One runs across so many books that are so undeserving of mention these days that reading them is like asking oneself, “What would I like to waste my time on?”  As one who has little such time to waste, it is seldom that I find a book of so atrocious a style and nature that it deserves mention.  Yet, THE EDEN EXPRESS, published in the 80s, by Mark Vonnegut falls into this category.  It deserves attention because of its stark honesty.  The book reveals so much that one is thankful to the author, not because he intended clarity, but because he bared his soul and in the process gave us a glimpse into the soul of a split personality.  It is possible that he didn’t even know it.

THE EDEN EXPRESS is billed as a personal account of schizophrenia.  It is much more.  It is an obituary for the counter-culture of the ‘70s, a living proof that its philosophical foundations were of such a nature that psychological anarchy is its only result—or at least that it provided the foundation for rationalization by those who needed a sanction for their desperate lives, the dropouts and the conmen of the revolution. 

Mark Vonnegut is the son of the famous novelist Kurt Vonnegut.  But there is little hint of any traumatic experience in Mark’s family life.  The first traumatic experience seems to be Mark’s graduation from Swarthmore.  In his privately written commencement address he admitted quite honestly that he didn’t know what to do next, that he had learned two things in college: How to be a good conversationalist and that college education was ‘a pile of shit.’

After college, Mark and his girlfriend Virginia decided to go to Canada—to find some land and live a completely communal life (sounds like something he learned in college).  On the way, they got busted, visited some old friends, and generally traveled hopefully.  Through out the chapter titled “Traveling Hopefully,” one learns very little about Mark, except what can be gleaned from his philosophizing.  “Rational truths,” says Vonnegut, “were true enough, but they were mostly trivial, boring, and not particularly useful.  We wanted to free some of our rational brain space and make room for other ways of being.”  Sounds like a good start toward schizophrenia.

Not surprisingly, Marks’ brain opened up.  He found of piece of land and with some friends began living in harmony with nature.  But his travels were not over.  An escape from rationality can never end while life goes on—unfortunately.  One is not made fully certain what actually happened in Marks’ brain to make him lose control.  One only knows that Virginia left the community, that she confessed to making love with someone other than Mark, that he got high, that he ate some ice cream, that his stomach stopped working and that he could not allow himself to go to sleep.  Next comes hospitalization.

One does get clues as to what happened, but since I am not a psychoanalyst, I will not attempt a deep incursion into hidden meanings except to say that Mark’s pronouncements appear to possess all the classic hallmarks of the split personality, the rationalizations, denials, projections and pretensions that make up the person who is hiding himself from himself and others.  The counter-culture and the philosophy that developed from the critical approaches of Marx and Marcuse merely provided the rationale, the validation and sanction needed by the projected personality created by this intelligent, well-educated, and well-placed young man. 

In a letter to the world, Mark wrote, “ I did everything just like you wanted and now I’ve ended up in a padded cell.  What do you say about that?  I can’t think of anything I really regret, anything I’d do differently given another shot.  The whole idea people are trying to ram into me from a million different angles is that since I’m crazy I must have made a mistake somewhere, but I can’t buy it.  The idea is, as soon as I recognize my mistake and decide to do things differently, everything will be fine and I can get out of here (the hospital).  Well, shit if I can figure out where I went wrong.

“One thing that makes me suspicious is that everyone seems to have a different idea about what sort of mistake it was I made.  Maharishi probably thinks my mistake was not doing my mediation faithfully.  Lots of the nurses and orderlies seem to think my beard and my long hair were my real mistake.  The other day they helped me out with that by holding me down and cutting it all off.  I guess Freud would say I’ve repressed something.  Some of my friends seem to think it’s that I wasn’t open and sharing enough.  Others think I wasn’t eating the right kind of food.  Lot’s of people are pretty sure it has something to do with drugs.  One doctor here has it all figured out that I went crazy because I didn’t try to get a good job and make some sort of contribution to society.  The whole reason I got into this mess is that I was throwing away my college education by trying to be a farmer out in the bush.  The other morning someone came to the little hole in the door in my seclusion room and told me that if I could just accept Jesus Christ as my savior, everything would be fine…

