrasting themes are:
Alek's accelerated consciousness and perception ( he is described as having synesthesia ) and the perceptions of the other protagonists that Christian is in a full vegetative state unaware he is in a hyper selfconscious narrow productive state (he resolves to begin a memoir while locked in while at the same time Chelsea resolves to finish what Christian had begun writing about Alek and the notebook and at times during visits with him voices what she discovers from talking with Douglass who had been in touch with Christian prior to Christian's stroke.
So in a sense, like an hourglass, the narrative pours from narrator to narrator. The notebook itself according to Alek’s intention describes the domain of reality as a vast pouring through portals to new spaces.
Neuroboros
prologue
It is a somewhat silent psychotic rant our protagonist is engaged in.
Who is his anger directed at? Himself?
What does he know that we don’t?
Where is he while enduring this writhing monologue?
Pacing in a broad unoccupied space with someone listening nearby his rant begins to surface…
He is knotted up and on fire with rage. Reeling around to look at the hooded figure kneeling on the flood damaged parquet floor Alek is audibly seething and fairly spitting as he talks.
“You do not know me… but you will remember me… because I want you to know the suffering… the pain you caused someone I care about. I want it deep, deep in your skull… so deep you cry out as it moves like a ravenous brain devouring parasite.”
He pauses a moment noticing an apparent rush of distant footsteps on concrete, and the brief faint flicker of passing street light shadows… then continues, his eyes and face glistening from the tears and sweat of his recent exertion.
“Oh dear… does it hurt,” he asks the object of his wrath, and then strikes him again with even more ferocity. “How about THAT? Is that better… or worse? What was that? You don’t know? Of course you don’t… you fucking greedy—Oh hell with it,” he shouts and continues to pummel the man into unconsciousness.
prologue ends
10/30
Neuroboros
Chelsea finds both the notebook and Christian's notes about it and Alek.
10/23
Neuroboros
What if Chelsea knows enough mycology that she recognizes a reference in the hourglasses notebook to Cryptococcus gattii the nesting world/body graphic as graffiti.
How ridiculous would it be to have this recent of a discovery be on her radar? Douglas firs.
Sci fi direction: Alek manages somehow to grow enough mycotoxin to drop spores of this yeast by drone into the air intake of a corporate air conditioning system. this would not be suspect since it can take months to be symptomatic
***
reading William Sidis The Animate and the Inanimate
His reversible universe very much recalls to my mind what I visualized at CCS in 1982(?)in a frantic caffeine driven series of drawings.
Refer to Clerk-Maxwell’s “sorting demon” and/or Lord Kelvin suggesting that “living organisms[…]act the part of Clerk-Maxwell’s sorting demons [reversing the second law of thermodynamics]” (Sidis)
Have the above appear in Alek’s notes as described by Douglas.
Alek uses gesticulation to enact the "sorting demon" as the living space of return (the flipping hourglass which he calls his sorting demon). He shakes it like a rattle or percussion instrument.
***
“I just don’t understand why you are doing this. Dad’s not well and you know that
“He’s not ill David!”
Just look at him... it’s obvious… come on Cece…
“He is finally focusing on something productive instead of thinking about mom or watching fucking news coverage!”
“I think you’re in denial and that’s not helping him either. Seriously, he doesn’t need to relive whatever it is you’re finding there!” David is pointing at the …Hourglasses notebook. “Honestly, that notebook won’t help him recover. It’s nothing but manic thoughts and drawings…what do you see in it anyway?”
10/24
Neuroboros
My scaling schematic of Langer's Individuation / Involvement philosophy is a spiral (like sand in an hourglass) which symbolizes too a Theorem (hypothetical proof in calculus re integration is the reverse of differentiation)
10/24
Neuroboros
Do I need to give Alek a setting other than that of his travels with his mother in Europe?
A relationship, and dialog with a girl friend?
How does Alek’s violent experience develop in contemporary time?
10/24
Neuroboros
Need to construct how and when Chelsea finds both the notebook and Christian's notes about it and Alek.
10/24
Neuroboros
Find the 20 entrances to Central Park and their names
"Strangers" entrance... what entrance did the NYPD find the head?
10/24
Neuroboros
Need to develop the plagiarism original accusation and place subplot in time
Also, the pagination at halfway point should stop but then resume in oposite direction from the back of the book so that the story ends in the middle.
Neuroboros
Find the 20 entrances to Central Park and their names
"Strangers" entrance... what entrance did the NYPD find the head?
11/06/2024
Neuroboros
Cordus and ether
a possible fixation for Alek
chloroform → hepatic dysfunction
11/08/2024
Neuroboros
It may seem as though I have callously hurried and skipped over important events that led up to this story about father and Alek; but going back further to mother’s decline and death are too much for me right now, even though witnessing her suffering had a lot to do with father’s withdrawal as a parent from our early childhood and more recently his revitalizing obsession with Alek. Perhaps I will manage to share all that when I delve into Gisela’s fundamental part in this undertaking.
Neuroboros
Christian used to tell stories to the children. The stories became more chaotic, abruptly ended shared times. And after her passing they were sadly fewer and far between until they were reserved for anniversaries of her death.
