~ sotto voce ~ | grand mal

variations on a theme by mark caywood and sadi ranson-polizzotti

2005-08-25T09:41:00.000-07:00

Fugues & Fireflies: Variations on a Theme By Sadi by Mark Caywood

The night filled with melodies,
a background of sky,dark bass notes
that drift near the earth.
The night hummed harmonies
of woods and winds,
swift connections in musical meadows.

The night danced in counterpoint:
a soft black curve,the rainbow of strings,
the big brass monument to a swirling chorale.
The night sent fires to distant villages,
a symphony of lanterns to mark the milky waywith a galaxy of jewels... -
- with wings and teeth.

* * *
There is no pain --only loss of memory
and accapella echos in quiet crystal valleys.
Dissonant. Atonal.
The conductor is gone, replaced by the train's hot third rail.

* * *
And every now and then:
blue beaches washed with white light,
a powerful currentthat moves with the tide,
a powerful currentthat whips the sand,
tremolo textures glowing green:
Holy Vibrato in blood and brain.
Oh Harmony!Legato!
Return again. Redeem the light in human form.

* * *

Of fugues & fireflies, poem ~ for Shark by sadi ranson-polizzotti

Those dark bass notes that drift near the earth;
If only I could tell you how deep they cut.
Yes the night hums harmonies but warnings too,
Warnings of portents and hexes, but yes, musical connections
Like the silver-wired pinholes that run the labyrinth;
That soft black curve you spoke, wrote of.

Counterpoint: silver and bright, no rainbows here,
Only fugues, only fireflies and my sweet and not
So sweet aphasia. Words strung together, our galaxy
Of jewels, yes all winged with teeth – how they bite
And scratch and claw at the mind. The brain.

There is no pain this much is true.
Only those daft aphasias that leave me stupid
And stupidly contented, moving bovine and slow
My mouth a slow and dreary echo of what was.
What has been, what could have been.

Dissonant. Atonal. All you write is true.
None of it makes sense: nonsense.
There is no conductor, just me, some electric
Prophet wired for sound; a 1000 volts of you.

The current bleaches the tide ~ the sea is almost white,
Mirrored. A transparent eyelid that slides in, blinks.
Harmony unharmonious the orchestra has lost its way!
Where is my conductor on this dark and dreary day?
I tell you about the fugues; I tell you about the fireflies.
Never do I tell you about the small and little deaths.
The petit mals that one day will take me as I move
Further and further from you until nothing but a speck
A pinprick moving in the distance.

strange love | journeys as a cancer patient

2004-08-23T10:17:00.000-07:00

How do you thank the person who saves your life? How do you tell them, and what words do we have that truly express such a debt of gratitude? The countless other lives this person has impacted by saving your measly live, that you thought was insignificant, but when you faced death head on, you realized that even if you didn’t have meaning for yourself, even if all the years of therapy hadn’t allowed you to recognize your own self-worth, that despite the dirty secrets you harbor, the sins you have committed, those other things you call your ‘idiosyncrasies’, that there are people who love you regardless. People who love you in spite of these things; in spite of You.

It is to spare their grief that you wish to live. Maybe you don’t believe that, but if you have ever been close to death , and maybe you have, then you know that the worst thing of all is not your own fear, but the fear and the pain you see on the faces of those you love. They visit. They take care of you when you can’t take care of yourself, you invalid. They make you tea and bring it up to you in bed, place it next to your ever-present IV. Some show up with small gifts of pastries or fruit salad. They dodge between home nurses and physical therapists. Some of these friends will quietly cry next to you on the bed when they think you are sleeping in a narcotic induced haze. Others will step out into the garden and hide behind the hollyhocks and shed their grief to the pollen, to the grass. Still others, at least one, grasps your hands firmly, stares you square in the eye and pleads with you not to die. Please, he says, Please don’t leave me. I can’t do this without you. And this, this means everything. This is where you get your will to live. So it’s circular, but you live for them, not so much for you, because for you, you are tired of the pain and the surgeries and the drugs and the diagnoses and the countless doctors and scans and radioactive shit they pump into you. You would give up, but you can’t. Not yet. Not now. You promised.

It all happens so fast; whisked from diagnoses (cancer) to surgery (surgical oncology). You are appointed to the best of the hospital; the best melanoma surgeon they have. His name is David. You meet him twice, but hardly notice any details about him. He seems kind and blushes easily. But really, all you notice, all you hear, are the details as he outlines your lymph node biopsy and removal, the wide-excision they will have to make to get “clear margins”, the chemotherapy that will surely follow, the depth of your melanoma (over the line), the doctor he recommends you to at Dana Farber. You take his card. You take the information about Dana Farber Cancer Treatment Center. You make the requisite calls, but mostly you are numb and all of this organizing is automated. Not quite real.

What you don’t notice, what you don’t realize (at least, not in that moment), is that this gentle man who speaks to you now, will be the same man who leans over you in the operating room and gives the signal for the anesthesiologist to send you off on dreams you won’t remember. Before you are completely under, this surgeon leans over you – the drugs have put you in twilight – it’s not so bad, you think. It’s kind of nice, really. His eyes are blue and large. You notice this, but you can’t remember his name. Not now. He says, Everything Will Be All Right. And you believe him. This is the contract of cancer. Absolute faith, based on nothing, but isn’t that what faith is? Don’t we all take the ontological leap, believe when there is no solid proof. Faith is about believing despite science or logic that may say to the contrary. It is about the intangible. So I have faith, despite statistics, despite prognosis, despite what I’ve heard and what I’ve read. I am a confirmed believer. Baptized and delivered. Amen.

The recovery is too awful to bother writing about, and too banal. It’s so ordinary. A few details: It hurts like hell. It stinks. It’s frightening. When I see my leg, see how much of me is missing, I mourn. I cry for the lost part of me. I cry for lost freckles that once seemed so innocent. I call my mother and tell her, I am dying of freckles, and I laugh through my tears and she laughs through hers. That is all I remember. The rest is a pleasant, poppy-colored blur. It is like living through wrapped gauze, the world is muted.

Returning home is not a home-coming in any traditional sense. When I return home, it is with a daily nurse, sometimes two, a physical therapist (who tells me her fiancé died from melanoma just a month prior – very cheery), an IV drip that sometimes the nurse changes, but eventually, both my husband I will learn to do and will learn the language of hospitals: Heparin lock, a long lead versus a short lead, making sure there are no air bubbles in the line, hooking up the antibiotics and pain killers. This is necessary because of all things, I have contracted a particularly virulent infection in both of my wounds: they call it cellulitus, or necrotizing fascitis. My body is eating itself with infection – with cancer, with cellulitus.

I can’t walk, and I have a wheelchair. It is sleek and black and matte it is the Saab of wheelchairs. If you have to have one, this isn’t so bad. Mostly, I am in the bedroom upstairs with my IV and lots of films that I’ll watch but not remember and a friend by my side. I take pills of different colors: my favorite is one of a deep purple color. It makes the pain go away and everything come in waves. The white ones are tiny, like after-coffee mints. I take them when it starts to hurt.

