Lawrence Weschler at Wondercabinet:
And here we arrive at a whole knot of issues at the heart of both Aviv’s and my own earlier characterizations of Oliver’s story. Because Oliver could relate to the situation of those wretched patients both out of the residue of his mother’s malediction itself and the sheer extent of the drug induced extravagances and catatonias he’d thenceforth experienced as its direct result during his ensuing wild California days (when his slogan had been “Every dose an overdose”), and beyond that, the wider identification he’d come to feel more generally with what his California-era friend, the psychoanalyst Bob Rodman, termed “communities of the refused” (an identification which would subsequently extend to Parkinsonians, Touretters, amnesiacs, the Deaf, the catatonic, the colorblind, the faceblind, and other such marginalized communities, and for that matter ferns and cuttlefish and even certain inert chemical elements as well). That sense of identification came to ground a profound empathy which, on the one hand helped him to give voice to the otherwise voiceless by helping them to reclaim their own stories, their own narratives, in so doing allowing them to reemerge as the active agents of their own lives—a practice which, granted, occasionally overstepped its bounds into outright projection and, in the subsequent recounting, downright confabulation.
more here.
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