This then is a large theme—Chelsea's subconscious(?) carrying forward the story telling since her father now is tragically unavailable.
neuroboros
Stories - recursiveness - admixture - this is the hourglass theme - the limit of human imagination.
Thus Alek's synesthesia is a full on admixture of natural history as a primal narrative, the mother meristem as Alek calls it.
neuroboros
writing stories as counterintuitive to telling stories
Neuroboros
David: "what are you doing?"
Chelsea: “i'm moving into my old bedroom
“Why?”
I already asked dad about it and he said it was OK he knew that I needed —
But why? So your rent is going up but you can still afford it can't you?
That's not why I'm moving in.
David closes the refrigerator.
Chelsea continues. "look are you gonna help me or not? I don't have that much stuff.
It's — it's not a problem. I mean it's just bad timing.
Chelsea rolls her eyes and is about to walk away. And thinking about her pregnancy nearly tells him that she is on maternity leave.
“I'll help you okay. Just not right now.
“Great thank you David! So when? I need to get out this weekend.
Neuroboros
Chelsea ruminates as she revisits her fireplace memories… in her father’s study! ( the comfort aspect of being near her father in this way but remembering him talking about being methodical, life as a science of building upon what we know, and that knowledge starts as a visual accumulation, and that language can muddy up what we’ve learned. She thinks about the life in her and wanting to preserve her child’s spirit of adventure, how to let go (anatomical hourglass theme into uroboros theme of mother/parent as a regenerative cycle, nurturing yet controlling, stiffling of a child’s desire for independence.)
This ultimately is the psychological/“neuroboros” meaning of the story as she is currently on maternity leave from the firehouse.
11/13
The tree has for too long been an asterisk to after thoughts and parentheticals, to excuses for aggression or —while all along the tree itself stands ignored, not revered or cared for.
11/17
Neuroboros
words and objects disappearing from Christian's memory—how to describe this
11/19
neuroboros
Who is Alek?
pchap 19 Chomsky clause alias chap2 emailed to me today should encorporate the Doug chap on Alek
12/17
Neuroboros
Can Alek become a Jesuit to get off the grid
1/7/2025
Neuroboros
just realized how significant is the actual chronological notes I'm compiling—for my Neuroboros novel which by themselves is a book—a notebook as it were, and that Chelsea discovers, realizes reading her father's notes about the book of hourglasses, that the notes ARE his book of Hourglasses akin published unfinished works like Passao's the Book of Disquiet and other books which are clippings and quotes and miscellaneous writings by the authors like Robert Walser or Walter Benjamin
D as a doctor of psychiatry and is a Freudian;
Christian is a PhD in Philosophy and psychology and is a Jungian
1/26/2025
Neuroboros
Re work the story to focus on Chelsea and brothers faced with the question of determining death and donation of of their comatose father's organs. (Halakhah! Contrast with Alek’s notebook question: “Is any form of population control an intervention? Genocide cannot be justified as an intervention… however if such mass culling does not discriminate, favoring no subset of a species over another, can it be justified if such control is on behalf of preventing a larger threat of extinction? Who has such authority and power to condemn to death a cross section of earth’s population to save humanity? How to implement such a diabolical event without discovery or recourse?” Ilustrate with a few paradigm schematics on exploring ordinary v extraordinary killing.
Who does Alek become that he would think of such things? ( remembering to high light his synesthesia and near photographic memory as potentially propelling him to greater professional involvements)
He does not vanish from our story, nor is he sought after as a killer, though indeed he has killed(?)... and thus he knows he is capable of partaking in and/or setting into motion a "solution" the conception of which he eventually is partly respondible for as a ______{CEO billionaire, slash glass-blowing artist?}
What ordinary profession has he achieved though?
The story now is a juxtaposition of several hourglass shaped consciousness conundrums with the comotose Christian's family halakhah predicament overlaying Alek's population/intervention solution question. {saving one life through the choice to let another individual die versus the extreme measures of intentional global population interventions}
2/3/25
Neuroboros
Chelsea:
“I am the middle child between two brothers. Not sure if that predisposes me to any flaws of behavior or conscience but I know that I learned how to manipulate my parents because of my older brother and fawned over the younger one. Is that a character flaw? My mother thought so… or rather caught me at it, many times I think, mostly because Mark was clever enough to entrap my lies after which of course I would punish him further all the while Davie was entertained by it. Mother was very fastidious so believe me I made good use of crumbs and such strewn everywhere Mark had been. I had fortuitous timing too. While he sought to retaliate in kind I once saw to it mother would catch him doing so.
We eventually grew out of this child-like sibling war but sadly it did drive a wedge of subtle distrust between us, such that we each had a habit of disguising our vices and hiding our contraband oddly enough in places only the other might discover thus increasing their inevitable exposure. Only college put an end to our
2/9
Neuroboros
aporia? (the panapsida of my poetry turns like this)…
Chelsea nurtures the reawakening of her father’s memories—but are they revisions, corrections, undoings of wrongs? The moments a paused life skewed into fiction is rewritten… and truth renewed!
Possibility: Christian wronged Alek!