I make a point of going down the stairs (which I do on my rear-end, slowly, step by step) at least once a day. I sit in my wheelchair and listen to opera because I have just realized how much I love it. I always liked it Even worked for the Boston Opera Theater, so this is nothing new to me, but the way it sounds now, the intense emotion it holds, touches me like never before. O Mio Babino Caro becomes my favorite. What little I remember from my surgery is waking up to this aria. That I heard a beautiful voice singing in Italian. But I can’t confirm this. It may have been the drugs, or my desire, or both. Either way, I hear it, and now, I want to hear it all the time, so I put it on repeat and play it over and over. It is one of few things that makes me happy in those dark days. I sit in my wheelchair at the garden door and watch the coneflowers blow in the wind. One day, I see the soft grey-mauve of a storm front moving in; one of those humid, sultry summer storms with heavy rain, and yes it’s corny, but I don’t think I have ever seen anything so beautiful.

All these things I’ve taken for granted are suddenly alive. What a fool I’ve been. This, I am sure, is an experience common to all patients who suffer serious illness. Who come to that thin place that is the edge of death. But I did not die; I was saved. I was lost, but now I’m found. And I didn’t even notice the one person who saved my life – not til later.

Later, when I could walk again, I saw my surgeon in his office. It was a routine check to see how the incision was healing and to get the results of my the lymph node biopsy. He looks kind to me. That’s my first impression. He wears really nifty, well-tailored, peg-leg suits and a dark tie. Eventually, I will find out that almost all oncologists wear dark suits and ties, but I can tell you, none of them look as cool as David. And cool is the word. He looks like Maxwell Smart, only better looking. He has light-brown hair and freckles and big blue eyes. I remember the eyes from the OR. He speaks softly, and even the worst news is when it is delivered by him doesn’t seem so bad. I begin to like him. He keeps me out of pain, he has saved my life. He has held my hand when I was frightened. He has returned every page. He has always been right there. Of all the people around me, he is the one person I think truly understands what is like to live in that thin place between the living and the dead, because that is where I live. Not dead, not quite alive. A thin place.

It’s not fair that those I’ve loved all along can’t truly understand what this is like. It’s not their fault. They try, but no matter, they just can’t understand. Nor can I explain. It is a tacit understanding that exists between surgeon and patient. Who else but your lover or your husband enters your body so intimately? Who else renews you with his spirit? At first, my cancer seemed to draw my husband and I closer than we had ever been, but eventually, he began to pull away. I felt it, every inch he moved away. He wanted to save me, he wanted to be the hero, and he wanted this because he loved me. When he realized he could not save me, then he turned. He talked to women at his office about his grief, but said little to me. A year later, when my cancer returned, again he pulled away and found a woman at the office. They developed one of those office “things” that for some, seem to defy definition. To me, it’s simple: it’s an emotional affair or a crush or both if there are sexual feeling involved. There could be a checklist to determine the nature of the relationship.

Question 1 Are you lying or have you lied to your spouse about this person?
Question 2 Do you feel sexual desire for this person – lust.
Question 3 Do you hide this person from your spouse, avoid introductions, get nervous when the two are in the same vicinity…

So you get the idea. If the answer is Yes, they’re on you’re the slippery slope to wherever you want, but not anywhere that will ultimately be of consequence. It may be fun for a while, and who knows, maybe you’ll even fall madly in love and divorce your spouse, in which case, have the courage to just say Enough and then do what you want and move on. But please god, stop dragging us all through the muck and mire. It’s deadening and blistering and it sucks.

. I imagine being with her was lighter, such contrast to the darkness that seemed to shroud me, no matter how hard I tried to shrug it off. With her, the contract was simple: make her laugh, make her smile, make her want you. It was easy, far easier than what our life had become. When I found out, as one always does when there is some form of infidelity, I was shattered. I’m still shattered, and although it’s illogical, perhaps in some subconscious way I blame my husband for not being able to save me. For not being able to make me laugh in my darkest hour. For defining me, seeing me, as nothing more than a PATIENT, as if the word had been stamped in indelible ink on my forehead. I was and am more than the sum-total of illness; there is so much more to me, both good and bad, but it seems cancer has put up a road-block or a scrim, and it is difficult for anyone to look at me and see anything else other than this. I am a sick girl. A very, very sick girl.

I’ve heard that many patients develop a crush on their surgeon. It’s only natural. He is your savior. All those things you wanted in a man when you were young, before you became an educated feminist and you wanted a savior, a man who was strong and lean and could carry you if he had to. You want the modern-day equivalent of a cave man who will take care of everything so that you don’t’ have to worry. You want the man who can fight off the bad guys and win. A guy who can fight. It’s visceral, it’s probably politically incorrect, but it’s true. What bad guy could be worse than cancer? So David fights them off, and Lo! He wins. He is my instant hero. And as unfair as I know this is to my husband, to others I love, it is David that I put on a silver pedestal. And though in any other circumstance I don’t think I would be attracted to him, years later I find myself strangely drawn to him. I believe the thing that draws me to David is a similar mechanism to the thing that drew my husband to that woman at work. At its root, it is about language and communication; David and I speak the same language. It may be morbid, at times technical, but at its heart, it is about saving a life. My husband seeks out his own savior; someone to lift him out of this grief, this dark, thin place.

So how do I thank him – this man who has held my life and given it back so gently? Several surgeries later, all performed by him, all for cancer, how do I thank him. He’s kept me alive, kept me out of pain, he’s been my number one advocate, he’s told me I’m ‘tough.’ He’s told me, ‘You’ve been through a lot,’ though I ever thought of it that way. I just made my way – groped the dark corridors and prayed I’d come out the other side. In all of this, I never felt sorry for myself. I felt sorrow, I felt grief, I felt rage, and I felt regret, but never self-pity. Is that hard to believe? It’s the truth. I was too busy fighting, too busy dealing with just getting through. There was no room in my schedule for such pity.

If I felt sorry for anyone, it was those I love, as I’ve said. For them, I felt sorry. Sorry that I was the cause of their pain. Yet if anyone I love had to get cancer, I am still glad that it was I, because if it had been one of them, I honestly think I couldn’t handle it. Then I would rather die. Then I would feel sorry for myself, because without them, I am nothing. It is through them that I live. It is through them that I do good deeds and bad, that I comfort and hold, that I listen to and vent to, that I depend on and always will. Without them, I don’t even know if exist. And my best friend, without him, should it have been he got the cancer and not I, then I would shatter and splinter like glass. Once, he was in a cycling accident too awful for words. He shattered and almost lost his arm. He held the pieces together with a magazine as he lay on the road and drifted in and out of consciousness. When the medi-vac helicopter arrived, he coded – he died – and had to be revived. When he arrived at the hospital, he was rushed to surgery, and again he died. Again he was revived.

I got the call at about 3:30 in the afternoon. My dear friend Carl said, ‘Please stay calm. I have to tell you something,’ and I knew it was bad. He told me, ‘Ian has been in a bad accident.’ Where? I said. He said the hospital and I ran out of my little brownstone on Beacon Hill all the way down the hill and rushed through the doors of the General, and rushed through the pistachio and white corridors until I found his room. He looked so fragile, so broken. All I wanted was to take his pain away. God, I pleaded, why couldn’t it be me, and this was not just something I thought, it is something I meant and still mean. I excused myself to his little bathroom and sobbed. But I did not cry in front of him. I stayed with him. I fell asleep over the vent on the big hospital windowsill. A sympathetic nurse brought me a blanket. I kept vigil. But it was too much to handle, so all these years later, now that I am the one – now that I am the patient, I am sorry for the pain it causes them, but selfishly, I am glad it was I who got ill. Because I am so selfish that I know I cannot handle their illness. That I have lived and I have learned and know that I cannot suffer a loss such as this. That I want to be the one to die first, just so I don’t have to grieve and be left alone. Don’t abandon me, I want to scream, Don’t you dare. Let me go first.

