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Show (o¥3 line between dedication and compulsion, between artistry and insanity? Was I, in my propensity to write, more like Lucinda or Esther, more like Ben or my father? Was I meant to write, as my dreams and feelings told me - all my mental and emotional processes seeming to have accumulated to this result, the only way to make sense of the vast and varied experience of my short lifetime? Or was I hopelessly illegitimate, revealing family secrets I had been sworn to keep, underscoring thoughts and circumstances that were beyond my ken? Was I simply trying to stave off the encroachment of a nervous breakdown, or was I answering the call of foreordination, fulfilling my mission on earth? Would I be dogged by my predilection to words until I became hysterical, my female organs and visceral functions deteriorating in the wake of the terrifying, bright energy which swept through me when I wrote,just as my mother's insides had rebelled at her perfectionist musical inclinations? Would my stomach eat itself away as I waxed prolific, as my father's had done? Would I speak lies or truth? Would I bear good fruit, or would the tree of my creativity be 'hewn at the roof to be thrown into an eternal furnace? I thought of the many writers who had gone over the edge, committed to institutions or suicide. I remembered that Ben was locked up in a state mental hospital in Arizona. From time to time, he wrote letters in his childish scrawl, demanding that my father repent and recognize 'the true priesthood.' But Ervil did more than write notes and perform histrionics. The things which Ben only threatened, Ervil lived out. The schizophrenic fallings of a sick and insecure mind had become pillars of the universe to the younger brother. But Ervil's insanity did |