Character sketches, notes and misc scenes for Neuroboros
Doug (ego) rivals for “meristem” of notebook—superimposed identities (Id) of Alek & George;
Chelsea, primary narrator reveals brothers’ divided ethics as well as theme of motherhood, uroboros
Dhyey, Leon—desire (subconscious exposed), authority, justice…Jung’s “dragon fight”.
George allegedly found a draft of Alek's doctoral thesis in notebook form while working in the dept head Dhyey's office as his new assistant, (presumably Alek's replacement). And thus began the early years of George writing what appeared to be an account of their acquaintance (because, as the reader is told later, George played a part in Alek's disappearance.)
Chelsea meets a friend of George, Douglas (at a hospital during a visit to her comatose father, George) to whom she confides her attemps to organize George's writings and shares Alek's notebook which Dhyey also had an interest in. Dhyey had suggested Chelsea meet Doug (also a friend of Alek's) and explains Alek's notebook being a source for an implicated doctoral thesis submission of which Doug might have further knowledge.
Here, then too, is room for a narrative interim describing Chelsea and her brothers’ struggle over their father's fate (the theme of possible brain death )
After a few weeks(?) however George awakens from his coma; soon after which he obsesses over finding Alek whom he insists he needs to apologize to for a supposed allegation that caused scrutiny of Alek's submission.
Do Alek and George actually come face to face with each other? No, Not in the narrative!
The result of their meeting must also remain ambiguous.
To resolve:
Where to position the murder scene (of an un-named victim);
Chelsea narrations and scenes;
George;
Dhyey;
and Leon(?).
Alek is only alluded to through journal quotes and dialogue.
The story begins (in a hospital) from the perspective of Chelsea, the daughter of a man who has gone into coma with locked in syndrome, but he has also sustained injury from an attack. She discovers some of his writings as she’s learning to adjust to his physical needs being unconscious (and her own—bipolar treatment).
***
Surgeon Dr Robert Klein slowly approaches his patient’s daughter and extends a soft hand to her.
“Chelsea?”
“Yes…” she says rising slowly.
“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.
“There is another complication however. The investigators that arrived with him have determined he was attacked…”
“No! No, no…wait, what?!
“…struck on the head in fact.”
***
Chelsea’s memoire extract:
—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 weeks ago, they say it’s locked-in-syndrome, but 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 “case study” as he called them. This latest project as it happened 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 would 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 for more than fifteen years now. Saving people and property from devastation isn’t at all 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 all involved, families especially⏤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.
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 could tell he grew weary of mother too 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—not just a cohort’s infernal notebook, the origin of his most recent study before his loss of consciousness, but something that preceded all of it. 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 will I finally attempt to fathom for you must remain as yet 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 ultimately cracked through his skull! and thus now onto my laptop. And you may well be wondering what on earth inspires a first responder to write a book, much less what gives her the confidence to share 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—and sometimes near death—happens.
***
George’s original narration it is later intimated is him telling it to Chelsea in his mind as he is still prostrate and silenced by stroke(?).
Chelsea’s narration: is spread throughout? And intertwined with George’s journal.
She does cross fit training and as well studies forensic psychology in night school while preparing for the NYPD? Her father’s influence perhaps... but this is how we introduce Leon(?)
Chelsea believes The notebook belonged to someone named Alek, and the story then transitions into a memoir of her father she is of the impression was trying to finish (what Chelsea eventually refers to as the “Common Book of Hourglasses”) what he started writing and at some point before she actually recognizes her father’s own words in the notebook.
Once George awakens from his coma, Chelsea then begins the process of helping to nurture his memory back during which he tells her he wishes to undo a supposed wrong (that he mistakenly accused Alek, a synesthete, of plagiarism—Alek we are told is the young man whose notebook George has and whose position at the university George took over). Doug explains to Chelsea (and Leon?) that Alek disappeared years ago after someone (killed) whom George Framed as the person responsible for Alek’s ruined reputation—which in fact is not established. Reader will eventually have to be unsure whether Alek even exists—
climax!—which he did, but rather George has killed Alek. And thus George’s mental state unravels, an ironic condition having just gained consciousness! And the reader now must wrestle to gain interest to identify the real author of the “Commonbook of Hourglasses” as well as George’s and Chelsea’s mental state.
