the Disease in the head: command headquarters, The Spider, DIS-EASE — "silence is deadly, pure Spider-food, if…"

The one datum this scene lands that the theme's Spider and DIS-EASE passages do not: Gene M.'s teaching that the Disease "makes its command headquarters in the head," so "the newcomers with some education" are the worst — the educated addict who identifies his whole self with his intellect is the most defended and therefore the most doomed. That command-headquarters-in-the-head beat is 066's distinct contribution here. The other two doctrines these blockquotes voice are landed in full elsewhere and are carried as cross-refs rather than re-taught: the Spider — Feeding versus Starving it, the will as the web the Disease spins in — is the theme's core model at 074 (p. 357, spine); DIS-EASE, the hyphen-trick and Geoffrey Day's tireless objection to it, is landed at 056 (p. 203). Day is diagnosed against the command-headquarters model in real time — "You can almost hear his Disease chewing away inside his head, feeding" — the parasite doing the newcomer's thinking for him.