"'Most people,'" not raising his voice, though something in Lew jumped as if he had, "are dutiful and dumb as oxen. Delirium literally means going out of a furrow you've been plowing. Think of this as a productive sort of delirium."
* * * * * * * * * *
"Think of this as a productive sort of delirium"
So Drave doesn't want Lew to get back on track. Drave doesn't want Lew to "get back to the way most people live." Drave want's Lew to see his derailing as a chance to change. I was going to say "do better" but I think that implies too much judgment on the quality of the change and I think Drave is ambivalent to that aspect. His description of most people as "dutiful and dumb oxen" suggests (or is it outright? I'm being too wishy-washy, aren't I?!) a negative connotation to your trolley remaining on the tracks or your plow staying within the furrow.
Delirium is characterized "by restlessness, illusions, and incoherence of thought and speech." Lew is definitely suffering from illusions and his life itself has become incoherent, first and foremost his inability to remember the sins of his past. And now Drave and this weird Chicago neighborhood and the Esthonia Hotel/Maze and his sudden immersion in a vague 12 Step Program and/or religious cult. He has definitely jumped the furrow. Now Drave wants him to use that to move his life forward. He wants him to engage in the other aspect of delirium, I would think: wild excitement and ecstasy. To jump from your furrow is to escape the dreary mundanity of the life you thought you had to lead. To escape from the plow and the harness should induce excitement and ecstasy.
I've never known the etymology of the word delirium before (unless Neil Gaiman discusses it in The Sandman and then I knew it for half a second before forgetting it again). I see it as a lovely idea. And yet the use of this picture—your plow escaping your furrow—was given such negative connotations. Delirium is something you don't want. It's a bad thing because you've somehow split from reality. But what good is reality to the ox strapped to a plow being driven in a straight line over and over again? The main connotation of delirium is that escaping from your life, what is your expected reality, is a bad thing and shouldn't be done. You've gone crazy now. You need help to get back into your mold. It's authoritarian propaganda. "Keep in line or it's the nut house for you." (Again, this reminds me of Reverend Cherrycoke from Mason & Dixon.) But the second definition of delirium . . .wild excitement and ecstasy . . .that's the one that I'd embrace. Some might think you've gone crazy, throwing your life away as you skip out of your furrow and trundle off across everybody else's furrows and out of the field. But there's excitement in that. Adventure! A promise to be who you want no matter the cost.
It's Enid boarding the strange bus at the end of Ghost World. It's Chief Bromden throwing the tub room control panel through the window to escape the asylum. It's Orr crashing his plane over and over again practicing until he gets the chance to escape the army and the war and the insanity of it all in Catch-22. It's me leaving my home town in my 1972 VW bus with only a box of comic books and a large stack of tape cassettes.
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