My last surgery, just a few months ago, I spent several days in the hospital with a Demerol drip hooked up to my vein. My husband visited every day and stayed for long hours but all I could do was start fights. Maybe I pushed him away because I was afraid he was losing me anyway. Maybe I pushed him away because last time, he went away and turned to another woman. That if he turns away this time, at least it would be me, not cancer or him, that made the decision.

David came by very late the night of my surgery. He was still wearing his scrubs and a patterned head wrap. I guess these patterned wraps are all the rage with surgeons. I’ve seen them on TV, on ER. I didn’t know real doctors wore them, but they do. He came in just after I had received another injection of some or other opiate. He sat on my bed and pulled back the sheet to look at my leg. It went well, he said. We won’t know if it was successful for a while, but it went well. He said, I cleaned it out (whatever that means). It did hurt. Even with all of the drugs, it hurt like hell, like a slow and steady burn that comes up on you and you can’t take your hand out of the fire. By that night, we had known each other for four years. He had treated me for every melanoma, large and small. He placed his hand on my knee-cap and gently stroked it. And although the leg hurt, the contrast of his soft touch as he was checking the wound felt so good that it was almost sexual. It was definitely sensual. And then Eureka! It was at that late date that I truly realized the very critical role he had played in my life.

Before I say more, I should make it very clear that I was on a great many drugs at this time. That I had IVs of Demerol and oxycontin and some other things – I’m not sure what. I had no control over what I was saying. If I thought a thing, even for a moment, I announced it. So in this moment, at almost midnight on a Tuesday night in October I professed my undying love for him. I told him I wished I could be with him all the time. That it was only with him that I felt safe. Such insult to my husband who had been there, patiently waiting, for every surgery. Who had taken care of me, ran errands, doled out pills, comforted me. And I did appreciate my husband, so much more than I let him know, but what I felt for David was an almost religious love. And while I knew I would never sleep with him or pursue a real relationship – for many reasons – that I love my husband, that adultery is a mortal sin, that he is married with children and a wonderful wife and in my later years I could never do this to another woman, never be part of such betrayal, but I admit that I did want to make-love to his soul. I wanted to breathe life into him somehow. Oh, I know. It’s too metaphysical, too theoretical. But how do I explain a love that is not corporeal but transcendental. So I declare my love, he holds me hand. He sits on my bed for what seems like a very long time, his other hand on my knee. This must be what they mean when they say ‘bedside manner.’ He was my comforter that night, as he had been many other times, but only now did I realize. I remember his face, I remember him being in my room, I remember the warm, mellow touch of his hand, but I don’t remember everything I said. It was not until a few days later that I realized with horror that I had professed my great love. That it may have seen that I was flinging myself at him, some desperate and unhappy woman.

Friends told me of similar incidents. One dear friend who had breast cancer told me of the great crush she had on her oncologist. I’ve heard of many other patients, and now, in the waiting room to his office, I see the woman fawn and fall all over him. A few weeks ago, a couple of women were talking about him and with a sigh said, Oh, those blue eyes! After that, I felt quite ordinary. Relieved, though still terrified to see him, afraid of how he would treat me now. So I waited, my palms sweated, my heart beat fast.

The nurse called my name and asked me to change into a hospital Johnny with my bare flank visible. This is how hospitals make you vulnerable. My surgeon knocked gently on the door before entering. I was both glad and embarrassed to see him. I apologized, couldn’t say enough to say I’m sorry, and very smoothly and deftly, he told me that I had said nothing to be embarrassed about. He let me off the hook, but I believe we both knew what was said that night and that however you define it, this is some sort of love. It is gratitude en extremis.

All our lives most of us look for love. We seek the perfect companion. The one who will comfort us, stand by us “for better or for worse,” and if you are a woman, in some way, I believe our instinct is to look for a stud, a savior. That savior may be different for everyone, and thank god -- what a mess it would be if we all wanted the same man. But love comes in strange forms.

They say love comes when you least expect it, and experience tells me this is true. I have been in love twice, and both times, it was a surprise. Am I in love with my surgeon? No. Do I love him? Yes. But still, after much searching, I cannot define what this love is. I know what it is not, but that does not tell me what it is. It is not sordid. It is not inappropriate. It is not a betrayal of my husband, and the confidences we share are not secrets. Or they are, we call them “cancer secrets.” We share a language that only others who have been to that thin place between life and death can comprehend, and even then, I think there are variations between each doctor and patient. But it is love. Of this I am sure.

sadi ranson-polizzotti

Mothman | Prophesize This

2004-08-22T12:04:00.000-07:00

If you weren’t paying attention, you could easily have seen The Mothman Prophecies, and thought “interesting” and never thought about it again because you were expecting a more traditional “horror movie” or some such nonsense where a winged guy comes out of the woods all deranged and starts hacking up the locals. But that is not, anyway, what “Mothman” is about. It’s a film that on the surface anyway, doesn’t entirely bend to genre. Or you could have missed it entirely because a film about a moth, you thought, sounded really dull and boring. But it wasn’t about a moth per se either. So what is Mothman about? Ahhh, that’s where it gets interesting…

At its core, Mothman is a film about the fear of the unknown and about warnings missed and warnings heard. The quick review – Mothman Prophecies, based largely on the work of writer John Keel, is about events in Point Pleasant, West Virginia in 1966-67 that lead up the dramatic and tragic collapse of the Silver Bridge (connecting the town to Ohio), that took the lives of forty-six people. Beneath the journalistic element, Mothman plays on our very basic instinctive fear of that which we cannot define, those things that fly in the face of logic, defying it and us at every turn.

Like any good film that sets out to unnerve you and make you think this could happen to you – which is really the engine behind any horror or psychological thriller, because if there’s not a chance in hell that you too could fall prey to whatever the horror is, then the film will fall flat on it’s face, n’est pas? Mothman does and excellent job of helping you see yourself in this picture.

So when John Klein (most likely based on a the real character of Point Pleasant, Washington, John Keel) and his beautiful, vibrant, and wife Mary (Debra Messing) are house hunting. They are the peak of their lives; successful, young, attractive and happy, and now they have found their perfect dream house. Delirious and happy, John and Mary shut themselves into one of what will be their giant wardrobes for a quick fuck me upfuck me down session, to which most of us can relate. Even if we haven’t yet found our dream house, the happiness of even finding the right apartment is enough to get any couple going, and who wouldn’t wish to inaugurate such a thing with some frisky making out when so deliriously happy? The moth that flies fast around the lightbulb when the realtor flips on the switch and catches the two startles Messing and is the beginning of what will be the end.