Christian awakens from his coma with a remembered purpose—to find and restore Alek’s reputation. Christian was the student that set in motion the plagiarism lie that ultimately turned Alek into a killer. Thus explaining why/how Christian has Alek’s notebook. Now the purpose for the character of Christian is two-fold: to write his wrong but to discover what became of Alek, a killer.
scene: (Seeing, groggily, his daughter, Chelsea):
“where am I? Who are you?… who am I?”
2/9
A synopsis of my novel Neuroboros
The story begins from the perspective of Chelsea, the daughter of a man who has gone into coma with locked in syndrome. She discovers some of his writings as she’s learning to adjust to his condition. She discovers an enigmatic notebook and his writings about the notebook, and this transitions into her memoir of her father trying to finish what Chelsea eventually calls the “Common Book of Hourglasses” from what he started writing and at some point before she actually finishes this Christian awakens from his coma, and she then begins the process of helping to nurture his memory back during which it is discovered that he has to right a wrong and the wrong is that he is the one that accused Alek of plagiarism (Alek being The young man whose notebook he has and whose position at the university Christian took over). We are told that Alek turned upon someone (killed) years ago whom he thought was the person responsible for his ruined reputation.
The resolution is forthcoming.
There is no closure as such. the title embedded in the story (common book of HOURGLASSES) hints at this problem.
2/11
Neuroboros
The original notebook was Alek's which Christian had obtained (by stealth before Alek disappeared).
Christian had written notes himself intending to write an intrigue about Alek based upon what he extrapolates from the notebook. Chelsea knew of her father's intentions but innitially had only Christian's notes, not a draft, rough or finished.
Chelsea finds a US posted correspondence from Douglas (a university friend of both Alek and Christian) which illuminates the real (suspected) reason for Alek’s disappearance.
All the while her brothers interrogate her about her involvement, especially after Christian awakens and slowly recovers.
Find the croquet dance schematic.
Christian’s visions from his locked in memory should include a scrambled mental “slide-show” of Alek’s panapsida paradigms
2/11/2025
Neuroboros
Find the croquet dance schematic.
Christian’s visions from his locked in memory should include a scrambled mental “slide-show” of Alek’s panapsida paradigms
Neuroboros
a-helix and b-sheet
2/16
Neuroboros.
“Leave him alone!”
find MONKEYMAN story.
First scene must be a tormenting of a young Alek by school mates.
Reactions to his visual abilities, ostensibly, and mistaken for plagiarism.
Alec then endeavors to become a ghost.
Ghost oneself: “Must erase my entire intellectual and creative footprint.”
2/23
What do you do when you are financially and emotionally dependent upon family that use your domestic and artistic eccentricities but especially your acute awareness of our politically and proprietarily indoctrinated medical community and social injustices like censorship gaslighting to bolster their belief that you are “mentally ill” and “paranoid”? How do you defend yourself against this?
Call out their own ignorance or denial? No. All defensive acts, no matter how civil or logical, will merely give them further justification to marginalize you… to place the “choice” of alienation upon you.
Shaming is no defense against the deep history of cultural indoctrination.
Like the layers of pressure above a mine.
The canary has no audience in the trees.
Goblins are irresolute canaries.
2/24
Neuroboros
Chelsie: Dad, I just don’t get what you see in him…
Christian: It’s not about what I see Chelsie… it’s about what he sees!
Chelsie: Well… what is that exactly?
Christian: (sighs, exasperated)… What we can’t see.
Chelsea: Right, so let him do it.
Christian: What?
Chelsea: This. That. (Pointing). Put it into words…. a story? Your character study or whatever—from what I can see dissolves into chaos, nonsense. It’s inane.
Christian: He puts it the only way he knew how… how I’m trying to put it.
Chelsea: Ah... I see. So he’s schizophrenic? Is that it?
Christian: (shakes his head.) No. He’s a synesthete—how else can I illustrate that?
Chelsea: A what? Right. So you’re trying to see through his eyes?… look, it’s making me crazy just thinking about that, what it’s doing to you… to us. I’m sorry. I can’t help you with this anymore. (She pauses a moment) Make it a children’s book then. You were always a good story teller. Just tell it like a dad.
Christian: (Slowly and nearly whispered.). I’m sorry too.
Alek is the "voyant-visible"
(The infants gaze is the nearest thing to metaphysical enlightenment)
Read Virgil's Aeneid and reread Merleau-Ponty.
2/25
Neuroboros
Christian waking from coma in Alek’s life (?)
Does he take a switch in reality to become Alek?
Is Alek real? Or is he in Christian
Explains the lack of Alek’s presence.
3/1/2025
Neuroboros
Avoid gay partners as confidentes in plot as cliche.
Was Alek onto something in his academic study or uncanily repeting something published.
Avoid algorithm or fibonacci tech content... instead, the bubble concept (Satan, or Jung's cave origin of subconscious)
If the neuroboros is to become independent of known human history:
"You will want this chronicle to hold fast to a calendar, the town to logitude and lattitude, the protagonists to earn your respect or succumb to what you might define as debauchery... never the less you will find no familiarity annalogous to fable or kingdom. There is no god or spell here... there is however, perhaps, a tragic cup bearer and her perdurable storage jar.”
