just jen

RIP Michael Jackson

I read this article about the Michael Jackson media blitz:

This lopsided allocation of media attention and public focus is an ominous indicator of how shallow and superficial we've become as a nation, and calls into question whether a nation fixated on entertainment possesses the maturity, discipline, judgment, and civic virtue necessary to preserve freedom in an increasingly hostile world.

Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. 

I think this article is an ominous indicator of how shallow and superficial this man's appreciation of art can be.  Identifying Michael Jackson as something new to the culture betrays a Philistine lack of knowledge of the history of dance and art.  Michael Jackson is hyperlinked all the way back to antiquity.  And how there is another threat to freedom on our horizons: a hatred of art and a hatred of the desires and tastes of the common man.  Assaults on common taste are really just another form of hatred for humanity and a wish to control the public attention and taste is nothing more than an expression of fascism dressed up in elitist attire. 

While I agree that there are other things going on in the world that deserve our attention--there is something about Michael Jackson that stodgy-old art hating neglects to see.  Our hunger for celebrity and popular culture is a hunger to be moved.  Michael Jackson, for whatever sensationalistic problems the man suffered, was an artist and his music and his dancing was a phenomenon to be respected, whether or not he reflected one's personal tastes.  The art of Pablo Picasso, for example, is not something that all agree is beautiful, but it is an art that deserves consideration, for its technique, form, and impact.  

I think the vigor in this assault on public taste is motivated by a misplaced division between high culture and low.  And of course, the older generation always finds the taste of the next deplorable.  Would this writer have complained about media attention to Fred Astaire or Frank Sinatra?  Both Astaire and Sinatra, before there deaths names Jackson as the inheritor of their traditions.  Astaire and Sinatra have both said the following about Michael Jackson:

“Oh, God! That boy moves in a very exceptional way. That’s the greatest dancer of the century”. - Fred Astaire

“I didn’t want to leave this world without knowing who my descendant was. Thank you Michael!”- Fred Astaire (shortly before his death)

“The only male singer who I’ve seen besides myself and who’s better than me – that is Michael Jackson.” – Frank Sinatra

I continue to take our culture's need for "entertainment" as an optimistic sign of our health.  The use of the word "entertainment" here is an insult, and one that, I think, unfairly reduces what it is Michael Jackson was and what he did.  On the issue of his predatory instinct toward young boys--we continue to confuse the artist with his art.  If it is, in fact, true that Michael Jackson was molesting young boys, (it is not at all clear that is--the evidence is largely in the conclusions of the public based on bizarre behaviors that have multiple explanations) that really bears no relationship on the lasting impact of his art--of which I think the most significant portion was his dancing.  If we are to take the personal behavior of the artist as the sign of the integrity of the work, we'll have a huge problem with as many (if not more) of the artists of the high tradition as the low.  (Think Mozart, Caravaggio--as one of our friends brought to our attention in the combox this week--Michelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci.) History tells us that beauty in art is not necessarily correlated to beauty in moral character--in fact, the two often exist in stark contrast to each other.  James Hillman has commented profoundly on the depths to which artists sink and its seeming inverse proportion to how high their star and skills reach. (He uses the degrading deaths of Marilyn Monroe, Judy Garland, and Elvis Presley as examples noting the contrast of the conditions of their deaths to what their work represented in life.)  

As a dancer, Michael was an indescribable genius.  His movement vocabulary was drawn from the history of dance and he is unparalleled in his ability to bring "street dance' to the very edges of high art.  His body, ravaged at the end of his life but his own self-destructive impulses, was built from and around the vocabulary he created, until his very limbs and tendons conformed to his drive for higher expression.  Though some of his movements could be construed as vulgar, all of dance, emanating from our body, has pointers toward sexuality.  I read recently a quote (the source of which I cannot find now) that said something to the effect of: all dance is an upright expression of a horizontal impulse.  If you begin to qualify dance moves as high or low, as beautiful or vulgar based on its reference to sex acts, you'll find yourself in very murky, grey territory.  