This moth is a forbearer or omen of what is to come, the great Messenger of the afterworld – Osiris, the Egyptian God of the Dead. We want so much to put have an answer or explanation for the tragedies that befall us. So when the lead character John Klein’s (played by Richard Gere) wife, Mary, (Debra Messing) suffers a nasty head contusion when she crashes their BMW as the two return home from happy house hunting. Mary sees a giant, red=-eyed cloaked figure flying to the front windshield and grill of the car and swerves to avoid it. John does not see this Mothman (our first real sighting) and is somewhat mystified about the car accident.

Everything is soon explained in logical terms when Mary’s subsequent hospitalization leads to the discovery of a temporal lobe brain tumor, remarkably and actually shaped like a butterfly (I checked on this and such tumors do exist and when I checked my own MRI, I noticed remarkably similar butterfly patterns repeated in the brain, but particularly in the temporal lobe). The moth and butterfly, interestingly, have also been the symbol for “bridge” at various points in history, and of course, most revelatory, the moth is the symbol for the human soul.

Lying in her hospital bed, injured and scared, Mary says to John, “You didn’t see it … did you?” asking about the red-eyed thing that came screaming at their BMW as they were rushing home from their newly bought house to their old house for celebratory love-making. Such happiness ruined in a moment. The tumor of course, is too convenient, but it’s natural that we seek something logical, scientific on which to pin these odd happenings. The tumor is real, and we watch as Mary goes through various MRIs and tests, but the thing that she says she saw defies logic.

The temporal lobe is the seat of memory and artistic vision, so this is an interesting place for Mary’s tumor to appear, for it would affect everything, especially what Mary perceives. It is also the area of the brain that helps form the bedrock of character, determining who we will be, and governing everything from our emotions, memory, and consciousness- acting as a sort of sifter…receiving and expressing emotional feeling, the lobes function as a computer. (Temporal Lobe Epilepsy and Social and Psychological Considerations ) As such, Mary’s temporal lobe tumor is used as a device to appeal to our logical sense and as such, can logically account for the many weird visions and sounds that Mary begins to experience after the accident and according to Mary (and to the viewer, for we too have seen Mothman now), things before -- the very thing which caused the accident: our red-eyed entity that was, yes, moth like, but also very much like a figment of what an injured brain would summon up. Are we perceiving something that is real and actual then, or are we simply seeing what Mary’s injured brain hallucinates for us?

Or more, could it be as many believed in other cultures that there were those, such as the village Shaman, who had altered states that allowed them to perceive things that others could not perceive but were nonetheless quite real. Such shamans were considered sacred and holy, for only they could communicate with the gods of the underworld and after-life. Shamans and medicine men and women were considered holy and as such, enjoyed a privileged status in their village.

Most shamans were also epileptic. It was believed that their epilepsy. Such stark contrast to the more Westernized notion of epilepsy that put many in mental institutions and labeled them mad and attributed their disorder to “excessive masturbation,” which lead, of course, to castration and cliterodectomies Mothman takes these antiquated notions and turns them on their head. In this film, those who can perceive Mothman are the gifted among us - The Chosen, for only they can communicate with this higher power. Sure, they may die for it, but in many ways, they are also martyred, canonized.

For those interested in the real events that came to pass in Point Pleasant in 1966 and 1967 – author John Keel wrote extensively about Mothman and other unexplained anomalies that took place across the country. According to Keel, man has had a long history of interaction with the supernatural. He believes that the intervention of mysterious strangers in the lives of historic personages like Thomas Jefferson and Malcolm X provides evidence of the continuing presence of the “gods of old”. The manifestation of these elder gods comes in the form of UFO’s and aliens, monsters, demons, angels and even ghosts. Keel is no doubt considered eccentric and a bit “off” but he remains one of the most respected authorities concerning events that would be considered supernatural. Today he is best known for his work concerning Mothman and became the major archivist, chronicling the stories of the many 100 or more good citizens in Point Pleasant who believe they saw Mothman in various forms (including strange lights, winged creatures, sounds emitted from telephones and televisions etc. – all believed to be some attempt at communication). Keel wrote The Mothman Prophecies in 1975. For more information, check on Keel and Mothman, check out http://www.prairieghosts.com/moth.html

In a sense, then, John and Mary Klein have been warned about the car accident – the moth as omen and that is what Mothman is all about. It’s not that Mothman himself is evil – he isn’t. It’s that he just happens to appear whenever there is going to be tragedy. It’s about being aware and awake enough to recognize that perhaps there are warning sings after any great tragedy – that we look but don’t see, as Hannibal Lecter has told us so many times.

Two years pass, Mary does die from her temporal lobe tumor, and John Klein sets off as part of his job as a journalist at The Washington Post, to interview the mayor. After driving for what seems like quite a short time, he finds himself in a completely different part of the country in a small town called Point Pleasant in West Virginia.

It’s the middle of the night and his car (an Audi, of course) just stops dead – some electrical anomaly and he walks to a local house to ask if he can use the telephone. There he is met with a rather crazed looking man, played by Will Patton, wielding a gun, who says to his wife, “I told you he’d come back”. Patton forces Gere into the bathtub while he holds him prisoner until the local Deputy Connie Parker (Laura Linney) arrives. He tells her this “strange guy” has been paying him visits and that he’s warned him off his property several times now, but that he keeps coming back. He describes the creature as half moth, half man. Linney manages to talk Patton into letting Gere go, but tells the reporter (Gere) “There have been some strange things going on around here lately” apparently referring to people seeing things – strange things that she can’t explain. She drops Gere off at a local motel for the night and arranges for his car to be towed to a local garage.

The next morning, when Gere goes to get his car he is told that there is “nothing wrong with it and that there is “no charge”, which is odd because it had just died - flat out, electrically zapped. He then visits Linney at the police department where she says, “Did you see that woman?” of course, Gere didn’t see anyone. Linney describes the woman as “real pretty with red hair and green eyes” describing perfectly the two-year dead Mary Klein. Gere rushes out to the street, but sees nothing, though he is desperate to see her (this will be the first time that his dead wife tries to contact him. Messing reappears in the background several times in the film, though Gere never really makes contact. He may hear her, and even see her, several times in his own bed or receive a phone call – a voice that sounds like her. Frustratingly, he is never able to speak directly with Mary. Instead, it’s a one way communication on her part as if she is trying to convey a message that he can’t quite get no matter how hard he may try.

If you look carefully during the scene when Gere steps outside the police station, you’ll see that the woman in question is a rather tired looking Debra Messing, back from the dead somehow, wandering lost and solemn around this small town. She is walking down the sidewalk, head down, hands in he pockets, looking like anyone on their worst day; she passes through the crowd, undetected by Gere who rushes back into the police station to Connie to ask what she wanted.

Linney tells Gere, that she left a message which is: “Tell John I’m sorry for ruining everything.” And that’s it and it just happens to be a slight variation on almost the same thing Mary said to her husband from her hospital bed just before she died (“I’m sorry for ruining everything.”) Though John rushes out to see if he can find his dearly departed, it is to no avail. This is just another of many odd coincidences that seem to be racking up now faster and furiouser, building as they will continue to throughout the film.

After some quick investigatory work, John Klein discovers that the locals in this small town have all been seeing the same moth, winged creature that his own wife was seeing before she died. She had left a notebook full of odd drawings (the kind you’ve seen in The Ring, only this time, the drawings are of moth type creatures but use the same dark black and rich red grease pencil to same effect.) The hospital attendant tells Klein, she was drawing “angels” but these do not look like angels – unless your conception of angels is that of the evil angel – the one who is cast down by God and sent to Hell and winds up being called Satan instead of Seraphim. No – these are moth men and the locals have been drawing eerily similar portraits of what they have seen.