3/3/2025
Neuroboros.
Alek
“Im not a medium
Im a seer, there's a difference”
Back story: Alek visited (confronted) Christian? Shoves him. This explains Christian's fall(?) initial brain injury(?)
Alek's location, employed as (?); ruined reputation motivation for attacking Christian.
Christian's plagerism accusation(?) and injury as a link to death of student Alek previously murdered (mistaken for plag accuser?) Doug tells Christian (still in coma) about the murdered colleague.
Also Doug reveals to Christian he has coincidently run into Alek (while C still in coma)
Doug does not know Alek visited C?
Doug is dismissive towards Christian writing fiction. “You’re not a writer!”
“This story keeps me alive.”
3/13/2025
Neuroboros
Alek’s insomnia as described by Doug: he can’t keep his eyes closed for long without hearing and seeing the reality he’s experienced, the day to day memories buried beneath the constantly involuting overlay of synesthesia, shapes like chemical waves in a beaker.
Alek’s insomnia as described by Doug: he can’t keep his eyes closed for long without hearing and seeing the reality he’s experienced, the day to day memories buried beneath the constantly involuting overlay of synesthesia, shapes like chemical waves in a beaker.
3/19
A synopsis of my novel Neuroboros
The story begins from the perspective of Chelsea, the daughter of a man who has gone into coma with locked in syndrome. She discovers some of his writings as she’s learning to adjust to his condition (and her own—bipolar treatment). She discovers an enigmatic notebook and her father's writings about the notebook, and this transitions into her memoir of her father trying to finish what Chelsea eventually calls the “Common Book of Hourglasses” from what he started writing and at some point before she actually finishes this Christian awakens from his coma, and she then begins the process of helping to nurture his memory back during which it is discovered that he wishes to right a wrong and the wrong is that he is the one that accused Alek, the synesthete, of plagiarism (Alek being The young man whose notebook Christian has and whose position at the university Christian took over). We are told that Alek turned upon someone (killed) years ago whom he thought was the person responsible for his ruined reputation.
The resolution is forthcoming... for Chelsea too must command the opposing terminal sides of her psyche
There is no closure as such. the title embedded in the story (common book of HOURGLASSES) hints at this problem of oscillation, and all unending passage including between the seen and the imagined.
While Christian desires to reach and make amends with Alek,
Chelsea is determined to make amends with herself—and reframe her childhood (by forgiving her father's detachment via finding a compassionate voice for a memoir)
Anyway, that passage passage extracted From Neuroboros (page in Alek's commonbook of hourglasses)…
"1)
Allometry itself is an evolving "law" taking shape like an expanding bubble of conscription... from numinous womb.
(cave's internal wall is consciousness, an invitro framed canvas which later in contemporary human history occupies then envelopes like a phage the museum...
2)...public gallery at once then occupies and fertilizes the ovulating earth's surface which in turn gives birth again a supreme display of forms, wherefrom each animate form scaling law resumes anew (ontogenically-phylogenically)."
is from my novel. The character was diagnosed with synesthesia. But as a fictional device he thinks in shapes including animated concepts ... his "notebook" is crammed with schematic figures with occassional text like the one above, and so much which appears as mixed metaphor that his acquaintences think he's merely schizophrenic—because he doesn't verbalize well for them what he can see and they cannot.
Anyway, the novel is complex and about so much else... (by way of comparative event shapes—the hourglass in particular implied or otherwise utilized);
another character in locked-in syndrome shares position of narration with his daughter who is the primary and the story's presumptive author writing a memmoir of him.
The synesthete and the locked in character occupy the two extremes of isolation as marginalized "others" with the daughter occupying a so-called center, being herself trapped betweem them, trying to find a stable life, not a metaphysical universality, for she herself believes she is "bipolar"
I guess I'll leave you with that for now.
Kafka Ward song during Christian's mental breakdown.
Christian gets commited.
Alek didn't exist(?!)
Christian has created him in his coma.
Notebook was/is Christian's notes all along for a fictional character...
story thus comes full circle.
Alek
“Im not a medium
Im a seer, there's a difference”
Back story: Alek visited (confronted) Christian? Shoves him. This explains Christian's fall(?) initial brain injury(?) — not the cause of coma.
Alek's location, employed as a picture framer(?); ruined reputation motivation for attacking Christian(?)
Doug
Christian's plagerism accusation(?) and injury as a link to death of student Alek previously murdered (mistaken for plag accuser?) Doug tells Christian (still in coma) about the murdered colleague.
Also Doug reveals to Christian (in the hospice) he has coincidently run into Alek (while C still in coma)
Doug does not know C visited A
Doug is dismissive towards Christian writing fiction. “You’re not a writer!”
“Maybe not, but This story keeps me alive like a frame enshrines a painting.”
“Well, just don’t include too many frames within it… “
Chelsea
Chelsea is a framed mirror. Physically and narratively.
When she and brothers are talking insert another, a Christian frame.
Doug describing Alek to Chelsea
Chelsea: "Sounds like dad..."