Well, I’m sorry, people.  I must be the most perverse bastard going but I can’t think of anything I did that I can see as my big mistake.  I was trying my damnedest to do the best I could and I don’t feel like reneging on any part of it.  Love and kisses, Mark” (Page 131)

Mark, in rationalizing everything he has done, inadvertently reveals the problem: a deep concern for pleasing the expectations of others—that has led him to place so much pressure upon himself that he must fall short.  Throughout the entire book, he reveals no solid code of ethics, but a loose mish-mash comprised of a number of expectations of others—all of which he dismisses as manipulation and corruption.  Since Mark rejects rationality, the opinions of others are all that is left to him.  The ability to develop morality is made impossible.  Schizophrenia is inevitable under that much self-imposed pressure.  It is certainly true, however, he did do things the way he thought they wanted…and that is the unfortunate choice made by too many that actually succeed better than Mark. 

Mark also rejects the concept of volition: “I think maybe you ought to look into the possibility that I’m being used as some sort of Judas goat.  Something built me up as believable in and has now taken over my body.  I’m not really in charge any more.  I think maybe you ought to consider that maybe killing me would be the best thing.” (Page 134)  He needs to invalidate the idea that he is responsible for his actions because he believes that he is responsible for his condition.

Yet, Mark’s repudiation of volition operates with a double standard.  Others have volition.  “Maybe if everyone hadn’t been so polite, so reluctant to make any sort of judgment.” (Page 134)

Mark’s problems can only be worsened when he blames it all on hope:  “If there hadn’t been so much hope I might never have gone nuts.  If we hadn’t all believed and hoped that the world could be a much better place.  That pain and suffering was unnecessary.  That there really was a way.”  (Page 134)

Examples of this rationalized thinking process are resplendent throughout Marks’ account.  They worsen as his problem deepens.  Eventually the dilemma surfaces as chronic self-doubt and still he thinks he is developing solutions to the world’s problems while he is losing control of himself.  It is his way of berating others for not treating him the way he thinks they should treat him—for not making the world a paradise of harmony and nature—a world in which his fears tell him he could live, where girl friends don’t leave, where they don’t have sex with others, where they don’t betray his clinging, demanding personality.  At the end of such thinking there is only whim and narrow, very short-range action:  “Up the hill and down the hill, shifting just right, so as not to screw my clutch.  It was the clutch more than anything else that made driving Car Car (the name of his car) an art.  One foot in front of the other, the secret of making my car go.  The secret to my getting out of the nut house.  It’s so simple, such a gas, and it works, works, works.  No reason for people to be such jerks, jerks, jerks.  No reason for wars, either.  If everyone would just catch on to this one foot in front of the other thing maybe the shit would just stop happening.  Maybe, maybe, maybe.  Who can say?  Crest and surge and shift and turn.” (Page 158)

The rejection of rationality and the inevitable self-doubt that rejection creates requires either a reversal of one’s policy toward thinking or a cover-up.  How does one cover up?  Only a schizophrenic doesn’t know how he does it: by imitating the actions of others. “Fan David (a friend) was rolling the joints, lots of them.  I thought, this kid’s got to run out some day, but they kept coming and coming.  I’d pretend to be asleep or sometimes really drift off.  He’d shake my arm and make sure I never missed a round.  It would look funny if I said no or just passed the joint.  Maybe they’d think I was going nuts again.  When in doubt, do like those around you are doing.  Those around me were smoking dope nonstop.  I didn’t want to make a fuss.” (Page 160)

Can philosophical attitudes make one helpless?  “All of a sudden I was somewhere without the faintest idea of how I got there.  Remembering what a bitch it was philosophically to prove that there was anything but the present if there was even that.  Not having the faintest idea what time it was.  How long had I blanked?  A minute, a day, years, millennia?  Maybe I didn’t blank at all.  Maybe I just think I blanked.  But something’s out of tune.  Either more has happened to here than me or more to me than here.  One of us has changed.”  (Page 161)

If one rejects rationality, one rejects the absolute nature of reality.  One also loses the ability to cope with reality.  Yet, the psyche cannot tolerate a situation of helplessness.  The state of impotence must be so intolerable that only a complicated method of face-saving will work.  The schizophrenic begins to believe he is a prophet of God.  Indeed, Mark’s degree was in religion.  But, as befits Marks’ problems, he seems to have had an advanced case of it:  “Maybe it was just that I was able to create an atmosphere which destroyed people’s customary expectations, an atmosphere in which miracles could flourish.  Anyway, it spooked the hell out of me.  I even managed to spook a few doctors and nurses.  That’s impressive spooking, considering the extensive spookproofing those people go through and all the antispook drugs they pumped me full of.

