There was talk, in Carl’s case, of performing a frontal lobotomy—cutting into the frontothalamic fibers (the white matter) of the frontal lobes of the brain . . . but, in correspondence with the doctors, I was able to discourage it . . .
Instead, he was given different forms of convulsion therapy—electroshock when either violent or calm, and metrazol, when in deep melancholy . . .
I thought of Moby-Dick, and Pierre . . . of a man sinking, pulling down and over him his family, his parents and ancestors—the mutations of all evolution—
struggling convulsively, even in drowning, to re-form himself, to grow or discover a new center . . .
as an epileptic, or in syncope: to fight out of the wrong center and into the right,
or to the left of it . . .
and I thought of the doctors, with electronics and drugs—one remove from his own, self-determined spasms of epilepsy—trying to force Carl
to create a new source and origin of motion . . .