"fecal nature of reality, leaky gut"
"What's to pine for? the past's all Kierkegaard's tinsel”
3/26
Words that define or occur the novel
Convolution
Reframe
Toroidal
capgras delusion
coefficient - constant factor of a product as opposed to a variable
diagnosis - to say some "qualifies" for a specific illness label; it's like a family crest.
4/3
Darwin's "tangled bank"
Evolution as enveloping layers of complexity, the bubbling outward in time, not forward.
Cicero for example "used evolutio to mean the action of unrolling a scroll." (from the accidental species by Henry Gee)
"progress is destiny. The only way is up."(Henry Gee - the accidental species: misunderstandings of human evolution)
"Art is immitation: the essence of every picture is the frame" (G K Chesterton)
4/11
The origin of Alek the synesthete (and the novel) comes from a reaction by a fellow art student at CCS to my thoughts and enactments (with my hands) of a description of a vision I had about light, that “seeing/being”—as if one could have that vantage point—would be as if one were in fact the stillness of a deep ocean and all matter thenceforth jostled us about as we encountered obstruction, the squeezing through a whitewater rapid to a new expanse… thus the curious use of my hands to describe to my friends the eternal flowing from an enclosed space to another space like sand rushing through the pinch of an hourglass.
A friend said “You should start a cult” facetiously! And immediately I stepped out of my presumptuous visionary stance to constructing my absurd postulate as that of a fictional protagonist.
4/15
Likely confusion for the reader, 4 different contexts:
1)Christian’s notes / 2)Alek’s correspondence with Doug about 3)Panapsida paradigms and the 4)“Commonbook of Hourglasses” described by ?
Christian had written notes himself intending to write what he claimed would be an intrigue (about Alek? based upon what he extrapolated from a found spiral bound notebook?).
The original notebook(?) was Alek's outline for a Commonbook which Christian had obtained (by stealth? before Alek presumably disappeared).
Chelsea knew of her father's intentions and initially had only Christian's (?) notes, not the original “Commonbook of Hourglasses” which was Alek’s Panapsida outline (which Alek had also referred to as both the “Shape of Escape” and “The Mother Meristem”).
Chelsea finds US posted correspondence from Douglas (a university friend of Christian’s) which illuminates the (suspected) reason for Alek’s disappearance(?); and so she gets in touch with Doug.
After she and Doug talk on the phone he sends her drafts, notes and correspondence which were written by Alek. Alek had begun the project he called Panapsida, which proposed a kind of rebus using his visual paradigms as “symbolic logic” to explain his theories… without text! ( ?embed The Mayflies story—boys and their linked sweaters being Chelsea’s brothers; and the brothers tying Chelsea to a tree; and later Chelsea objecting to the boys’ preferring to “unplug” Christian).
Dhyey talks to Christian while he’s still locked-in—what is revealed(?) What does he know about the dispute between Alek and Christian? Or indeed his whereabouts.
All the while Chelsea’s brothers interrogate her about her involvement, especially after Christian awakens and slowly recovers (?) Their relationships? Her being tied to a tree.
Make Chelsea a writer(?) who had briefly worked as an EMT for the fire station until they had to downsize staff.
4/23
"ab ovo" Alek says in vitro but he is superimposing the junction of a test tube over cave wall as womb (an allusion to gene editing). He sees Jung's cave not just as an amalgamation of subconscious entities but as as the awakening of sight, loosed from darkness, a door for spiritual reconnection to the physical world... a passage, not viewed any longer as an origin or fixed terminus. Free will freed from fate of entrapment.
Imagery at close of locked in coma—Fingers walking upon the wall, to awakening cave drawings, to hands up to shield eyes from the hospital room overhead lighting.
Envisions Bohm’s hidden variable and Everett’s universal wave function
( “The essence of Everett’s thinking was that the wavefunction is all there is: a universal wavefunction for the entire universe, which describes the universe as being in a superposition of any number of classical states, and this wavefunction and the superpositions evolve continuously, deterministically, and forever.” (Through Two Doors At Once… by ANIL ANANTHASWAMY )
4/26
In Mann’s The Magic Mountain the narrator foretells a story of a Hans Castorp which “took place long ago” “ and is “covered with the patina of history and must necessarily be told with verbs, whose tense is that of the deepest past” but
“…The story does not actually owe it’s pastness to Time—an assertion that is itself intended as a passing reference, an allusion, to the problematic and uniquely double nature of that mysterious element “
From this very early passage I am caused to reframe Alek’s path as through an hourglass of violence past to future violence :
“ But let us not intentionally obscure a clear state of affairs, the extraordinary pastness of our story results from it having taken place before a certain turning point, on the far side of a rift that has cut deeply through our lives and consciousness. It takes place, or, to avoid any present tense whatever, it took place back then, long ago, in the old days of the world before the Great War, with whose beginning so many things began whose beginnings, it seems, have not yet ceased.”
…a reference then to Alek’s beginnings where in Odessa he struck his father down at the onset of his and his mother’s escape past program and other trials in Central Europe to make their way to Gdansk and ultimately to America… where we must accept his continuation of violence in response to injustice done (to him and his mother!)
