1
Being Van Huis
– novel project –
Premise
The only way out of total confusion is a rare sort of spiritual enlightenment.
Fabula
Jerry is at home and works at several schools, where he is asked to teach his specialty: mind-reading and remote viewing through an invocation of ancient telepathic power. He has discovered the soul or seat of language inside the body to this purpose.
Hans is a professor of religion, specifically of spiritual enlightenment, who is radically out of touch with colleagues and holds suspiciously unacademic contacts with old friends from his birth place in rural Europe.
Setting
Color palates and hues are important. There is a continuing sense of simplicity in matters that usually are hugely complex. These matters themselves seem sometimes to form the setting within which thoughts unfold, as though theories and ideas pave the backdrop to any life.
Narrative strands
The first strand follows a man named Jerry Van Huis in his 40s who lives somewhere in rural Illinois, quite luxuriously, but who also seems to constantly be lacking something, or rather, someone: his wife. The reader will not know whether he makes up his wife or actually has one but that’s not the point: the point is that he meets with the second person Hans Green in chapter 3 of the book, after both have been introduced in both first chapters.
Jerry has trouble keeping up with his time: he doesn’t understand modern technologies and feels that this has repercussions all the way down to the level of language, where one makes sense of the world, or is supposed to.
1.Frederic’s home
Introducing Jerry, narrator, and a few other characters that somehow seem vaguely connected in how they talk about strategies for knowing things better, in the future or where to find stuff now. Introducing the topic of telepathy in the last scene of chapter. Set up to seem as though this is the entire story plus characters. Chapter 2 starts a new strand, which comes as somewhat of a surprise.
‘Why are you following me?’, Frederic Van Huis asked the girl. They just met at an online platform for lonely strangers.
‘I’m not,’ she replied.
‘Oh, but you are. She waited a bit. Frederic could tell she was thinking. It said so underneath their chat. ‘Well, I just like what you posted earlier,’ she continued.
‘That thing about the windows to your heart and the world?’ he asked.
‘Yes, that one.’
‘OK, well I don’t know you so I might call the police if I catch you following me again.’
‘So should I unfollow you?’ she asked.
‘Is that possible?’ Frederic wondered out loud, as he imagined a person would just dissolve into thin air, would simply stop to exist.
‘It is in our day and age’, she explained. And then: ‘When are you from?’.
‘When am I from? Are you insane? I was born in the ’70s.’ Slowly Frederic got wary of missing out on life again.
‘If you’re not on board by now, you may as well live in … the 1900s. Or earlier.’
And that was that. Frederic didn’t trust himself to go on. He sank deeper in his