EPILEPSY
Sacred Disease
Paul Newman
Fireworks Photo Caption
One
agreeable aspect of modern publishing is the production of samplers or
tasters of the work of new writers. Faber's
1994 anthology opens with a story by Thom Jones called The
Pugilist at Rest. An
ex-boxer, advertising copywriter and member of the Marine Corps, Jones
writes tough, intelligent, yet entirely disenchanted prose and (through
the mouthpiece of a remarkably literate brain-damaged boxer) has this to
say about various distinguished "peakers": "About a year after my fight with the guy from the artillery I
started having seizures. I
suffered from a form of left-temporal lobe seizure which is sometimes
called Dostoyevski's epilepsy. It's
so rare as to be almost unknown. Freud,
himself a neurologist, speculated that Dostoyevski was a hysterical
epileptic, and that his fits were unrelated to brain damage - psychogenic
in origin. Dostoyevski did
not have his first attack until the age of twenty-five, when he was
imprisoned in Siberia and received fifty lashes after complaining about
the food. Freud figured that
after Dostoyevski's mock execution, the four years' imprisonment in
Siberia, the tormented childhood, the murder of his tyrannical father,
etc. & etc. - he had all the hallmarks of hysteria, of grave
psychological trauma. And
Dostoyevski had displayed the trademark features of the psychomotor
epileptic long before his first attack.
These days physicians insist there is no such thing as the
epileptic personality. I
think they say this because they do not want to add to the burden of the
epileptic's suffering with another stigma.
Privately they do believe in these traits.
Dostoyevski was nervous and depressed, a tormented hypochondriac, a
compulsive writer obsessed with religious and philosophic themes.
He was hyperloquacious, raving, etc. & etc.
His gambling addiction is well known.
By most accounts he was a sick soul.
The
peculiar and most distinctive thing about his epilepsy was that in the
split second before his fit - in the aura, which is in fact officially
part of the attack - Dostoevski experienced a sene of felicity, of
ecstatic well-being unlike anything an ordinary mortal could hope to
imagine. It was the experience of satori.
Not the nickel-and-dime satori of Abraham Maslow, but the Supreme.
He said that he wouldn't trade ten years of his life for that
feeling, and I, who have had it, too, would have to agree.
I can't explain it, I don't understand it - it becomes slippery and
elusive when it gets any distance on you - but I have felt this down to
the core of my being. Yes,
God exists! But then it slides away and I lose it. I become a doubter. Even
Dostoyevski, the fervent Christian, makes an almost airtight case against
the possibility of the existence of God in the Grand Inquisitor digression
in The Brothers Karamazov .
It is probably the greatest passage in all world literature and it
tilts you to the court of the atheist.
This is what happens when you approach Him with the intellect.
It is thought that St. Paul had a temporal-lobe fit on the road to Damascus. Paul warns us in the Corinthians that God will confound the intellectuals. It is known that Muhammad composed the Koran after attacks of epilepsy. Black Elk experienced fits before his grand "buffalo" vision. Joan of Arc is thought to have been a left-temporal-lobe epiliteptic. Each of these in a terrible flash of brain lightning was able to pierce the murky veil of illusion which is spread over all things. Just so did the scales fall from my eyes. It is called the "sacred disease".