Christian's children battle over his fate and eventually he succumbs to madness(?) and/or:
an entire narrative is in Christian's mind and only regains consciousness only to directly sink into a catatonic wheelchair bound body.
4/27
While Christian desires to reach and make amends with Alek,
Chelsea is determined to make amends with herself—and reframe her childhood (by forgiving her father's detachment via finding a compassionate voice for a memoir)
4/30
scattered memories as detritus
is there a broader family setting? an aunt or uncle?
5/10/25
Chelsea: I miss your voice daddy!
“Punctuated equilibrium” (Stephen J Gould, Niles Eldredge)
5/15
Incorporate earliest “plainsong” theme into the last measures of my Pandorina.
Find the best example on Ben Maton’s YouTube channel episode “The OLDEST MUSIC EVER WRITTEN…” https://youtu.be/7z1WpYihkRQ?si=pDOSApvLVZsvdbhW
5/17
one ugly factor has ruined Chelsie's plans for an independent life: her father in a coma and two brothers quarreling with her over what to do, to care for him or let him die... sadly he has not prepared himself or them for this predicament, no power of attorney nor will or living trust.
5/25
All the Neuroboros soundtrack music I recorded... all the written material for a novel/screenplay... and decades worth of graphic material attributable to a main character, a synesthete, in the story.
Nevermind all the manicgrams as sorce material for a separate animated film.
Noone will ever understand what it all could have become, what I've tried to hold onto while raising children... but not even my daughters now or my brother who all believe I'm merely mentally ill and paranoid...
6/4/2025
panapsida
"beyond the pale"
calls to mind the tropaeum, trophy, the linguistic transverse relation of "meta-" (of Greek v Latin) and the like. A place where the turning back warning exists along with revere us, is the association. The against versus with of border walls.
the "pale" here is a furrow, trench, a demarcating a territorial dividing line.
Here is the spacial friction where nomadic culture butts up against sedentary culture.
"The Spaciality of Being-in-the-World"; (Martin Heidegger, Being and Time)
I derive from this "regions" of being, sharing the same sun but competing for a place to benefit from it.
6/26
Panapsida
visual epistemological canto one:
interplay of surface and shadow shaking creativity (& thus self consciousness) loose from the construct of the phisical boundary wall (cave as frame!)
chosing a breast
choice is relevant
each is distinct and consequential
7/5
Phyllis says I've become haggard, that this, this whatever this is consumes me, most of me, and leaves little for her to engage with much less enjoy. So she has left me... temporarily she promises, that surely something will reignite. Hope. Love. A need.
I told her unlike her I won't make any promises.
"And that's just it," she said. "A promise not to promise is like swallowing yourself alive... and I can't watch Chelsie!”
7/9
Visual epistemology. canto 3
do away with good/evil
think visually, attach a subtraction or addition sign to events or actions, (the value added idea?)
tears wed smiles of the afflicted
7/9
Christian hears street anouncements on busas if in Dutch
7/26
See Tony Judt's "Postwar..." Legacy chapter one pp 13 - 26 for historical support for Gisela's expulsion West from the east (Odessa?) as most Germans were despised by Stalin and Communist Poland.
8/5
Gisela might get out of europe as a displaced person—but by stealing the identity of a deceased WAC (women's army corp) whom she has accidentally killed out of anger having learned she would be repatriated to Russia because she is heard speaking it... and thus emigrates to America (?)
How does Alek get to America?
8/5
Neuroboros in a nutshell.
- [ ] Gisela (whose emigration backstory will be forthcoming)
- [ ] Her son, Alek
- [ ] Christian, (in a coma) Alek's university department assistant replacement
- [ ] Chelsea, Christian's daughter
- [ ] Dhyey, Christian's former psych dept head
Gisela's backstory and fate, ie., the "tecnically stateless" issue re
her story: where to repatriate to was not a given—where to escape Stalin's reprisal (forced into NKVD captivity by American soldiers) or persecution by Germans (retribution as a Red Army sympathizer or war criminal).
Alek: What reader will know in the beginning: What brain death medical fallacy Alek challenged that led to the allegation of fraud at Harvard? (copyright infringement, plagiarism) Alek is a synesthete. He was an assistant to Dhyey and replaced by Christian.
[Thus Gisela and Alek preset the hourglass archetype as both a literal and psychological dichotomy— antipodal themes of: schizophrenia v synesthesia; comatose v functionally conscious; intertextuality v intellectual property; original text v copied; narrative configuration v digression...]
Christian's story: we first find him in a coma. brain death v merely physically unresponsive.
Ultimately, whose story is this the reader asks?
What connects Christian and Alek?
A notebook ascribed with "the Commonbook of Houglasses" on its cover. (Which will be presented after epilogue as source material for Alek's university thesis)
Chelsea is a critical vantage point— she challenges (v the brothers' contrary view re father's fate) the brain death of her father, Christian.
Alek's vengeance upon whom? for what?
His discredited paper on a theme of dual definition of the "ordinary" v "extraordinary" of killing. Thus we are further introduced to Alek's notebook of explanatory paradigms used as figures in his controversial and challenged thesis.