The world mourns the loss of Michael Jackson because of the food he provided for those who long for substantial art.  Whether or not his art was your taste is a side issue--his world-wide popularity is not a sign of his lack of ability but an ear mark of how we all long for beauty.  

The writer of this article calls the media attention on Michael "lopsided" but I beg to differ.  Michael Jackson is the product of the freedom this writer cries out to protect.  That we were able to experience a Michael and that a Michael was enabled to make such beautiful poetry in motion is the strongest sign we have that the human desire for freedom will not perish.  I cannot see a Michael Jackson evolving from anything but a culture that is free.  

Criticize the lack of media attention to violation of freedom across the globe--but don't criticize the common man for mourning and wishing to understand the individual who provided such  masterful expressions of freedom in voice and movement.  What is the Moonwalk but a body, through skill and mastery, defying gravity?  What is the elastic movement of those limbs but an expression of the spiritual control of the body to express higher values and freedom from physical restraint?  What are those unbelievable scales and phonetics in the upper-ranges of masculine falsetto but an expression of freedom from biology and cultural expression into the outer-reaches of sublimity?  Lest the homophobic recoil be triggered too quickly--what were the Castrati, then, as part of a religious high art tradition?  There are more than a few parallels between Michael and the Castrati, as a viewing of the movie of Farinelli might evoke.  (I deliberately chose this clip to illustrate the fervor and ecstasy Farinelli created in his audiences.)

Even Michael's de-evolution through plastic surgery and his documented anorexia nervosa is a result of the mental anguish he endured for the sake of art--the desire to control the body for higher artistic expression, expression that blasts through the limitations of the body into the realm of spirit, obviously preyed upon this man endlessly, until that desire to reach sublimity destroyed his face and body.  I'm not sanctifying his disease--only noting the connection it has to his desire to reach artistic height. It seems that, like, us, Michael became unable to separate the man from the art he made. 

RIP Michael Jackson.  

If you doubt the link between Astaire and Jackson, then I think you need to see this video.

OnFiction: Sensitive Children and Illness

what if innately sensitive children are more susceptible to illness?

(photo from shane on deviantart)

I found this new blog/magazine about cognitive psychology and fiction--right up my alley.  This latest entry discusses the relationship between early childhood illness and later success in life.  

Exploring the numerous instances of artists and writer who were ill as children, poster Maja Djikic writes: 

 But here is my question. What would have happened if Marcel Proust was able to amble about without the terrifying prospect of a fatal asthma attack, if Tennessee Williams, age 5, could walk about, instead of lying bedridden for two years from the diphtheria-induced paralysis of the legs, if Sinclair Lewis, not lonely in his ungainliness, had been able to get every girl he so pined for? Would they have still written themselves into history? Would they have enjoyed their lives better? And knowing full well that muses gift only those whose bodies teach them a lesson in transience - do we dare defy them, by trying for both?

I'm going to add to that the relationship of familial madness to the artistic temperment as well as the related phenomenons of alcoholism and drug abuse, which often mask mood disorders--the two best studies of which I know are Kay Redfield-Jamison's Touched with Fire and Louis Sass's Madness and Modernism.  

I also add that it occurred to me that there is a way to invert Djikic's lens, here.  By which I mean: perhaps the relationship is the other way around.  Perhaps the question is not: How does childhood illness create artistic genius?  Rather the question may be: how does artistic genius lead to childhood illness? Is there a possible relationship of sensitivity to a weakened immune system?  Or a tendency to autoimmune disorder?  

The other proposition I'd like to advance is that highly sensitive children may be treated as if they were ill because of the protective instinct they trigger in their care-givers. (See Gavin Becker's Protecting the Gift for this phenomenon--he proposes that artists and saints trigger a protective instinct in us because socially we know how essential and valuable they are to society.   This can lead to either actual illness because the mind convinces the body it is sick so it fulfills the prophecy or to a myth of illness that surrounds the child.  I'm thinking in particular of Carl Jung who was often described as sickly and that was the reason given for his long absences from school.  But in actuality he simply preferred to be on his own and do his own imagining and learning so he malingered. 