The forthcoming resolution (?) … for Chelsea, she must command the opposing terminal sides of her psyche. Presumably is bipolar. But what really was her father’s interest in finding Alek? Enter Dhyey.
There is no closure as such. the title embedded in the story (common book of HOURGLASSES) hints at this problem of oscillation between impressions of truths, and all upending passages between the seen and the imagined come to the foreground. Who in fact designed the notebook? Who/what indeed was Alek. Why was Chelsea formerly compelled to finish her father’s story about this Alek? Doug’s input.
***
Explanatory notes.
synesthesia
(Finally figured out how to explain the schism between Dhyey and Alek and the reason for the whole story in the first place. Dhyey's excessive interest (and George’s) in Alec's synesthesia becomes annoying to Alek(?). George (as Alek) regresses inward to put it psychoanalytically. His reality becomes more & more detached from linear reality, to the 3/4 dimensional. The notebook only explicates the grand set of universal shapes, a space that George (Alek) veritably swims in.
I just have to avoid the cliche of mysterious and comic bookish pseudo psychic nonsense, the common factor of sci-fi these days. This is a psychological study of ultimate self absorption, & hopefully elicits only a hint of numinous spiritual points of view that could never be put into words. The medical protagonists simply misdiagnose George's incommunicable gift as schizophrenia and he ends up just as cut off from our world as we are led Alek to have been. Who narrates as Alek in George’s comatose state? ( George’s thoughts are part of the narrative and it is he that eventually "sees" this possibility of Alek's new separate reality when George awakens). So that's a huge spoiler! Two fiction characters cut off from the narrative world but presenting as separately self-aware aware and omnipresent; while two others, Dhyey and the detective, are self absorbed in a shallow way of needing a defining recognition from a group of authorized obsessvers.)
***
Anyway, George upon “awakening” cannot remember what really happened to Alek, whom we are not told whether he is even alive (or even a protagonist imagined by George to be diagnosed with synesthesia…George tries to re-establish his reality via the notebook images, finding words were abandoning him—to dementia?!)
But regardless as a fictional device Alek (as George) thinks in event-shapes, animated concepts ... the "notebook" is crammed with such schematic figures with occasional texts which appear as mere mixed metaphor. Doug relates that George can't verbalize well for him what he can see and they cannot—
2nd climax! who exactly was killed, why and who was a killer.
Leon’s narrative role?
Targeted students are those that conspired & participated in a mock Thematic Apperception Test ”haze-grilling” of George’s (Alek’s) ideas he shared in a paper (or classroom discussion?) wherein they accused him of plagiarism. [Henry Murray = Harry Murphy]
He had made the mistake of relating his supposed eidetic memory and ability to see his “universal shapes of escape” in any event or thing. It is a kind of madness they counter, using terms like schizophrenic... tin hat etc
Anyway, this novel, Neuroboros, is by way of comparative shapes—the hourglass in particular implied or otherwise utilized—about the oscillating, cyclic nature of conceiving of objective v subjective reality and relationships.
George in locked-in syndrome shares position of narration with his daughter who is the primary narrator and the story's presumptive author attempting to write a memoir of her father. George’s early narration comes from his locked-in state and comprises Alek’s as well.
DOES GEORGE IN FACT CREATE ALEK OUT OF HIS OWN ACTIONS (A SPLIT PERSONALITY) The invented synesthete and the locked in character as one occupy the two extremes of George’s mind in isolation as a marginalized "other" with the daughter passing through the pinch of a virtual hourglass, feeling herself trapped between chaos and calm, anticipation and resolution, trying to find a stable life witnessing an unstable father while pressured between two oppressive brothers.
***
on the surface it may appear to the reader as 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.
Ultimately, how to explain the schism between Dhyey and Alek and the reason for the whole story in the first place: self-absorption of all characters, detachment. Dhyey becomes more personally obsessively interested in Alek's synesthesia and this becomes annoying to Alek who physically vanishes).
Reality for the protagonists becomes more & more detached The notebook only explicates It's a psychological novel of ultimate self absorption, short of asking the reader to accept a shamanistic message, but rather a language problem, not a metaphysical problem—the paradox of the self as subject/object). But the story is meant also to suggest medicine and science misdiagnose individuals such as George’s (Alek’s) incommunicable gift as schizophrenia only because of another language problem, literature is a language game.
