 |
| September's full moon, 2012 |
Tuesday, 20 November 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 on the list as it is Hungarian, both the author and the setting, and,
of course, the vampires!
Tibor Fischer’s
review 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) because of its Hungarianess 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 what
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’ 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 from migraines myself 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 lay people
– just like the people whom Sacks describes in his books.
While I am reading in this chapter about the range of
visual and musical hallucinations and also 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
these experiences in their book – Migraine
Art.
All that I feel just before the onset of a migraine is
nausea, and my vision can be blurry, this 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. That is just how I feel it.
Oliver Sacks writes – ‘…what a colossal and
complicated achievement normal vision is, as the brain constructs a visual
world in which colour 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 or motivate a painting to
take my mind off it!
I do not have that sort of migraine 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 where 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’ 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 follow some of my own paths 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 read what Oliver Sacks has written about all
of this and more.
No comments:
Post a Comment