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| September's full moon, 2012 |
I am still with Oliver
Sacks
In-between
times I have been reading –
Eats Shoots & Leaves by
Lynne Truss; SPELL IT OUT, The Singular Story of English
Spelling by David Crystal, and The
Finno-Ugrian Vampire by Noémi Szécsi.
Me and vampires
I
ordered the last book as it is Hungarian, both the author and the setting, and,
of course, the vampires!
Tibor
Fischer’s reveiew in the Guardian Weekly,
02.11.2012, says that it is a better read if the reader has inside knowledge of
the Magyar language, culture and country, especially Budapest.
I
discovered when I went to purchase it that this book was only available in ten
of the book chain’s many stores, including Brussels. Nevertheless a copy was
sent very rapidly to my local branch and I devoured it (an apt description
considering the subject) in a matter of hours!
Vampires
are not my usual cup of tea, but as I had a few days off it made a change from
the stuff that I usually read. It was because of the Hungarianess of it that I
was so keen to read it.
Having
read Bram Stoker’s Dracula last
winter, more for the wonderful language than the story line, I had some
background information on the life of vampires that added to my enjoyment of
the Hungarian book.
It was
all in all a good holiday read and was a welcome bit-in-between amongst the
non-fiction that I usually devour on planes, trains and trams.
Hallucinations
Now, I
am back to Oliver Sacks’s Hallucinations
–
It is because I have hit the spot in this
book that deals with migraines, classic migraines that arrive with an
introductory visual hallucination, or aura, before the pain begins, that I
started to write about what I am reading.
I have suffered myself from migraines since I
was nineteen years old and I had already seen my mother suffering from them
throughout my childhood and teens. Oliver Sacks and his mother, both migraineurs shared their migraine
experiences, just as I did with my mother.
They were both neurologists, my mother and I laypeople
– like the people whom Sacks describes in his books.
While I am reading in this chapter about the
range of visual and musical hallucinations, hallucinations of smells that the
classic-migraine sufferers experience, I consider my own pre-migraine experiences.
I have no such luck to see interesting hallucinations;
nothing has appeared to inspire my artist leanings as they have done with
several well-known figures, including probably Lewis Carroll. Klaus Podoll and
Derek Robinson have described some of them in their book – Migraine Art.
All I feel just before the onset of a
migraine is nausea, that is almost immediately followed by a throbbing,
excruciating pain that J.C. Peters described in his 1853 A Treatise on Headaches as a pain of a hammering, throbbing or pushing
nature… pressing, dull, boring with a sense of bursting…as if the brain was
pressed outwards.
Oliver Sacks writes – ‘…what a colossal and
complicated achievement normal vision is, as the brain constructs a visual
world in which color and movement and size and form and stability are all
seamlessly meshed and integrated. I came to regard my own migraine experiences
as a sort of spontaneous (and fortunately reversible) experiment of nature, a
window into the nervous system – and I think this was one reason I decided to
become a neurologist.’
As I read this chapter called— ‘Pattern: Visual Migraines’, I began to
think that I was missing out on something. I thought that, if I am going to go
through all that pain that accompanies a migraine, albeit to come out the other
end one or two days later, pleasantly refreshed and more alive than before,
then it would be good to have some hallucinatory images and visions to enjoy at
the onset. They could even act as a warning for me to get some tablets taken!
I do not have that sort of migraines and I
hope that I have to wait a long time before I next experience the type that I
do experience, but I will be prepared to pay better attention when it comes and
I have already placed a notebook and pencil in the medicine cupboard beside the
migraine tablets. If I can reach the tablets then I will also be able to grab
the notebook. Then I can record in detail what happens, what I experience, with
or without visions and auras to satisfy my artistic eye, the next time that I
feel like my head will burst.
Conductive?
What, readers may ask, do hallucinations and
migraines have to do with conductive upbringings, lifestyles or education?
Whenever I read Oliver Sacks’s books I
recognise that his words and his work have a lot to do with conductive pedagogy.
His observational skills and his description,
his placing together of sequences of behaviour to form a picture, all remind me
of what I do in my own conductive work.
His descriptions of how many factors
influence symptoms and his insistence on not believing the first things that we
see, remind me to rest on some of my own laurels but also to learn more from
his words.
Within the virtual spirals of human lives,
with neurological illness or wellness, with the influences of drugs, loving
care, sleep disorders, eating disorders or visual disorders and much, much
more, we must use our observational skills, not only of sight but also those of
touch, smell, hearing and also ‘instinct’, to guide us to see the whole of an individual and to use these
observations while making decisions on how to help clients progress and develop
and continue spiralling upwards.
Back to the book
Perhaps while reading further and writing
some snippets about things that strike me most in the next chapters I will end
up with a unified whole.
I will discover more, I am sure, as I carry
on with the next chapter, called – ‘The
“Sacred” Disease’. It is about epilepsy, a subject that I think most
conductors and many parents will have come across in their work and lives. Many
of us will have observed the onset of convulsions or the affects that the
anti-epileptic drugs have on personality.
I shall see what Oliver Sacks has written
about all of this and more.
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