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 authoritative 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 appears grounded, not self-absorbed, but rather in the sense of being pinned like an insect, laid out for observation by others. Her voice is the most colloquial of the narratives. Tell her story of the brothers tying her to a tree! And her Mayflies retaliation in the basement.
✽Have George awaken from coma recovering the name of the borrowed flower he placed on his wife's grave.
On Beowulf, Grendel and the "monster mother" The Seven Basic Plots, (Christopher Booker)
"[...] what we are looking at here is really one mystery built upon another, because our passion for storytelling begins from another faculty which is itself so much part of our lives that we fail to see just how strange it is: our ability to 'imagine', to bring up to our conscious perception the images of things which are not actually in front of our eyes." (Christopher Booker)
✽Grant meets a philosopher (R Arnheim?) imagine a conversation re combined metaphysical significance of shape implied in all of architecture to include animals.
✽cf Doug's recognition of synapsida in "shape of escape" as it was used by Alek, the pattern in his paradigm of the neuron.
12/14
opening paragraph prior to Chelsea at the Hospital scene.
George:
"What was it Dhyey said to me?" —
(with a phantom limb George reaches for a notebook he believes to be on the bedside table closest to the bedroom window wherein he would find the quote...) —
"Damnation... failed again... if I wasn't so tired..."
“George is not tired though; no longer, that is, in the sense his body would extend itself to successfully inform him... of exertion... of anything at all.”
Chronologically, Douglas had been working at the University library / bookstore while enrolled. Now as a "Knowledge manager" assigned to advise a Police department by monitoring social media “influencers." He and Chelsea meet in a campus coffee shop.
Revise the following, Doug’s account to Chelsea:
—“your father and I had several pre med classes together at Johns Hopkins. One ethics class 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 mesmerized by 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 I can say he had this visual idea that human actions were a kind of continuum of recursive influences continually invading and throwing off the now… that we never leave the past pure and clear. I’m making it seem simplistic but frankly I didn’t follow him entirely. It was him trying to explain or actually make light of his eidetic, synesthetic awareness.
(at some point have Doug? relate the following: “our collective construct of time from it’s original shape to immediate events Alek imagined it was akin the ever involuting and pervasive gravitational waves mischaracterized as dark matter, that this grand mother of all meristems as he described it was the missing force physicists were incapable of visualizing or define mathematically. I think your father was trapped by this, Alek’s idea, Chelsea … long before his present incoherent condition…"
Douglas however was masking his jealousy of George and on a lesser compassionate level told Chelsea it was George that was actually accused of plagiarizing (while George himself came to believe it too it was his own defamation against Alek who was never actually in jeopardy for this academic falsehood.
Twist 1: Alek’s disappearance then is given to the reader as having been due to a sexual overture by Dhyey.
How to introduce the overture to the reader?
And is there an attempt to plea for forgiveness...) which leads us to the following plot twist:
Twist 2! we go back to question George's collapse and hospitalization. (Leon, witnesses?!)
Douglas had attacked George! fearing exposure (of his own jealousy and George’s own overtures toward the enticing, sexualized Alek)! George had over time himself provoked Douglas's ire as well, exacerbating Doug's contempt and jealousy. Thus a crime-of-passion motive having already done damage to Alek... who—unaware of himself as a physical antagonist—surely sought academic justice for the plagiarism accusation
(The unfounded plagiarism accusation appears responsible for Alek's fate as derived specifically from his independent coinage of the term "mother meristem”.
Alek it is said saw 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 called the “mother meristem” —which does occur in botany literature— and this is the fulcrum of more than his epistemology, this hourglass/toroidal continuum is his road map to an inevitable future) in his “Panapsida” doctoral thesis. His use however is meant to be a suggestion that there is a unifying metaphysical principle which he attempts to demonstrate through a progression of visual paradigms... which itself ultimately secures for him intense ridicule; his "shape of escape" as well portends his actual disappearance… but ultimately leads to Dhyey’s blind infatuation and attempted seduction of Alek…
{Not convinced there is need of a “panapsidarium" as they call it, the invention of a visual epistemological descriptive language ceiling projection device, based on Alek’s Commonbook of Hourglasses panapsida concept paradigms. George and Alek argued/fought over the patent rights!