The ancients believed that the moth was the carrier or symbol of the soul. In ancient Egypt, the moth or Isis or Osiris (also symbolized by the butterfly) as she was then called, was drawn on many cartouches and symbolized the soul’s journey to the other world or in the case of the butterfly, a happier connotation of the soul’s flight and life after death. The moth was also recognized as the forbearer or omen of a death or disaster to come – as in this film, though in Mothman, it seems to be both.

In all cases, the mothman’s intention is not to harm to cause harm, but really often to warn (if you can ascribe intentionality or emotion, though that would be to humanize perhaps too much). The moth is also a messenger who simply speaks of what will be but what we cannot stop or prevent. Most interestingly, the moth has been the symbol for bridges, dreams, reincarnation, and an omen of sickness, among many other things (anyone interested should check this out here. )

The forms Mothman takes in this film are myriad, depending on who is doing the looking – he may literally be man with wings and giant red eyes or more representational, like Messing’s moth that flew at the BMW causing the accident who looking more like two giant red eyes cloaked in black. It may sound corny, the red eyes and all, but see the film and there’s something really eerie about the way it is done. Something almost too convincing. Most eerie of all, however, is the means Mothman uses to communicate with John Klein and myriad others, traveling through existing telecom systems, traveling the long and short wires, traversing the earth.

Mothman is smart – not only can he appear in many forms and shape-shift to suit the viewer’s idea of what is scary to get his message across, but he also makes use of modern technology to communicate. He seems to be some collective energy, and what is energy after all but electricity. That he travels using our telecommunications system is then not really surprising. It makes sense.

If you were an electrical current, wouldn’t it be most efficient to travel through a pre-existing network of landlines that grace the country, swinging from pole to pole and through huge metal power girders that stand like monsters with huge batwings – the kind you’ve seen on the sides of highways on long road trips. The same things that used to scare the hell out me when I was a kid because they looked like giant steel monsters walking across the British country side and coming right for the back of our car.

To be clear Mothman isn’t entirely made up. In fact, the film is based on the very real happenings of several small towns in West Virginia in the mid 1960s where extensive sightings of Mothman were reported. On November 12th, 1966, five local men in West Virginia in a small town called Clendenin were preparing a grave for burial when they spotted a “brown mothlike figure” lifting from the cemetery. Later that month in nearby Point Pleasant, a young couple saw a similar red-eyed mothlike figure as they were making out in their car. Many other sightings followed for the entire month – one local man was watching television, when the screen suddenly went blank and he heard what he described as high pitched screeching sounds that he believed were sending some kind of message of warning.

Many people saw strange lights in the skies around Point Pleasant – and almost all reported the strange sightings to local police. Eventually, this made the newswire and local reporter named Mary Hyre, who was the Point Pleasant correspondent for the Athens, Ohio newspaper the Messenger, was gathering all of the information for a story. Hyre reported that one night around this time while she was working late, and saw a strange little man who terrified her. She described him: “He was very short and had strange eyes that were covered with thick glasses. He also had long, black hair that was cut squarely “like a bowl haircut”. Hyre said that he spoke in a low, halting voice and he asked for directions to Welsh, West Virginia. She thought that he had some sort of speech impediment and for some reason, he terrified her. “He kept getting closer and closer to me, “she said, “and his funny eyes were staring at me almost hypnotically.”

Alarmed, she summoned the newspaper’s circulation manager to her office and together, they spoke to the strange little man. She said that at one point in the discussion, she answered the telephone when it rang and she noticed the little man pick up a pen from her desk. He looked at it in amazement, “as if he had never seen a pen before.” Then, he grabbed the pen, laughed loudly and ran out of the building.” (http://www.prairieghosts.com/moth.html).

In the film, as in real life, on December 15th, 1967, The Silver Bridge, foot bridge linking the town Point Pleasant to Ohio collapsed and crashed into the river below. In the film, this is eerily predicted by Laura Linney’s dream in which she imagines she is floating in a river of wrapped gifts with silver bows and wrapping paper. She feels herself sinking to the bottom of the river, where there are lights (later, we discover, these are the lights from cars that have plunged into the water from the high Silver Bridge). A voice says, “Wake up number forty-seven.” Forty-six people will die on this night, in the film as in life. She is saved, in the film, of course by Richard Gere who has become a love interest and she, the first for him since the death of his wife, so particularly significant...

No mater what you point of view, to say that the entire Mothman incident in Point Pleasant (or elsewhere, for there have been other sightings, other disasters where great and awful happenings were foreshadowed by Mothman and light sightings as they were in this case) was a complete hoax. People did see something and what they saw was remarkably, spookily similar and mothlike in appearance, and there is no question that awful things did happen.

It’s worth seeing Mothman to be sure, but it’s more worth it if you do some preliminary research first on what the symbolic meaning of the butterfly or moth is. And be sure too, to note the repeated and excellent imagery in this film – the way the symbol of the moth and the wingspan is duplicated again and again and the pattern found in almost every scene, from Mary’s seemingly winged hospital bed, to the front lights and grill of the car, to the dark tree branches over the accident scene.

Here is a film worth seeing, but do check out some of the symbolism beforehand just to get a real good angle on what the moth is really all about. Understanding that deepens the horror of the film, and this one ranks among the best, with The Ring, and others in the genre. As I write this, I want to note that the TV has just gone completely bobo and all static, when a moment ago it was in fact, just fine, and yes, there are strange high-pitched sounds coming from it – and I shit you not, and it is spooky and it wouldn’t be spooky if I hadn’t seen Mothman so many times and now associate it with some kind of communication or sign, but of what, I can’t say… so either I’ve lost my mind I’ve gone bobo, or (and I pray this later is more likely), The Mothman Prophecies is a highly effective thriller. See it believe. Do not go gentle into that good night.

sadi ranson-polizzotti

http://blogcritics.org/archives/2004/08/22/145141.php

2004-08-21T10:08:00.000-07:00

napoleon ~ temporal lobe epileptic

37.2 le matin | why is betty blue

2004-08-21T09:46:00.000-07:00

http://blogcritics.org/archives/2004/08/21/122901.php

2004-08-19T14:14:00.000-07:00

a beautiful mind | sparks of genius

2004-08-19T14:11:00.000-07:00

The real John Nash, from the Nobel Museum Web site.

I keep watching the film A Beautiful Mind because I have this idea that to see it only once is to miss a great deal and would prevent any real understanding of The Great John Nash! It’s a phrase that is repeated often in the film – a film adapted from Nasar’s unauthorized biography, and it’s a phrase used by persons real and unreal and always mockingly.

The truth, the truth that would finally be acknowledged a great many years later in 1994, was that, in fact, John Nash is indeed great and a true genius. Winning the Noble Prize was simply the public acknowledgement of this and by then, no one was mocking John Nash anymore. It's hard to imagine though that anyone who took the time to know John Nash, could not see his brilliance, the beauty in the very way in which he thought. The film does convey this - that much one can say, but still, there is that underlying mockery and although this supposed to be, one gather's a "sympathetic" portrait, that's just it; it seems to look down on Nash, as though he were a child, incapable of taking care of himself and oh, gosh, thank god for Alicia, were it not for her, he'd never have achieved greatness. There's a real martyr thing going on here and at a price to John Nash.