The two crises to resolve Cristian's true fate; Alek's academic innocence transformed into his intended literal criminal offense of murdering an alleged accuser (Christian).
Climax: Christian and Alek find each other. Christian attempts to apologise.
Alek explains his thesis (the denied paper) that put forth the question which kind of killing is an "unplugging" of an otherwise live person which he believed the problem to be unsolvable.
We are left to wonder whether Alek's desire for vengeance is permanently difused.
addendum: notebook paradims
8/7
The notebook connects Alek and Christian.
Christian found Alek's notebook while working in Dhyey's office as his new assistant, (Alek's replacement). And thus began a the early years of Christian needing to write a memoir (because, as the reader is told later, Christian played a part in causing Alek's disappearance.)
Chelsea meets Dhyey to whom she confides her attemps to organize Christian's memoir writings and Alek's notebook which Dhyey requests to see. Dhyey suggests Chelsea meet Doug (a friend of Alek's) and explains Alek's notebook being a source for the implicated thesis submission of which Doug might have further knowledge.
Here is An interim for Chelsea and her brothers to struggle over their father's fate (the theme of brain death)
After a few months Christian awakens from his COMA; soon after which he begins his search for Alek whom he insists he needs to apologize to for the allegation that caused scrutiny of Alek's submission.
How Alek and Christian actually come face to face I still have yet to establish.
8/8
Hi Lisa. Yes, I scurted over that.
Ultimately The notebook connects Alek and Christian.
Christian found Alek's notebook while working in Dhyey's office as his new assistant, (Alek's replacement). And thus began the early years of Christian needing to write a memoir (because, as the reader is told later, Christian played a part in causing Alek's disappearance.)
Chelsea meets Dhyey (at a hospital visit to her father) to whom she confides her attemps to organize Christian's memoir writings and Alek's notebook which Dhyey requests to see. Dhyey suggests Chelsea meet Doug (a friend of Alek's) and explains Alek's notebook being a source for the implicated thesis submission of which Doug might have further knowledge.
Here, then, is a narrative interim for Chelsea and her brothers to struggle over their father's fate (the theme of brain death)
After a few months Christian awakens from his COMA; soon after which he begins his search for Alek whom he insists he needs to apologize to for the allegation that caused scrutiny of Alek's submission.
When Alek and Christian actually come face to face with each other (through Doug) their conversation explains where Alek had "disappeared to".
The final result of their meeting however will remain ambiguous.
Sent from my iPhone
On Aug 7, 2025, at 7:05 AM, Lisa Patrell <lpa2mi@gmail.com> wrote:
Van,
With these final arcs just beyond the crisis point --how will the characters converge their arcs towards conclusion?
Lisa
8/10
What exactly did Alek and Christian talk about? What did become of Alek? Of his Synesthesia?
Was he using/seeing his shapes to control/foresee something?
Did he become a glass blowing artist?
An eye surgeon?
Where was he? In Ukraine?
Need something to tie into or from in a sequel. What secret did he reveal (only partially for reader) in the final scene?
1)
Did he become a real "ghost", a violent asset.
Where is his mother?
Need to show that Alek told Dyey about his mother and the killing of his father, how that memory painfully replays, (shame) interferes with his visionary aspiration.
Asking Dhyey for help. Dhyey offers to take him to Ukraine where D introduces him to an surveillance operative following movements of communists... might find his calling there and deal with his resentment for what his father had become (a threat to his family cohesion— this is the theme of implosion hinted at in the final scene's soundtracks. From ordinary passionate killing to extraordinary mastery of methodical killing.
2)
Or perhaps a more mundane explanation. Lost faith in his ability to cope in university environment after being challenged much less accused of plagiarism. Dhyey counsels him as a psychotherapist would to resist the desire for vengeance... and takes Alek to Europe ostensibly to describe for Dhyey everything that Dhyey can't see... but in actuality as therapy for Alek, real imagery to counter his visions of killing. Alek eventually ends up staying in eastern where he runs into a familiar face, that of a man that had come to take/kill his father. timeline here is critical
8/13
Neuroboros
◦ Gisela (whose emigration backstory will be forthcoming)
◦ Her son, Alek
◦ Christian, Alek's university department assistant replacement
◦ Chelsea, Christian's daughter
◦ Dhyey, Christian's former psych dept head
Gisela's backstory and fate, ie., the "tecnically stateless" issue re
her story: where to repatriate to was not a given—where to escape Stalin's reprisal (forced into NKVD captivity by American soldiers) or persecution by Germans (retribution as a Red Army sympathizer or war criminal).
Alek: What reader will know in the beginning: What medical fallacy (?} Alek challenged that led to the allegation of fraud at Harvard? (copyright infringement, plagiarism) Alek is a synesthete. He was an assistant to Dhyey.
Gisela and Alek preset the hourglass archetype as both a literal and psychological dichotomy— antipodal themes of: schizophrenia v synesthesia; comatose v functionally conscious; intertextuality v intellectual property; original text v copied…
Christian's story: we first find him in a coma. brain death v merely physically unresponsive.
Ultimately, whose story is this?