Mind-body medicine proposes a different model to consider--even the causes of infectious illnesses are not pathogens, per se.  The cause is a breakdown of the immune system that allows the pathogen to take over and multiply.  For instance, all of us have the bacteria in our spinal column that could, if allowed to multiply, cause fatal meningitis.  Yet some people will contract the disease and others will not.  What happened was not an overwhelming infection---it was a breakdown of the system that usually protects the body from overwhelming infection.  

Sensitivity.  If a person is sensitive to sounds, images, colors, smells, tastes, and experiences, why wouldn't the also be physically sensitive in other ways?  

This is actually a paradigm issue--the Blank Slate of empricist philosophy.  Are we born blank slates and made into who we are by our experiences?  Or are we born with innate characteristics?  It's a false dichotomy of course, and that's where the trouble lies.  This idea can be found in Malcolm Gladwell's latest book Outliers--he demonstrates the notion that greatness occurs by random tricks of circumstance.  He proposes that as many recognized geniuses exist many more go unrecognized.  And it isn't grit and determination and bootstrap philosophy that causes the recognized genius to pursue greatness--its simply the random chance of circumstances.  

Something doesn't seem quite right about that philosophy to me--what do you think?

Migraines Part III: Hildegarde von Bingen (A)

There are certain ideas that haunt me--hunt me down like The Hound of Heaven.  They always present themselves in a crisis of language.  One of them is the impossibility of mind/body duality.  Another related conundrum is a conflation of "mind" and the ancient concept of "soul".  Throw the word "self" in there and the salad gets all kinds of mixed up.  Mind and body are not separate, do not oppose each other and are enmeshed.  (Medieval Philosophy Nerds, does this sound heretical?  It's not. Disagree?  Slap me around in the combox.)  There is no mind without body--though there is body without mind.  Our language is also haunted.  One of the sentences I read recently from cognitive psychologist Steven Pinker (whom I like a great deal) wrote:

    But cognitive sciences is showing the self, too, is just another network of brain systems.
    (The Blank Slate, 42).

Just?  I don't know from just. 

Marshall McLuhan gave me the idea of a probe--and now, rather than tackle such complexity head on, I find that it is best to explore these metaphysical problems through phenomena, rather than head on.  To probe certain phenomena through the lens of the metaphysical difficulty. They present themselves simply.  Migraines are one of thoses phenomena. 

Regarding the beatified migraineur, Hildegard:

"Mysticism is just tomorrow's science dreamed today."  (Marshall McLuhan). 

(I think this is going to require multiple posts within my 7-post probe of migraines.  And not only because The Backyardigans is almost over.) 

I'm not one for conspiracy theories.  Who said it?  That never settle for conspiracy as an explanation when simple incompetence will suffice?  (If you post the answer it in the combox I'll enter you into a drawing for another reader prize.  I'm sure the quote is slightly inaccurate.)  I don't find the lack of notable women in history, or at least the relative lack, very surprising.  After having two kids, two things are very clear to me:

1) there isn't much time for much else and

2) after having children I could very easily be satisfied--deeply--by having nurtured and brought those lives into the world. 

There is something so completely rewarding about nursing a baby through the night, exhausting though it may be.  I am not surprised that a lot of women, who are more than capable of producing what a man does artistically, philosophically, and scientifically, just, well, don't.  Their need for bringing something lasting and contributory (I thought that word should be contributive--but contributory it is) into the world is satisfied when a sperm meets an egg in her body.  

And knowing what a Herculean effort it is to get work done, to discipline yourself, and be your own taskmistress, there has to be a deep, burning fire to spur one on.

(yes, Karen Horney would call this Womb Envy, though since I have it I'm not sure its fare to couch it thusly. though, Hey Perfect Work Readers--another reason that time in the Land of Not OK was 100% necessary! You see?  Do you see?  And though its supposedly pronounced horn-EYE, how titter worthy is THAT name?)

If that fire is channeled into the pro-creative act, there's isn't as much NEED involved.  Nothing spurs one on like need. 