I have to confess too, that part of my atttraction to the film is that all too often i've felt as i imagine Nash must have felt at times, because although the origin and cause are different, temporal lobe epilepsy can often make you "different" in ways that others cannot quite pinpoint. And although epilepsy is a neurological illness often caused by mesial lesions in the brain (such as I have), the effects are similar. More - when researching Nash for another article, I found a relation between Nash and my friend Ian, also a mathematician and also with roots in the South (suffice to say he not only resembles Nash, particularly in the ears, which i happen to like, but also in the way he thinks,) and so here I am, drawn in.

It was John Nash, who, as a student at Princeton, turned Adam Smith on his head. Smith had said, to paraphrase, that you do what is right for the individual, and the group will benefit It became the equilibrium of modern mathematics. And it was Nash who, as a graduate student, refused to attend class because he felt that it deadened the mind and stood in the way of original thought and ideas. During this time, Nash developed his theory which became the cornerstone of mathematics today and is even used in antitrust cases. He said, in short, do what is right for the group, then the individual and the group will all benefit. This was his theory of what he called Governing Dynamics. Nash is also known for his work concerning Game Theory, using which, he believed and proved many times that he could predict the outcome of any game (which would be most useful now, for what is war if not a game? John Nash might be the only guy in the world right now who could tell us how to best play our hand and get out of this alive, and am I saying, victorious, whatever that would mean.)

Nada’s film succeeds in illustrating how Nash was an original thinker. Portrayed by Russell Crowe (who is very unRussell Crow in this film), he can be seen in the university courtyard taking notes as a group of pigeons feed, pecking at breadcrumbs as he tries to extract an “algorithm” from their behavior. This algorithm and other equations, written with grease pencil on his dorm room and school library window. Whether Nash really wrote his equilibriums on windows or not, I don’t know. Regardless, as a visual, the elaborate etchings are a marvelous way of showing how Nash’s mind weaves such extraordinary and complex patterns. We see the algorithm of the pigeons, shaped like intersecting diamonds that criss cross back and forth, mirroring the path of the pigeons. Another equation illustrates a woman being mugged, the path of the mugger breaking into Ys, end to end, as he tries to flee, the woman’s running indicated by a broken line of white dashes.

Nash’s ability to see mathematics in most everything is astounding and actually does reveal the underlying beauty and precision of the world.. To Nash, the world is not random, which is interesting for a man who ultimately, was at various points unable to reason for himself because of the chaos in his head. Imagine what it would be like to live in a world so mathematically precise and then have the bits and equations come raining all over you as they fell apart and broke and you drowned in a sea of x, y, and z and schizophrenia.

Too often, we stereotype and assume, and one such assumption seems to surround the mentally ill. And other, those who have neurological illnesses like epilepsy that are not mental illnesses, yet the ignorance of frankly, far too fucking many, label epileptics as such. Which is not to say that there is something awful about being mentally sick or manic depressive; there isn’t. What bothers me though is the ignorance, and then, not only are you stigmatized, but it’s the wrong stigma, which is just dumb and really aggravating. If you’re going to marginalize me, at least put me in the right category. If you’re going to label me, be smart enough to know which label and where you can stick it, because I’ve got a few of my own and know exactly what you can do with those labels.

Epileptics are “spastic” or “mouthing idiots”. Schizophrenics have multiple personality disorder and are just “nuts” and “wacko paranoiac freaks”. And Nash sadly, had far too much experience in this world of, yes, now it’s my turn, idiots who labeled and taunted him. He was vastly underestimated by both fellow students and professors who mocked Nash’s confidence, his belief in himself, so much so that Nash himself began to doubt the merit of his own thought and ideas – which is to question your very existence and why you are even alive. Put it this way: if you’re mission in life is to write, to write things that will change the world and you fully believe you can, and those you trusted tell you absolutely not, it will never ever ever happen, what would you do? These are those who are closest to you. And that is what happened to John Nash. He was undermined and bullied and teased and taunted into submission, the way people like to humiliate those who are smarter than they are because it’s just to fucking threatening to really know and accept that someone who is not you is capable of doing something truly original and great. That they are a genius.

It was too much for anyone to assume, let alone prove, that Adam Smith was not completely right and had not accounted for every variable. Yet is there any doubt that even in his day there were those who even mocked Adam Smith. He too was no doubt a genius, and sure, so he missed a few things, but that doesn’t diminish the incredible impact of his work to this day. Without Smith, John Nash wouldn’t have accomplished what he did in that specific way. Maybe some other way, but we can never know. All we know is that it began with Smith. If one is to extrapolate a logic equation from this type of human behavior – this mocking and mockery making – it is a simple one. When you are alive and young and you fly in the face of convention with an idea so bright it scintillates but flies in the face of all that is known, the pre-existing, then you are wrong and a madman or just self-absorbed and arrogant and nuts, like Van Gogh, Sylvia Plath, Gauguin, Lewis Carroll, Virginia Woolf and this list could go on for ever, and note that of those listed, more than half of them had Temporal Lobe Epilepsy or Manic Depression.

There are an astounding number of epileptics who are now confirmed geniuses. Infact, it has been proven that up to 35 percent of people with temporal lobe epilepsy have a genius level IQ, which is significantly higher than in the general population. No wonder such people are mocked. That’s a pretty threatening statistic. Note also, that of those with temporal lobe epilepsy, we are up to almost forty or fifty percent more likely than the general population to commit suicide and something like four out of five people with temporal lobe epilepsy has made some type of suicide attempt or suicidal gesture and suffer from depression. I don’t think it’s crazy that we’re speaking of. I think this stems from living in a world that cannot accept a person because they are different and they are different in a way that is shiny and new. People like Lewis Carroll or Sylvia Plath were and sometimes still are, so universally hated and yet loved that one wonders what that is about. In life, they were pretty much hated and treated poorly. In death, they are revered and mythologized.

John Nash, for all that he went through, was lucky because in the end he was vindicated with his Nobel Prize, thank god. He gets to have his last laugh, should he want it. But what of those who never knew – like Van Gogh, Dostoevsky, Plath, etc etc. – who will tell these incredibly driven and talented people who wanted only and so much to succeed that , in the end, they did more than that. They became almost legendary.

Nash’s brilliance, like Carroll, like Pythagoras (also epileptic), Alfred Noble (again) is born of an ability to see what for others is overlaid and hidden. That all can see through the physical world somehow to the metaphysical underpinnings where nothing is as random as it seems on the surface. Nash can and did work out an equation for almost every possible situation where there are winners and there are loser. He could apply his theory used to model behavior such that one gets the best outcome for the group. How fitting that a prize named after an epileptic (Alfred Nobel) should go to one they labeled a madman. A prize that celebrates those who have been mocked and written off, and in the end, are recognized for the very things they were renounced for in the first place.