What else connects Christian and Alek? A found notebook ascribed as the Commonbook of Houglasses. (Some of which Which will be entered after epilogue as Alek’s source material for his university thesis)
Chelsea as a critical vantage point— her challenge (v the brothers' contrary view re father's fate) to the brain death of her father, Christian.
Alek's vengeance upon whom? for what?
His paper on theme of dual definition of the "ordinary" v "extraordinary" of killing. Thus we are further introduced to Alek's notebook of explanatory paradigms used as figures in his controversial and challenged thesis.
The two crises to resolve Cristian's true fate; Alek's academic innocense transformed into his intended literal criminal offense of murdering an alleged accuser (Christian).
Climax: Christian and Alek find each other. Christian attempts to apologise.
Alek explains his thesis (the denied paper) that put forth the question which kind of killing is an "unplugging" of an otherwise live person which he believed the problem to be unsolvable.
Alek's vengeance ? When Alek and Christian actually come face to face with each other (through Doug) their conversation explains where Alek had "disappeared to".
The final result of their meeting however will remain ambiguous for the reader.
Neuroboros
{The notebook connects Alek and Christian.
Christian found Alek's notebook while working in Dhyey's office as his new assistant, (Alek's replacement). And thus began a the early years of Christian needing to write a memoir (because, as the reader is told later, Christian played a part in causing Alek's disappearance.)
Chelsea meets Dhyey to whom she confides her attemps to organize Christian's memoir writings and Alek's notebook which Dhyey requests to see. Dhyey suggests Chelsea meet Doug (a friend of Alek's) and explains Alek's notebook being a source for the implicated thesis submission of which Doug might have further knowledge.
Here is An interim for Chelsea and her brothers to struggle over their father's fate (the theme of brain death)
After a few months Christian awakens from his COMA; soon after which he begins his search for Alek whom he insists he needs to apologize to for the allegation that caused scrutiny of Alek's submission.
How Alek and Christian actually come face to face I still have yet to establish.}
addendum: notebook paradims
8/31
UPA 1943 Ukranian nationalists bloody sunday pograms against Poles
Mykola Lebed (protected by CIA) Led Ukranian Polish ethnic cleansing
10/26
Christian had type 2 Chiari malformation symptoms before the malformation was discovered from scans after going into a coma.
Chelsie and brothers are told it's possible they have malformations as well.
a tethered spine
tethered cervical cord syndrome
spina bifida
How would a convo w brothers about their symptoms go?
Did father have a fall?
Christian had injury to coccyx:
Dr to Chelsie:
“So I see in his visit summaries he mentioned he had a fall a while back and as a child as well he was thrown from a vehicle accident?”
“Yes. His parents died in that crash… “
Rewrite Chelsea as a writer singer-in-band ?and her father's coma as the moment she becomes more intensely devoted to expressing her dark tendencies as a foil to her brothers' negativity...
Finishing college — a psychology degree?
What's her interest in the Common Book of Hourglasses(?) after all?
Make her a tattoo artist as well?
Sea Lemon music in soundtrack ("Stay" "Crystals" "Change Your Face"... )
Chelsie in winter ear muffs walking in west Seattle... meets someone at music instrument shop looking for pedals to elicit retro "shoe gaze" ambience
10/26
Perception and “binding problem” See Synesthesia (Cytowic) Cf my “triattitude” concept attending to the world as creative being (artist/wielder of archetypes), skeptical being (scientific observer), spiritual being (surrenderer to the numinous/worshiper of the unknowing)…
10/26
(Chelsie begins to leave a voice mail to her older brother David):
Davey…, Please —
(David picks up) okay, stop already.
(Chelsie continues) No wait, listen, I assure you what I’m doing is every bit for daddy not just for me. I am NOT being selfish as you’ve accused me—I want him to wake up but frankly I am certain he is conscious. He is in there Davey and I want to be there when he comes back.
(David tries to interrupt her) Achhh, Cici! (Cici is their nick name for her)
(Chelsie continues with somewhat of a hoarse throat) Don’t you want us to be there? I can’t —
(David) Come on that’s not fair.
(Chelsie) But how can you suggest it is better to let him die?! How can you even be this cruel?! And to demand I stop writing in his office? What the hell’s that got to do with anything?
(they both are silent for a moment)
(Chelsie asks) What has Bobby said anyway? He is not answering his phone now.
(David) Alright look—I don’t—won’t agree to turning off the support for now, until we can at least get Bobby to commit one way or the other?
(Chelsie silently gathers her resolve) Davey, I can’t let him go (and she begins to sob).
10/27
Familial cohesion
My therapist has agreed to a reframing of my diagnosis of "generalized anxiety" as more specically suffering grief—
I see my grief as bereavement, as in "deprived of something or someone..." such as:
going as far back then to my earliest framed developmental denial... my mother not seeing to it that my father was included/informed of, much less initiated/ fully acknowledged/punished/provided for a critical opportunity for forgiveness for my injuring another child, a little girl's eye.
The missing punishment was therefore the first deprivation/denial of a familial cohesiveness.
Add to this my grieving for having lost my immediate familial cohesion...