But in the case of Hildegarde (who sort of makes my point because she was a cloistered nun with an unbelievable, insatiable sex drive in the midst of celibacy) I have to think the fact that she is not studied more often is a bit of a conspiratorial crime.  She was at least as visionary as daVinci, and a decided polymath.  Though we like to imagine that a woman's genius was conspiratorially unacknowledged even the Big Bad Evil Patriarchs of yore recognized genius when they saw it.  She was regularly consulted by popes, emperors, and contemporaneous theologians.  

Hildegarde was a composer, a visionary, a mystic, a poetess, a playwright, (she's the founder of the musical in my history book), a philosopher, a theologian, a naturalist, a medicine woman, an herbalist, a channeler, and a linguist.  And I'm leaving a few other things out.  

That she was a migraineur--well.  We'll leave that to Migraines Part III Hildegarde Part B.  Hint: I'm not suggesting that her migraines are related to her genius.  I'm suggesting that her phenomenal experience of them are.  Phenomenal experience means just what it sounds like.  What does it feel like to be Hildegarde and have a migraine?  To be a visionary and a mystic and to have migraines?  Look again at the picture above.

going digital in long-hand

This Smart Pen is something that Blog Nerd must have.  I was going to get it for my birthday--but I my Inner Cheap resisted the expense.  I'm redoing my office--which of course is going to lead to unbelievable, Prolific Greatness.  And my trust Super Pen will allow me to take notes anywhere and have them sent straight to my computer.  (Writers are a very supersititous lot.  We need magic objects and alternative realities in order to perform.)  

Anyway--I figured I would hold back 200 bucks until the office was complete and then if I still have the 200 dollars I'd buy it.  The pen, among other nifty things, allows you to write notes longhand, and then upload those notes to your computer.  

This has amazing benefits.  Research is caught half-way between the old and the new.  About 65% of my research is electronic--which flows very nicely with my writing style.  But ther remaining 35% is still analog and it really puts a cramp in my technogeek style.  Trying to hold the book open with one hand while typing the quote I want to lift into the computer is really just anything but tres elegant.  My original thought was a text scanning pen--and I'm still contemplating it.  Ideal would be a pen that scans and allows for recording of long-hand notes.  There may be one.  Still looking.  

My current frustration is spending an hour or two at the library making long-hand notes on legal pads and then transcribing those notes into the computer.   On the opposite end of this frustration is the fact that sometimes, writing longhand, does something to your thinking that sitting at the computer does not, a point I discussed through Twitter with @mirielmargaret (who is VALEDICTORIAN of her graduating class this weekend--GO NERD POWER!)  

There is certainly a different neural pathway for thinking while writing long-hand.  Whether or not this is something that will persist or something that just adapted to long-hand writing as we learned to think and write at the same time, I'm not sure.  But certainly, as I'm sure almost anyone who writes will attest, there is a different thinking process with the speed and motor skill of long-hand writing that sometimes feels necessary.  

For instance--today I begin work on a first draft (from a rough draft) of Chapter 2.  I'm going to have to step back and organize my thinking on the chapter through re-writing the outline.  For some reason, outlining is something I MUST DO LONGHAND.  I can't explain why exactly.  

I also like being able to do things like draw arrows, circle things, write marginalia.  Both the process of creating it and the process of looking at it later is much more satisfying than the digital enviornment I now work in.  

But this pen might change that as I will have both.  

the hunt for gollum

Have you seen it yet?  

What did you think??

I was enamored of the film--for itself and for what it represents.  The Smeagol/Gollum story has long been an integral part of my love affair with The Lord of the Rings.  The photography on this low budget film is breathtaking.  The word magnificent comes to mind.  I am haunted by the master shot of Aragorn's bowered-garden vision of Arwen.   It's at 26:57.  Somewhere between the pre-Raphaelites and MC Escher.  It forced an exhale--as if I'd been waiting for the relief of that shot.  The goodness of it.  The honestness of it.  

