From Nikola Chubrich
Date: November 2, 2020
Subject: re: November 1, 2020

Dear Dr. Meyer:

I have often had academic nightmares. Mine are a little different: I am back at Yale, or what I call eka-Yale. It is the middle of the semester, and I have stopped attending classes, and even forgotten what classes I am taking. There is no hope of catching up.

I found myself able to follow all those arguments----once! I cannot help thinking that in not reading the Feynman lectures right this minute, I am letting a wonderful opportunity slip through my hands.

My problem in writing is not that I have too little to say (which was the case earlier this summer), but that I have too much to say. I wake up in the morning having worked out some missing piece of my worldview; or still worse it comes to me in the middle of the night; I go out for a walk (as I will now) to spin more thoughts; and by the time comes to write them down (excusing, I hope, the preceding agrammaticism), the thoughts --- which have coalesced into an indivisible whole --- have gotten larger, while my energy to write them down is diminished. And so the day passes.

On my mind today I have dual, or even ternary concerns. The one is to work out my thoughts on the question of faith you raised; still more urgent, the perhaps imminent failure of democracy (I have a mini-essay on peace that I may revisit); and finally (and this last linking back to the questions on faith), the challenges to my worldview that have emerged in the past year.

To speak of the last, I stumble, since it brings up so many painful assumptions about me. To wit: am I merely a madman who must be medicated for the rest of his life? I suppose in speaking to you I fear that you are very much in that camp (certainly Klemens would be); in the spring you said as much. My experience since then has convinced me even more that medication, for all but a time and dose-limited emergency intervention, is terribly dangerous. Nothing like the profound lassitude that has settled on me in the latter part of this year has ever happened to me before. Four years ago my supposed mania was far greater; and yet the recovery from it was a matter of a few months. This year, I lost my physical health while being on Lithium (much too high a dose, after the third hospitalization); and I lost any connection with my own thoughts and my own body. Everything I saw seemed to be under a glass, denatured, as in a museum. I have not managed to revive any sense of immediacy. And I suppose I am cautious about doing so until I have figured out how to handle the two minds that I have.

I believe we all have these two minds: the fundamental mind, fully capable of working in nature and reality, the source of poetry and health; and the linearized mind, which exists to interface us to the herd, the hive, or the civilization. This mind is not so much capable of inventing a diesel engine: but it can gather together the many needed to build one.

Until this year, I thought that I merely needed to learn how to use the fundamental mind, which operates by rules altogether foreign to the linearized mind. I thought the fundamental mind was altogether better. No: having learned to handle the fundamental mind, you must then return and learn how to operate the linearized mind, the better to interface with the many linearized minds around one.

A single mistake (incomprehensible to a linear mind) is enough to bring on a regime of utter brutality and incompetence, which nobody who has not experienced this regime is capable of conceiving.

Thus I was hospitalized the first time, by my own volition and provocation: I thought that by doing so I might be able to "process" the trauma of having had my life similarly dismantled four years ago. In that hospitalization, in a way, I triumphed: I was on good terms with all the patients and staff (this bought, of course, in part by slavish obedience): and the one staff member who was not kind I was able to neutralize through my psychiatrist. But I was put on a medication whose side-effects were barely tolerable in the controlled hospital environment, and not at all tolerable in the outside world (this being akathisia). I was sent home without any immediate follow up, my only appointment being a month hence, with a nurse practitioner, whom I had little hope of being sympathetic.

I had to quit that medication, whereupon I ran afoul of a dogmatist: which story you know. I had not the knowledge (which I have now) of the necessity of finding as soon as possible a safe place to stay so that people would not be worried. Trivial knowledge for the linear mind; not so trivial for the fundamental mind.

After a week, I found myself in the same position as I had been at the Bohemian Club: an authority figure saying "you are manic". I had imposed enough on your family that I did not want to offer any further protest. What would have happened had I done so? Would the police have been called, as they were back then? 

I am quite sure that somewhere in my car, I had the Thorazine prescription. But having been declared manic, I did not have any longer the presence of mind to ask if I might go and look for it (it was not in my backpack). Thereupon I found myself in a brutal hospital: one designed for the poor, rather than for the well-off. Delusion, as you well know, found itself in a fertile environment there.

After the stress of that hospitalization, and back up on Portsmouth, I thought I was having a heart attack. Seeking treatment for that, I was sent in yet a third time. And there they raised the Lithium level until I was, essentially, poisoned.

I can begin to see my way towards a return to life: uncertainly. But that is a way nobody knows. The counterculture (which reveres the fundamental mind, and worships, in abstract form at least, the remaining tribes of the earth which live in the fundamental mind) does not know. Psychiatrists certainly do not know. I am not sure you know.

If you do know, I hope you will by no means be reticent about saying what you think you might know.

N.I.C.

