Search Ebook here:


The Mind and the Moon: My Brother’s Story



The Mind and the Moon: My Brother’s Story PDF

Author: Daniel Bergner

Publisher: Ecco

Genres:

Publish Date: May 17, 2022

ISBN-10: 0063004895

Pages: 320

File Type: Epub, PDF

Language: English

read download

Book Preface

Before he was put on a locked ward, my brother danced on ferry decks. The ferries ran from Seattle to the islands of Puget Sound. This was back then; Seattle wasn’t yet Seattle. The boats were battered and sparsely used, and one day my brother, riding across the sound, wearing a khaki Army jumpsuit and little black dance shoes, was infused by the cadence of the water striking the hull and by the engine’s varied, rhythmic vibrations rising up from the bowels and traveling along the deck where he stood.

The jumpsuit buttoned up the front. He’d bought it at an Army-Navy store downtown, because he wanted a garment that would unify rather than divide his body. The dance shoes had a more basic explanation. In addition to playing the piano with promise, he had, at around the age of twenty-one, ambitions as a dancer and choreographer. How I envied those shoes! Streamlined, nimble, supple as slippers but with minimalist laces, sharply pointed, scuffed yet still a rich black, they were beautiful and full of artistic attitude.

The impact of the rough water against the bow created a steady, emphatic beat, and above that the engine delivered not only a churning rhythm but something bordering on a melody, deep and ancient, like a Gregorian chant. It was a small part of my brother’s gift that he both heard, at swelling intensity, this music of water and machinery and allowed himself to be inspired and electrified by it. His body responded with a physical, visceral version of a child’s wonder as she holds a conch shell to her ear and listens to its elemental communications for the first time.

He stood on the lowest deck, near the front of the cars and the slung chains, as the boat’s combination of Gregorian choir and pounding drum surged through him. He lifted one foot to knee height, then leapt high off the other and landed on the first foot, so that there was a simultaneous vaulting and transferring of weight, followed by a reversal and more repetition back and forth, melded with the strivings of his torso and arms, amounting to movements at once airborne and sinuous. To the few passengers who watched from their cars, his mix of military jumpsuit and elfin shoes may have looked odd, compounding the oddity of his dancing, but all of this strangeness was countered by the broad solidity of his body and by his resistance to the sporadic lurching of the boat, which should have pitched him off balance and made him grab at the chain poles or brace himself against a car, but never did. He hung in the air, stomped his heels on the steel deck, sprang from side to side, spun, and elevated again, athletic, animalistic, ethereal, impelled by the pulse of the water and the echoes of medieval worship.

And soon he was on a psychiatric ward, with a heavy dose of Haldol seeping into his brain.

This is his book. And it is the story of a few of the many who, over the past several years, his story sent me out to find.

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Prologue

One

Two

Three

Four

Five

Six

Seven

Eight

Nine

Ten

Eleven

Twelve

Acknowledgments

Notes on Sources

About the Author

Also by Daniel Bergner

Copyright

About the Publisher


Download Ebook Read Now File Type Upload Date
Download here Read Now Epub, PDF June 6, 2022

How to Read and Open File Type for PC ?