And that's what this film is honest.  And so absolutely good.  At 28:43--Gollum, up a tree watching for the approach of the Ring Wraith, for the moment, bonded with Aragorn as targets of approaching jeopardy--it suddenly struck me: Gollum illustrates the difference between Evil and those who are consumed by it.  So much to say about that, I can't really even broach it here.  Gollum, while consumed by an evil power, is altogether separate from the Evil that is generative of what tortures him.  This is why Gollum draws compassion and pity whereas Sauron does not.  One can hope for Gollum's redemption, indeed almost see it begin to unfold.  There is none for Sauron.   That this movie brought revelation, is simply another hallmark of its worth.  There is absolutely no purpose to fashioning filmed or live performances of famous literature if it does not shed light on the work, forcing new readings.  So in that sense, this film succeeds where so many high budget adaptations do not.  

And the revelations does not seem forced to me but simply true: Tolkein pays particular heed to compassion for Gollum and how compassion for Gollum ultimately plays an essential part in destroying the generative evil that threatens to destory all that is good. 

It also struck me, in a sort of chuckle-to-myself kind of way, how this film is a metaphor for the problem its form addresses--which is to say the corruption of film-making through the Industrial Machine.  The Hunt for Gollum--becomes a hunt for the consuming greed and corruption that threatens the art of film-making and story telling.  

And that's the other exhale this film draws from me--I have produced, written, directed, acted, and written some more in non-income producing contexts more times than I could ennumerate for you. Often, I have been shamed for it.  Art for art's sake, I've been told, is a waste of energy, an ill-conceived myth.  And always, always, there is the not-so-subtle insinuation that art done for free is never valid or as well-executed as art done for profit.  That we do the art for its own sake, simply because it isn't good enough to be done for profit.  

The fact that this is part of the genre known as "fan" work--like fan fiction, fan videos, fan films, etc.--brings similar relief.  Because there is also the other mean-spirited insinuation implicit: That to love anything that much--your own work, or the work of another--makes you a dork.  A loser.  Because to love anything that much reveals you--leaves you open, vulnerable to attack.  And who can resist tearing into that?  A dork with his throat laid bare?  

Well done, Chris Bouchard and crew.  And thanks for bringing that particular Gollum to the edge of Mount Doom.  The film world may just have experienced a Return of the King--with Passion for the Work at last wearing the crown.  

Hamlet, Get Thy Reeboks Laced

Takemybreathaway1191

Exercise and Depression

Posted using ShareThis

I recently posted this on Facebook:

sometimes i think the whole existential atheist movement wouldn't have started if Jean-Paul Sartre had merely gone for a run and had a good night's sleep.

Because honestly, I know the nausea of existence of which he writes.  And it usually happens when I'm not exercising and staying up too late.  Really all Sartre needed was a good mommy to tell him to eat his pain au chocolat, get some fresh air, and go to bed at a decent hour.  Note: existential atheism=no mommy?  And Simone was too busy writing to help him at all--wifely slacker.  Putting her writing before her lover and family (Bonny B: PUT THAT KNIFE DOWN!  Can't you see Mommy is WRITING?). 

Anyhoo.

Dr.ShockMD, one of my new bloggy crushes, posted the link above on exercise and depression which I'd heard before.  There was also another study, of small power, done some time ago in which the people who exercised actually had MORE improvement than people who took antidepressants.  If I were a good blogger I'd research it and get you the link to that study but, frankly, Gentle Blog Readers, I'm EXHAUSTED this AM and behind schedule so JUST TAKE MY WORD FOR IT.  ;) 

I posted this because I started back running this week--and my good, sweet GOSH what a difference it makes in my mood and mental well-being.  Also, because, you know everything gets filtered through my dissertation, it made me think of this:

"How weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable, seem to me all the uses of this world."
--Hamlet, Act I Scene ii.

You can't be down with Hamlet without getting jiggy with Renaissance medicine and, in particular, the Renaissance fascination with melancholia, or depression.  The most famous example of Renaissance scholarship, and the one most frequently associated, with Hamlet is Bright's Treatise on Melancholoy. 
Both correlate melancholy to a popular stereotype of scholars, who are identified as being highly prone.  And interestingly enough--they suggest exercise and outdoor activity as a cure. 