It is mystifying that no one in our present government has talked to John Nash about our present and possibly fatal circumstance with the present wars we are in. who better than the master of Game Theory to help us achieve the best result for everyone. Have we written him off again because of his schizophrenia? Is this all that people see? Was Pythagoras, Socrates, Nobel, Alexander the Great, and on and on… were they all just crazy? Napoleon? Sure, some of these are debatable, but isn’t it just possible that one can be both mad and a genius – an epileptic genius or schizophrenic genius? Are the two mutually exclusive, and why is it so fucking threatening that one or many can be both?

Director Ron Howard called Nash “Delusional” and noted that Nash didn’t “achieve much at Princeton.” Which in reality, was the where Nash formed the seed of the idea that would make him who he is today. He turned Adam Smith and 150 years of economic theory on its head, but other than that, he didn’t do much at Princeton. Sure.

How unfortunate that when we see a person as delusional and indeed they may be, that that blinds us to those other things that make them genius. Van Gogh and his paintings, those he had trouble selling and he died and lived always poor, largely supported by his brother Theo. Yet years after his death, we see Starry, Starry Night and we see a vision that is unlike any other. It is a world slightly out of focus and one that swirls and spins to dizzying effect – the same world, surely, that Van Gogh experienced during seizures. The same epilepsy that caused him to cut off part of his own ear because he couldn’t suffer the auditory hallucinations and that caused him to take his own life – all of this is part and parcel of what made him great and these things cannot be separated.

There is the mathematician Pythagoras who had a cult around him. People who at the time recognized his genius and wanted in. He too was written off as mad and eccentric, and to note, he is rumored to be one of the first animal rights advocates as well, another group that is still written off as mad.

One could go on with such examples but the point is made. Schizophrenics, Epileptics, though with disease of different origin and different path will always see the world in a different way. They are drawn to rigidity, discipline, and pattern. They will seek logic and pattern in everything and they will find it. Perhaps this is a way of making sense of a world that otherwise, makes no sense because of seizures or other spells that dizzy and stupefy. When the brain betrays you seek logic.

You are drawn to the clean and sharp lines of geometry, liner equations and calculus where shapes and equations can exist on an imagined plane – where the possible is impossible. A world where even though a thing person should not exist or succeed does so nonetheless.

Sadi Ranson-Polizzotti

http://blogcritics.org/archives/2004/08/19/165922.php on blog critics

check out more articles by sadi at the famous Cleveland blogcritics.org, editor Eric Olsen - select this link http://blogcritics.org/author.php?author=Sadi%20Ranson-Polizzotti

2004-08-16T14:26:00.000-07:00

what about lewis carroll |

2004-08-16T14:19:00.000-07:00

"Alice Through the Looking Glass", oil by John Henson

Biography, like any form of character study, is a post-mortem; the autopsy of the literary world. A good biographer, like a good pathologist, will bring the right tools to the table, know where to dig and how to identify what he finds, how to weigh it and give it its proper consequence. The writer, at best, need be an objective observer – though none of us is truly objective. We bring our own bruised hearts to the scene. We pass on our own, more contemporary, values and cultural mores, and no matter what we may say, we judge, and a true biographer – that is, one in search of the truth – will analyze, but will not attempt to impose his own values, his own life and experience, but will study and analyze his subject; walk, perhaps, in his shoes, and try to pass fair and informed judgment. But to judge our subject accurately, we need know something of the time – the structure under which he operated. If we are lucky, the dead will leave us good clues, the cipher we need to decode their inner-mechanism - because that’s what we’re getting at; what’s inside, what was the motor behind the subject’s loves and hates, his work, his triumphs and failures, and the true engine of motivation and desire.more>>> http://whataboutlewiscarroll.blogspot.com/

down you go...

2004-08-16T12:03:00.000-07:00

Lies, Lies Lies, Yeah: Lauren Slater's Book Lying

2004-08-15T14:36:00.000-07:00

Not so long ago, an acquaintance who works with me in the book business informed me that "everyone is a liar." At first, I strongly disagreed. Thought, Sure, maybe you are, maybe he is, but I - no, I am not a liar. But the comment stuck with me for months, and for months afterward, as I went about my business, I took stock. Every thing that I did or felt or experienced (or did not do, for that matter), I consciously noticed whether or not I told anyone about these things.more>>>http://blogcritics.org/archives/2004/06/11/140103.php

down the rabbit hole | the dallas grand mal

2004-08-15T11:40:00.000-07:00

I hadn't intended this. But then, who ever would. This epilepsy sneaks up on me. This time, the aura lasted about a week, and it was the week i was to head to another city for business. Something, i told those close to me, was going to happen. My mind was on terrorists - a fear of flying i developed after 9/11. Yes, i know, i shouldn't let it bother me. But to say it does not would be a lie. Terrorists, by definition, seek to terrorize, and in so many, too many ways, they succeed.

But this terror, the one i experienced, was a fear of myself. It was a fear of epilepsy. Of seizures that shake and quake me to the very core. Tremors and visual disturbances and an inablity to speak that leave me cold and afraid.

I have no recollection of how i got to Dallas. I know from the expression of those around me that i had seizures on the plane. I could feel people edging away from me. Security stopped me because i was shaking; if only i could have told them that it was not that i was doing something wrong - it was that my brain was. That my own brain was playing tricks on me, like a summer storm, heavy rain fell on me and lightning ripped at the seams of the dura. I seized. I remember little, only the prodromal warning - the strange and curious smells.

I picked up a rental car - yes, a big mistake, but i still did not know what was happening. I drove off with the trunk open, and behind me, heard a man shouting in the distance. He's crazy, i thought. Why had he kept telling me that the forms were important. When he spoke i went "la la la la la la la" like a child. It wasn't funny, but nerves made me laugh.

I somehow got to the hotel. checked in. Ordered food. Then blank again. My husband said he rang, but i was distant, almost dismissive. I don't recall this. He says he rang the next morning, heard a thud, then sounds like someone choking. That was me, we discovered, on the floor, having a grand mal - the big bad. The big terrible How is it translated? It should be The Big Bad, for that is what it feels like. He sent the hotel staff up to my room where they found me, post seizure, shaking like a tiny leaf and afraid, my eyes wild. "I am fine," I told them, and wondered why they were in my room.

Later, i went to my office in this other town. Again, i don't recall getting there, only that i knew i had to pull over in the car, and so i did. I tried to get directions to the office, but my voice betrayed me and i couldn't speak. Those who did speak sounded foreign. Why don't they speak English, i kept wondering. And why couldn't i speak? Words came out of me, but they sounded backward, like a song on a Beatles album. Maybe i was saying, "I buried Paul." but backwards. Then i fell again, they tell me, and i shook and convulsed. Again, i was sent on my way. To those who do not know, they assume the worst - they think drugs, alcohol. But it was none of those things. It was epilepsy. You see, i had this great idea a while back that i was miraculously cured. As an epileptic, like many with TLE, i am drawn to the trappings of religion, which is not the same thing as religion itself.

I am licensed to serve. To give communion. To take confession. I own a cassock and a cincture. I dress like a priest - or used to - every friday evening and ran the evening vespers. Sometimes, i swung the thurible and let the sharp and beautiful smoke of frankinsence waft around my cassock as the sleeves open and unfold like the indigo crepe wings of a bat or the silk of a black umbrella.

