Lunatic
Chapter
Abstract
Socratic dialectic thrives — it actually rollicks — on the question “Just what is ‘crazy’, anyway?” The interlocutors include Jeannie, an English professor, and her 43-year-old brother, legally named “Lunatic Michael Culpepper” (“You can’t make this stuff up”, Jeannie posits). Lunatic’s bipolar illness fuels his unconventional and prolific writing life, and has since the Internet opened innumerable avenues for his myriad interests. His posts, including 17,000-plus tweets, have attracted some 2,000 followers; in coded languages, he explores madness, Hermeticism, quantum physics, the Gnostics (or “Ga-nostics”), and much more. Lunatic serves as muse to his sister’s writing, and his dialectical musings on magic offer a clear sense of the real:
Jeannie: “So what is magic? Tell me the opposite of magic.”
Lunatic: “Having no power.”
Jeannie: “Wow. That’s pretty good. That’s why rhetoric was considered a form of magic.”
Lunatic: “Because it is powerful.”
Keywords
Madness dialectic bipolar disorder the writing lifePreview
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Copyright information
© Jeannie Parker Beard 2014