What would have become of that “fight”?
It’s too much unnecessary complication?!}
See the final park bench scene
Character development, “apsids” and misc scenes:
Chelsea (Pepper)
bipolar narrator; Neuroboros
—“It seemed to me father was losing his mind attempting to reconcile Alex’s composite particle/wave sketches with what quantum physics he thought he understood… but he kept getting caught up looking for interference patterns as “lumps” in an hourglass-like experiment—as if to say our limited reality is itself bicameral, the first interference, our consciousness is the primal slit.
In this I find it difficult to separate Alek and father; that writing father’s memoir causes me to see my own dual nature. That is, I have up until this point avoided discussing that I have been diagnosed with bipolar disorder and that I’ve discontinued the pharmaceutical treatment for it.”
conflicted offspring;
continuity (life/death);
prescription(?)
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.
(Chelsea begins to leave a voice mail to her older brother Grant whose middle name is David):
“Davey…, Please —
(Grant picks up) okay, stop already.
(Chelsea 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.
(Grant tries to interrupt her) Achhh, Pep! (Pepper is their nick name for her)
(Chelsea continues with somewhat of a hoarse throat)
—Don’t you want us to be there? I can’t do this alone
(Grant) Come on that’s not fair.
(Chelsea) 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)
(Chelsea asks) Wha’d Peter say anyway? He’s not answering his phone now.
(Grant) Alright look—I don’t—won’t agree to turning off the support for now, until we can at least get Peter to commit one way or the other?
(Chelsea silently gathers her resolve)
—Davey, I can’t let him go (and she begins to sob).
Chelsea meets Dhyey to whom she confides her attemps to organize George'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.
Need An interim for Chelsea and her brothers to struggle over their father's fate (the theme of brain death) to compare to their relationships as children
Chelsea is a framed mirror. Physically and narratively.
When she and brothers are talking insert another, a George frame.
Doug describing Alek to Chelsea
Chelsea: "Sounds like dad..."
Doug
describes Alek;
defines synesthesia
"Panapsida"
(see chap 2 vers 15 - 2012);
"mother meristem" supposed plagiarism problem;
George’s(?) plagiarism accusation and his injury as a link for Leon’s investigation re the death of a student Alek is implicated for (because he has vanished) while the murdered supposed plagiarism accuser was actually a witness to Doug’s advances?) Doug tells George (still in coma) about the murdered colleague, “Don’t worry my friend… ”
Doug is privately dismissive towards George writing fiction. But vocally “So you’re a writer now?!”
(George still comatose:) —“Maybe not, but stories keep me alive like a frame enshrines a painting.”
George Saballe
George 's wife Suzanne committed suicide. An illness which deeply troubles Chelsea. Chelsea punishes her father over Suzanne's "mental illness" & death, blames him.
George's wife's name is Suzanne and is she alive or present in another way.
Each protagonist then must pass through a constriction as it were (as within an hourglass) on the way to their own distinct stabile resolution or return. Each is in a sense a short mystery story. What are their goals, their immediate wants and needs; their fears if any or what do they loathe? Do they have unique habits, mannerisms? In what way is each aware of or not of their unfulfilled lives. Their arc in dramatic terms and their blocking in terms of how near the reader must sense the character's importance overall in the novel.
What is common amongst them or universal to their individual demographic; or does estrangement exist? George (refers to Alek seeing ghosts which he calls apsids—characters are all apsids!
After a few weeks George awakens; soon after which he begins his search for Alek whom he insists (insincerely) to Chelsea he needs to apologize to for the allegation that caused scrutiny of Alek's doctoral submission.
How Alek and George actually come face to face is not a necessary scene. Apsids remain independent, new shoots!
paradox of hourglass?
uroboros;
toroid;
the id
the comatose v the killer
Alek
confounds/explicates by his absence;
passage from figurative to eventual literal
Plato (Socrates) the Georgias dialogue;
the hourglass notebook as commonbook of prayer
Chelsea: Dad, I just don’t get what you see in him…
George: It’s not about what I see Chelsea… it’s about what he sees!
Chelsea: Well… what is that exactly?
George: (sighs, exasperated)… What we can’t see.
Chelsea: Right, so let him do it.