I'm always floored how much the common sense parts of medicine persist through the centuries.  As if we know ourselve intuitively, even before dissection, experimentation, and randomized, double-blind, controlled studies. 

So then--wondering again, in Act I maybe Hamlet should have just taken a run in a pretty spot in Denmark, come back and happily put a dagger in his murderous uncle's heart with a clear conscience and a pleasing endorphin afterglow.  Gertrude and Ophelia would have lived longer, that's for sure.  And see, they fell down on the job, too, just like Simone: "Hamlet, button up that doublet, go take a walk, and then GET SOME SLEEP!  It will all seem better in the morning." 

And back to our post on Tristan/Depresso and Isolde--I wonder also what we lose when we lose our capacity for grief?  I mean, really:

Hamlet:
What a piece of work is a man, how noble in reason, how
infinite in faculties, in form and moving how express and
admirable, in action how like an angel, in apprehension how like
a god! the beauty of the world, the paragon of animals—and yet,
to me, what is this quintessence of dust? Man delights not me—
nor woman neither, though by your smiling you seem to say so.

Rosencrantz:
My lord, there was no such stuff in my thoughts.

(This is why I'd always make Rosencrantz really annoyingly CHEERFUL all the time, if I were directing.  He's making a joke about Hamlet getting down with the ladies as opposed to the men--but he's also missing the beauty of the preceding speech.  Likely because he doesn't have enough melancholy in him to identify with it.  Nope.  Hey--isn't this apple delcious.  Crunch. and,  what's that sex?  sex?  No.  Crunch.)

Also interesting--reading up on Democritus Junior above, he wrote that he wrote his Anatomy of Melancholy so that he could cure himself of it.  Which brings me to my favorite Antonin Artaud quote:

"No one has ever written, painted, sculpted, modeled, built, or invented except literally to get out of hell." 

So which comes first---the melancholy and the writing?  or the writing and the melancholy?  I know this--I have existential crises regularly after writing too much.  Neediness.  That's when I snap the laptop closed and slap on the running shoes. 

I also know that writing has often saved me from sheer despair. 

Point being--when I'm writing I'm not moving and methinks that is stale, flat, and unprofitable. 

Thank God for running and endorphins. 

more on neurodiversity

Here, Isolde, take thou this Tincture of
Selective Serotonin Re-Uptake Inhibitor. 

Then we can become productive members of an Industrial Machine.  

As a follow up to the post I did about the aneurotypical culture, is this article from Salon which explores both sides of this "movement" amongst autistic people  (HT: Devin M.)

(Original post, here.)

There are several curious overlaps with this article and the post that happened here. Svoboda, the author of the article linked above) mentions deaf-culture just like frequent commenter and friend Kate did in the combox.  And Jenny McCarthy comes up as an unfavorable reference.  (The internet ether is really like one big hive mind, isn't it?)  

To piggy-back on Svoboda's article which does a good job of looking at it from both sides, I have a few additional thoughts.  

One of the problems with this whole conundrum--whether or not "autism" is a "problem" that needs to be "cured"--is that the diagnostic critreria has expanded to cover so many different levels of disability its hard to make any kind of satisfying generalization about the phenomenon.   Adding to the muddled mix is a wide-spread cultural denial of difference and imperfection in any manner--down to the March of Dimes latest advertising campaign:  "Soon all children will be born healthy." which seems to me to be a ridiculously naive slogan and also rather creepy--for I can't help think that in the age of IVF with Pre-Implantation Genetic Diagnosis (PGD), prenatal diagnoses, and selective abortions that the muttered afterthought is "or will not be born at all."  It's an insidious designer attitude evolving about our children's health, their behaviors, and even their gender and looks that makes my skin crawl.  