Somehow I managed to stumble onto some tricks of the holy-man trade.  Call it cosmic disability compensation, a bonus dividend accruable to ego disinvestiture.”  (Page 190)  “I doubt that I had much to do one way or another with the California earthquake or what was being broadcast on the tv or any of the numberless other things I felt responsible for.  But I wouldn’t have taken such bizarre notions as seriously as I did if it hadn’t been for the smaller-scale miracles that were undeniably real.  My notions of what I was and was not capable of were blown to smithereens.”  (Page 191)

One should wonder why Mark’s mind did not will him to be cured.  To Mark reality appeared to be an indeterminate flux that he could manipulate with a thought. Indeed, his mind, admittedly his most helpless tool, was able to create reality.  At a time when he needed his mind the most, he believed he was capable of wishing things to happen.  In such a state, one has no measure, no standard for action or thought and certainly no understanding about the possible or impossible.  There is no way to determine the harm this concept has wrought, but we see indications in the drug trips of naïve youngsters who believe they attain a higher level of consciousness and fly off the edges of buildings.

We have seen how Mark’s philosophical premises were at work throughout his sickness.  Let us now look at his cure.  Mark does not attribute a great deal to his conversation with Wally who visited him in the hospital.  It was never determined whether Wally was a patient or just a stranger who came to visit.  But I ask the reader to keep the preceding discussion in mind while reading the following. 

“Most of what he (Wally) said wouldn’t have made much sense to anyone but me.  It would have been just another poor crazy person raving his brains out.  What it boiled down to was that I was being divested of my power.

‘You’re not conductor any more.  Someone else is in charge of the train.’  He seemed to be congratulating me for having done my part well and saying that now I could relax.  He filled me in on lots of the places, people, and things I had been worried about.  Told me that for the most part I had caught on beautifully, far better than anyone expected.

He must have been listening to my ravings for the past few days.  Maybe he just wanted me to shut up so he could get some sleep.  He knew all the key words, all the themes, key players, etc., and how to put them together.  It worked like a charm.  I don’t think I did any raving after that.  I felt great relief.  My prayers had been answered.  I had no more power.  I could now be just one of the fellas.” (Page 192)

Whoever Wally was, he was the man who cured Vonnegut.  He straightened out the confusion, made it clear to Mark just what the situation was, and showed him why he need not be upset by it all.  But most importantly, he divested Mark, by a mere suggestion of his self-imposed expectation that it was his responsibility to please others.  In other words, he said, “Everything is ok and you don’t need to try anymore.”  To a schizophrenic, this must mean it is ok to be normal, to relax, to smile and to let go.  What Mark had let go of, of course, was the false person who was in charge of his mind…the one represented by the counter-culture philosophy he used as validation.

Mark does not draw any of the conclusions I have drawn regarding his cure.  He makes a pitch of a bio-chemical cause for schizophrenia.  But I suggest that the nutritional aspect of his mental illness was a concurrent effect, not a prime cause of his schizophrenia.  If we read Mr. Vonnegut’s book as if it were a chronicle, we should conclude that, based upon the evidence presented, the cause of his mental illness was psycho-philosophical.  Certainly he had his ideas long before he had his nutritional deficiency, and these ideas, particularly the one that he must meet the expectations of others, are bound to create a tremendous energy loss, one so tremendous that a nutritional deficiency is a likelihood.  I suggest that Mr. Vonnegut and his brothers in spirit take a fresh look at the concept whose absence most probably created his problem from the start—that concept is rationality.

 Posted on 5/31/04