On Sun, Nov 1, 2020 at 8:47 PM Ernst Meyer <ernstmeyer@earthlink.net> wrote:

    Dear Nikola,

    Thank you for your letter, and please forgive my immediate reply.
    Obviously a reply may be delayed, from inattentiveness or indifference,
    for too long.  A reply may also be too soon, immediate and overly
    precipitous, indicating that the respondent is concerned primarily with
    expounding his own ideas, and is insufficiently sensitive, or is
    indifferent to the experiences to to which he is replying. Such indeed
    is a fault to which I should often plead guilty.  I excuse myself by
    quoting the Bible,
    Wes das Herz voll ist /des gehet der Mund ueber. (Luther's translation)
    For out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaketh. (Matthew 12:34)
    ex abundantia enim cordis os loquitur (Vulgate)
    ἐκ γὰρ τοῦ περισσεύματος τῆς καρδίας τὸ στόμα λαλεῖ.

    To attempt to come to terms with my ignorance, I try to understand my
    ignorance, which I interpret as largely the deficiency of memory.  Whom
    may I blame for the deficiencies of my memory?  As I read the sentences,
    the paragraphs and the pages of Feynman's lectures over and over again I
    think I understand each single argument; but then, when he strings them
    together I can't remember the meanings of the conclusions that he has
    proved. Then I fall asleep and awaken to the nightmare that I can't
    possibly pass the examination and that there's no way of denying the
    fact that am failing, that I have failed the course, - which is what
    being 90 years old is all about.

    Good night. I hope you sleep well, with edifying dreams.
    EJM


    On 11/01/2020 05:19 PM, Nikola Chubrich wrote:
    > Dear Dr. Meyer:
    >
    > Your letter gives me much food for thought. I go for a walk and think it
    > all out, and then I am too tired to write it down, and too tired to
    > call. Such was today, at any rate. I am sorry I have been a poor
    > correspondent. I do feel things are getting better though. (It seems a
    > long time.)
    >
    > The question of the use of faith is an important one. It seems I am
    > suspended between different faiths, or rather in constant doubt....
    >
    > Nick.
    >
    > On Fri, Oct 30, 2020 at 7:56 PM Ernst Meyer <ernstmeyer@earthlink.net
    > <mailto:ernstmeyer@earthlink.net>> wrote:
    >
    >     Dear Nikola,
    >
    >     Thank you for writing to me. I'm relieved to know that you are
    >     reasonably well.  I have been reading Feynman's lectures on quantum
    >     physics. He referred to Schroedingers "discovery" of his equation. I
    >     asked myself about the difference between "discovering" a physics
    >     equation and "inventing" it.  In perusing, trying to untangle, to
    >     memorize and internalize various mathematical formulas of physics which
    >     I do not "understand", I have "discovered" or "invented" some issues
    >     entailed in "not understanding".  E.g.:
    >
    >     Acts 1:9-12
    >     King James Version
    >
    >     9 And when he had spoken these things, while they beheld, he was taken
    >     up; and a cloud received him out of their sight.
    >
    >     10 And while they looked stedfastly toward heaven as he went up,
    >     behold,
    >     two men stood by them in white apparel;
    >
    >     11 Which also said, Ye men of Galilee, why stand ye gazing up into
    >     heaven? this same Jesus, which is taken up from you into heaven, shall
    >     so come in like manner as ye have seen him go into heaven.
    >
    >     12 Then returned they unto Jerusalem from the mount called Olivet,
    >     which
    >     is from Jerusalem a sabbath day's journey.
    >
    >     an account of an event that fundamentally I do not understand in the
    >     prose of the King James Version, but that obtains a musical
    >     significance
    >     to me in listening to a performance of Bach's Oratorio (BWV 11).  I ask
    >     whether it is possible to replace or supplement failure to understand
    >     with belief, with faith that a statement is true. What, for example,
    >     would it mean to have faith that Acts 1:9-12 is "true". How would my
    >     faith that Acts 1:9-12 is true, differ from my faith that a linear
    >     partial differential equation which describes the wave function or
    >     state
    >     function of a quantum-mechanical system, i.e.  that the Schrödinger
    >     equation is "true", describing  a quantum mechanical system which I
    >     "understand" as little as I understand the gravitational basis of Acts
    >     1:9-12?
    >
    >     Good night. I hope you sleep well.
    >     EJM
    >     ~
    >
    >
    >     ~
    >
    >     On 10/30/2020 07:09 PM, Nikola Chubrich wrote:
    >      > Dear Dr. Meyer:
    >      >
    >      > I am doing quite a bit better today. I have in mind much to
    >     write, but
    >      > have set none of it down yet. These thoughts have had the habit of
    >      > coming in awakenings in the middle of the night, around 3 am. I
    >     lie in
    >      > bed and fall asleep around 5:30, and wake late.
    >      >
    >      > There seems to be a degree of completion in them, now, so I am
    >     going to
    >      > relax tonight and try to sleep through. Tomorrow is another day.
    >      >
    >      > I hope you are well.
    >      >
    >      > N.I.C.
    >