At last, i entered my colleagues office. I was to make a presentation, but right, i still could not speak and my hands shook, and quite literally, my teeth chattered the way they do on a Scooby Doo cartoon. Like Shaggy. "No Scooobbbbb" i thought, "Like, lettt's geeettt outtta herrre..." My boss gave me a moment. He is a kind man with soft eyes and a gentle manner. Thank God. I kept trying to speak, but still, the words came out in blips. I could not even ask for help.

A few minutes later, another grand mal. Elaine, who my boss works with, comes in. She says something, but i don't understand. She says epilepsy, i think. Maybe she asked if i was having a seizure. Someone did. Or i think they did. These words saved me. At last, someone was speaking my language. I kept thinking, My God, no wonder Alice was so lost down that dark rabbit hole. It is indeed topsy turvy. Dawn in the home office, where i usually work, she is the only person who knows what is happening. Some prescience on my part - for only a week ago i told her that i have epilepsy. I added, "but it doesn't happen, but just in case." Who could have predicted what they call status epilepticus. When she hears about what happened in Texas, she rings my hotel. She says she spoke to me several times, but i only remember one, and even then, just barely. She was an EMT, and like my neurologist, she is one of few who can speak the symbolic language of epilepsy. She says i declined medical treatment. That if she were there, she would have been in the back of an ambulance with me. I tell her, I am not to be trusted when i have seizures. I will do anything to fake being normal, but my eyes give me away, the way a young child grins when they're caught stealing. You know they're not telling the truth. This is me: all day, i've been telling people i'm "fine". Yes, "fine" i tell them. None believe me, of course. But it's all i can say. I want to say "I'm NOT fine" but for some reason, i cannot. I am confused. I feel pressure in my neck where there is a tumor growing at c-7. To date, nobody knows what it is, only that it has wrapped itself like Kudzu in and out of my spinal vertebrae. But Dawn keeps calling. Z. says he will come and stay with me and i want to say Yes because i am afraid of being alone again. What if i hurt myself even more, i think, but this part of me fears that i will scare him. I have no reason to believe this, but all my life i try to protect those i love, those i care about from so much illness. It is boring and dull and makes me boring and dull. Sure, maybe a medical curiousity, but who the fuck wants to be that. Wouldn't it be better to be known for your beauty or brilliance? Who wants to be known for this. I tell myself, i have enough evidence that i am smart enough, or as Ian says, "good enough lookin'" Yet when i look in the mirror at these huge and dark eyes, i see hazel-swirl that scares even me. An intensity and depth that i don't see on anyone else - it's odd, but a lot of epileptics have this look in the eye. I can't explain it. Maybe it's a look, an expression, left over from a world that only we see. I see it in Van Gogh's self-portraits. I want Z to come over, but i say no because i want to protect him from this. I want to protect Dawn, my husband, Elaine, Z... everyone. No one must know this dark place.

So the meeting is called off and Elaine drives me to the hotel where the front desk people, who all know me by name now, bring me endless pots of tea and sit with me while i watch, what else, The Passion of the Christ, because i have Temporal Lobe Epilepsy and religion turns me on right now. One woman, Denise, who works at the hotel, says she always wanted to be a nurse. Now she has her chance. They notice the burns on my arm. I must have seized long and hard on the carpet. My arm is red and has deep bruises and cuts. When i take off my dress, i see my left leg is black and blue from the top of the thigh to behind the knee - right where my soul lives. I still can't talk much, but sometimes i make a bit of sense. Mostly, i am afraid. I'm not sure what. Perhaps being so out of control. I just want this to stop.

The phone rings all day. My husband worries. He changes my ticket to return home. I fear for my job, but Z. says not to worry and is kind and generous and funny. Says i did the dance of the seven veils and we both laugh. What else can we do.

The day passes, and i am in and out of consciousness. Mostly, i don't make sense. I decide it's better if i do not talk, but still, it's in the eyes.

The next day, i go to leave but i have to tell the airline i have epilepsy just in case we have a repeat of the seizures. The man says he has to check. I wait for an hour and a half. I am still seizing, but these are Petit Mal. He can tell. He is worried. He rings my doctor who says i am "clear" to fly, but to watch me. And they do. They really do.

I want to believe that epileptics are the shamans, because i know that most shamans are indeed epileptic. that they are belived to be the conduit between this world and some other. I want to believe that what has happened to me these past few weeks, and especially, past few days, is some kind of mystical experience, but i don't see it. Instead, i see a girl with dark rimmed eyes that are hazel-colored saucers.

She shakes, she trembles, her pale and freckled skin porcelein in the half-light. This girl is me. Or part of me - the epileptic part. If i could make it all stop, i would. I would take her from her hiding place and wipe the fear (yes, fear) from her eyes and tell her Everything is going to be okay.

42 Seconds Under Ground: The Photography of Lewis Carroll

2004-08-14T14:43:00.000-07:00

Review of two books on Lewis Carroll, by Sadi Ranson-Polizzotti
Lewis Carroll, Photographer The Princeton University Library Albums by Roger Taylor and Edward Wakeling (Princeton University PressDreaming in Pictures: the Photography of Lewis Carroll By Douglas R. Nickel Yale University Press. Read complete review. More>>>>http://blogcritics.org/archives/2004/05/27/172905.php

2004-07-14T08:47:00.000-07:00

patient?

The Contract

2004-07-14T08:41:00.000-07:00

The Contract

He is a man of science and precision
He of measured manner and tone.
Of empathy and patience, of patients,
Of which I am one. Eyes etched silver-gelatin.
He sees all: scrubs in, never really
Scrubs out. The dead, with their sick-sweet
Smell, they haunt him. His wish then,
To keep me alive. He of gentle manner
And alabaster hands, of logic and of reason
He who outwits death; hunts every cancer.

Control: It’s even in the cut of his suit.
The sharp, starched folds, an undercover agent,
He is my guard and protectant, who runs
at every electronic beep, the drip-drip of IV,
harbingers of life, of death, of need. You feed
me deep-throated narcotics. If I die, what law
did you break? You fear it as much as I.

Later: I waited in your stark
White office, perched on the cold metal
Table, skirt hiked, I rolled down my tights
To where the wound is, am half done, then with quick
Simple knock, you enter, interrupt, but stay.
Stand before me, so close- a hair-thin line between us.
But these are not places of modesty. I lean forward,
Legs dangling, caramel hair falling, as I slip
the black silks off ginger-freckled legs,
and know that in this stance, we look like lovers,
my head bowed just so, the way you stand.
This is unplanned. A confluence of events,
a private ballet that leads us to now.
And when I rise, recognition,
double-blush, the room’s quiet hush,
we say nothing, but look to my tights
tossed hastily to the floor: Not the tidy folds
that should grace the chair by the door. Something careless,
more visceral; a heart skips, synapse crackles, tries to define
this slippery, dark thing that defies
every logic. Forget all you’ve learned.

You have been in me, but always,
I was asleep. We are Patient and Surgeon;
our contract is tacit: You need to save, I need saving.
So I walk the line between this life and some other
- -- unspeakable.
It is a push-pull tango, a dance of fight and resistance.
How many times have I surrendered
And you dragged me on my feet,
My body arcing in such exquisite pain
that my cheeks bloomed deep crimson
And I cried for every sorrow, for every lost part,
And you smiled because that red-hot flush
Told you the blood was still moving.
That you had saved me again.