Using ADD and ADHD as another example of an overdiagnosed and overpathologized phenomenon, a recent study shows that distraction actually aids memory and another that asserts that employees allowed unfettered internet access actually outperform those who are restricted.  Which demonstrate that "distraction" and "distractability" may actually be evidence of higher cognitive performance.  This is not to say that there are not many people so distractable that it begins to interfere with their lives in a negative way--it just provides food for thought about what our expectations are for concentration and, to the point, conformity.  For certainly the widespread notion that nonconformity is associated with genius may not be simply a folk theory but one correlated to reality.  

Thomas Moore (not the saint, but a contemporary writer) wrote in one of his books that if the epic characters of myth were alive today, they would be "treated" out of their proper fantastic appeal. Tristan of Tristan and Isolde would not be called Tristan, says Moore, a name which is derived from a root meaning deep sadness.  He would be called Depresso and he would be Prozac-ed to the point where Isolde was merely seen as a non-productive co-dependent obsession.  

While certainly clinical depression can and should be treated, to what extent has all sadness and grief become indicted?  There is something to that, I think.  How about you?

Migraine: Part I

by ~ObiJohnKenobi

There are moments when the painfully exquisite organization of our bodies becomes apparent to ourself. And usually it is through something that some would describe as pathology.  Like a string of code that suddenly appears in the midst of textual-graphic interface, a psychosomatic blip can reveal to us in terror and and awe, the beauty and complexity of our embodied selves.  

Migraine is one form of this category of experience.  Oliver Sacks wrote a blog post @ NYT on the experience of visual migraines, which often present themselves in intricate patterns:

Here, too, self-organization can produce geometries and patterns in space and time, very similar to what one may see in a migraine aura. In this sense, the geometrical hallucinations of migraine allow us to experience in ourselves not only a universal of neural functioning, but a universal of nature itself.

I experience migraine headaches.  Not frequently at all--if I have two or three a year that's frequent.  But since childhood, I've had overwhelming headache experiences, accompanied with nausea, extreme fatigue and sensory shut down.  I don't want to hear, see, touch, or smell anything, not because it worsens the pain but because its like my senses have become bionic.  Superhuman.  And all of it overwhelms.  

What interests me is how they begin--they have such a low-level, slow growing build, that I can often stop one in its tracks with espresso or some other high-dose caffiene.  They seem to be related to hormones, lack of sleep, and dehydration.  But sometimes, they begin and I'm aware of the symptoms but forget that they are connected to migraine.  What are these symptoms? 

Spaciness.  When I write a sentence different words come out.  I don't mean writing "by" for "buy" but meaning to write "dinosaur" and writing "palimpsest"--and the words usually have some very significant meaning in another context I've been working on or thinking about.  If the mind works on problems explicitly and implicitly, cognitively and subcognitively, and can work on multiple problems at once, its like sometimes, my brain's multiple projects begin to seep through its mebranous divides and a word from one project will suddenly appear in another.  

A widening of my peripheral vision--it suddenly seems as if the area of my periphery is widened and I begin to feel like the first grade teacher with eyes in back of her head.  I feel like my eyes are opened very wide, even when they are not.  

A feeling I call "crispy" which I can only describe as the feeling that some organization to my thought has become brittle (like burnt toast) and is going to crumble to dust.  

I don't have time to finish this--but this morning, I half-dreamed, half-read my way into a thought about the relationship of migraine, stroke, creativity, and ecstatic spiritual experience.  I'll continue later as Mena Bug is about to wake up, and I think B is starting to tire her Pa (grandfather) out, so I'm going to go rescue him.   In the meantime, I'm dying to hear from anyone who has true migraines (not just bad stress headaches) and what their experience of it is like.  Do yours have any odd and strangely aesthetic features to it? Do you have different cognitive, emotional, and spiritual experiences before, during, or after migraines?  Email me or post here.  

text flows

This is getting close to what the digital world can do to and for the printed word but not quite IT yet--the starkness and simpleness of this works on one level...

...and is terribly disappointing at another.  

What we're doing right now is just using the Internet as a digital printing press--its turning everything into magazine format, really, but it is much more flattened out than it can or should be.  