George: What?
Chelsea: This. That. (Pointing). Let him put it into words…. a story? Your character study or whatever—from what I can see dissolves into nonsense. It’s inane.
George: 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?
George: (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?…like looking down an hourglass!? You’re 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! You were always a good story teller. Just tell it like a dad.
George: (Slowly and nearly whispered.). I’m sorry… (but under his breath) Good idea. Alek as the "voyant-visible"
(The infants gaze is the nearest thing to metaphysical enlightenment)
Read Virgil's Aeneid and reread Merleau-Ponty.
Back story: Alek had visited (confronted) George? Shoved him. This explains George's fall(?) initial brain trauma(?) — the cause of coma.
Dhyey
mediator;
Sexual component
magnetic field;
ambiguity;
levity
Brothers Grant (Davey) and Peter
Dante
volcano/fountain;
effluence science v worship
Tied Chelsea to a tree.
Chelsea’s revenge: buttoning their sweaters together; them toppling into a shelf of ball jars, dispersing a cloud of dried, dead mayflies from a window sill.
(In their father’s house.)
Grant: "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.”
(Grant 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 big deal. 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 Grant! (Intentionally not using his nick name) “ So when? I need to get out this weekend.”
Leon
obese;
creed;
gravity;
justice
The investigation
***
Words that define or occur in the novel?:
Convolution
Reframe
Toroidal
capgras delusion
Aspects to refine
- The original notebook. was it Alek's which George had obtained (by stealth before Alek disappeared).
- George had written himself notes intending to write an intrigue about Alek based upon what he extrapolates from Alek’s doctoral notebook. Chelsea knew of her father's intentions but initially had only George's (Alek’s?) notes, not a draft, rough or finished.
- Chelsea finds a US posted correspondence from Douglas (a university friend of both Alek and George) which alludes to a potentially egregious reason for Alek’s disappearance(?)
- (Dhyey as well talks to George while he’s locked-in—what is revealed(?) Conversation that falls chronologically near the end of the story
—“You and I are a little like alchemists are we not, George, pouring a little of ourselves into one another, to see what distills out, to see what’s left, ultimately friend or foe in crystalline form. “
(the scenes with Dhyey and George talking in Dhyey’s office are spread out in the narrative but actually fall together as one conversation at the end of the story, where Napoleon, and other detectives and officers come to arrest Dhyey.
Sunday, August 19, 2018
Dhyey's obsession w all things glass
It is significant and an irony that the good doctor Dhyey of Neuroboros becomes blind overtime because of his obsession with the history of glass, mirrors, lenses, microscopes and hourglasses.
Ultimately, whose story is this?
What else connects George 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, George.
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 George’s true fate; Alek's academic innocence transformed into his intended literal criminal offense of murdering an alleged accuser (George?).
Climax: George and Alek find each other. George attempts to apologize?
explains where Alek had "disappeared to”.
The final result of their meeting however will remain ambiguous for the reader.
To develop:
- [ ] Doug tells Chelsea at some point that George won’t find Alek because Alek’s already been found…and a murder victim(?)
- [ ] Chelsea wanting to tell her father(?) before detectives can speak to George
- [ ] … which eventually sparks his memory of a struggle with Alek. (George had already attempted to apologize but it went badly!)
- [ ] A near Last scene is a double of memory of the attempted apology for stealing Alek’s work with George on a park bench telling imagined Alek he accused him of plagiarism because he simply didn’t believe Alek could have conceived of or written such a beautiful thesis…
- [ ] Detective Napoleon Smith approaches George on that bench and engages in the conversation as if speaking for Alek.
- [ ] End in father’s home… an unsatisfactory resolution for Chelsea’s (sub theme of a) bipolar psyche… arguing with her dismissive brothers about their relationships with their father and Chelsea’s presumed mental illness… Chelsea knocks an hourglass off his desk during an argument.
Last scene. a park bench. The Pacific ocean.
George (having just sped north on the PCH in his Mercedes with the top down):
—“It’s funny how many lives end this way… how many remorseful conversations are held on benches like this one… facing the sea… facing a future bleak as this stormy twilight… an end to suffering must be happier than continuing to live don’t you think? How do we do it Alek? How do I give it all back to you now it’s been sucked down under like an innocent child by the undertow?”
