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Francis Wheatley's avatar

Elizabeth and Jens had the Wittgenstein problem, I suspect. The story is that in conversation with his professor, Bertrand Russell, with whom he gotten very close and quite open, even almost a peer, Wittgenstein began talking about mediocrity and his fear that if he ultimately came to believe that he was really only a second-rate intellect, or perhaps something equally fatal, just merely talented, but not a genius, that he might as well kill himself. And there had been some astounding cases of brilliant Austrian students in Vienna doing exactly that at the time, which both of them knew about. Russell saw that his student was staring at him intensely. He murmured gently, with perhaps a slight gesture of the hand: "No, no, not you, Wittgenstein."

Elizabeth and Jens discussed this kind of thing intensively, as for example the relationship of Salieri to Mozart. They worried about the problem that might ensue if the one (Elizabeth) proved a recognized genius, while the other (Jens) was simply proven to be talented. Would rivalry and the success of one, but not of the other, poison the relationship? Though Jens was, of course, also worried about getting laid or not (maybe ever), since he was actually a hair-trigger sensitive, well- brought up, eighteen year old nerdish kid from a prominent German family with some real money in the background, who had had a brain operation once upon a time, and had played way too much Dungeons and Dragons on a permanent athletic recusal, and who somehow felt unworthy of her. First love, in other words? Or that among some other really weird stuff where it gets interesting. Jens knew that something was wrong. Jens thought that she was a literary genius who was being destroyed by her parents. Spiritually and psychologically, she could never be free until they were dead. His act against the parents was a revolutionary blow for freedom. An existential act of revenge against the tyranny of the arrogant, intolerant, powerful Ones who rule the world, like the Medici of the Florentine Renaissance (the Cenci) or Roman emperors (yes, these were actually brought up) who would simply crush a lovely and spirited young woman of enormous talent and think nothing of it. The play by Camus, 'Caligula', was very much on Jens's mind, even to the interpretation that Camus's Caligula was impotent, as Jens thought he himself might be. You might say that this is a literary crime. And It was not a crime that was entirely personal. It was a crime that was to be forever unknown, and it was for her, but it was also idealist and existential, for mankind. She had Jens reading her assigned reading list as if was the I Ching.

To understand Elizabeth's phony addiction to drugs, and all her purported drug experience, it crossed my mind recently that there is the current fascination with the life of the celebrity chef Anthony Bourdain, who really was a fine artist, but also a junkie, who often descends into levels of genius darkness from real moments of genius light which reward us with his enhancing love of life itself, wine and food. Which he lost. And whom some find tragic and moving. And Elizabeth knew all about tragic Byron 'high on Harrow Hill, dreaming of freedom far away' and I wonder about the poet maudit Rimbaud. Didn't she look like him on the road? She said it: that her character Dibbles in her disappeared novel, Samual (sic), hitting the road like a tramp from a channel ferry crossing at Ostende, maybe, (done it myself, once upon a time) looked pale blonde and Flemish! So her drug story that she had been a junkie put her in the destructive genius category, and she amazed her fellow students with negative and transgressive but joyful wanderjahr hippie tales. And she did have comic genius. She inherited this from her mother's side of the family.

Actually, I just thought of something that might amuse AH , with his interest in architecture. She likened herself in a letter to me to the ancient English abbey of the venerable Bede, which had now had an enormous 'ferrocemento' addition put on it in the brutalist style! (Blaming Jens as the architect, of course.)

Well, I am talking away right off the top of my head today. Am I bullshitting? Not really. I think I am close. I also think that Jens took a long time to understand that Elizabeth had a BPD. But he did realize that before they were arrested, and he did accept that. I think that he really did love her like the songs say, and I know that you can love a fucked-up woman. (They were one and the same, after all.) But I think that she knew that he knew, and that is interesting to me. I sometimes think that their arrest might have been deliberately, if unknowing at a certain level, caused by her.

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Truthfinder's avatar

Du weißt, dass der Podcast-Clan für viel Geld Bots bezahlt und wir wissen das auch. 😊 Vielleicht kommt ja bald die große Enthüllung aller Mitwirkenden? Buhuhu es bleibt spannend Kinder!

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