The majority of users on the internet are still using this as a hot medium when it is, in essence, a very cool media.  We could be using this as our own textavisual atmosphere where sound, visual, and textual elements interact in four dimensions.  Why are we not? 

My skill level just isn't there.  In my alternate universe, you know the one where Alice from the Brady Bunch lives with us and my house is always orderly and clean and I always look awesome, well-dressed, and fresh as a daisy, with just the right blend of casual comfort and romantic feminine charm, my lip gloss always faintly gleaming and my eyelashes, long and full and never clumpy or spidery looking?  

Yeah, THAT alternate universe.  

Anyhoo.  

In addition to all that stuff, I also have a graphic designer and sound engineer working with me in my office.  I keep toying with the idea of learning Flash, In Design, Illustrator, and Photoshop.  My hesitation is, well, look people, in about a week and a half or so I'm going to be 37.  (I can't believe that I just wrote that.  Sigh.  True story.)  I feel like I need to quit adding to my skill sets and just produce.  Having said that--it couldn't hurt to start each one at a time, now could it?   

linky love: alexis anne, gilbert magazine, and acephalous

Posting will be light in observation of the coming holy days.  I've got some things set to autopost for you.  In the meantime: some linky love.  The link above comes from this brilliant young artist named Alexis Anne, whom I discovered through one of my favorite art blogs, Street Anatomy.  I've been thinking about what I call the breed of philosophy I do--I'm starting to think of it as radical, romantic embodied materialism.  But don't quote me on that yet.  It's a work in progress.  In all seriousness--something about this clever lady's take reminds me of my own interests.  It's romantic, graphic, there is a startling biological realism in the middle of a whimsical and fantastic setting.  I'm going to purchase some prints--my friend Jennifer B. is a physical therapist and her husband is a physiatrist and she has purchased Butterfly Spine for her husband's office.  She, too, was immediately taken when I posted the link on Facebook.  

If you are familiar with the work of GK Chesterton, but especially if you are NOT, you've got to check out Gilbert Magazine, which offers a little digital peek-a-boo on line.  Edited by Sean P. Dailey, it is a literary journal that offers articles on art and culture as it pays homage to "The Apostle of Common Sense," GK Chesterton.  (Full disclosure--the editor is a fan of Serenity/Firefly, too.)  I'd like to draw your attention to one columnist I particularly enjoy: Robert Moore-Jumonville's Jogging with GK.  (If you know what GK Chesterton looked like, you'll git the tongue-in-cheek, contained therein.) He's got the clear-headed insights that come from running and expands the running metaphor to contain multiple insights in multiple terrains.  

For anyone who watched Idol last night--this is my Simon Cowell reluctantly and rarely given Standing O for this post by scholar/blogger Scott Eric Kaufman who does a reading of William Blake as comic book that totally set my heart a-pitter pat.  It's a brief entry in two parts about reading image as text and reading image and text together that is insightful and clear thinking (hey, hey, for the clear thinkers!) I think you guys know by now that the interplay of text and image excites me, and William Blake has always been a point of fascination for me (for both his breed of Romanticism generally and his artwork specifically) and he's on the short version of my long list of topics I'd like to write about.  This is part of an over-arching Kaufman, who seeks to validate the comic book as a legitimate object of literary study.  To me that seems like applying for the job of Howard Cosell of the Obvious, but someone does need to do it.  Comic books and graphic novels have long seemed to me as the most efficient form of narrative.  

Which brings me to Our Mr. Lileks who introduced me to a whole other level of time suck through this: 

xtranormal.com

A FREE online application that allows to write, direct, and make your own movies using these bizarre little lego looking actors.  Oh. My. Gosh.  You already know the depth of my blog crush on Our Mr. Lileks.  And now.  This.  So you can see where I may go with this.  Yah?  Of COURSE, Hamlet.  Watch for it.  If I get the time.  Maybe as an Easter Sunday indulgence. 

Speaking of indulgences: I'm breaking a Lenten taboo today and going out to eat, having a martini, and a glass of champagne.  

It's a special day for me and Nerd Husband: 

Nine years of Nerdly Marital Love, today.