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Sunday, November 19, 2006

The Zahir

Joan of Arc started hearing voices when she was thirteen. Her statements reveal that she saw lights, which is one of the symptoms of an attack. According to the neurologist, Dr Lydia Bayne, the warrior-saint's ecstatic experiences were caused by what we now call musicogenic epilepsy, which is provoked by hearing a particular kind of sound or music: in Joan's case, it was the sound of bells.

Medical scientists that study the Bible are sure that the Apostle Paul was an epileptic. They base this on the fact that, on the road to Damascus, he saw a brilliant light near him which caused him to fall to the ground, leaving him temporarily blind and unable to eat or drink for some days. In medical terms, this is known as "temporal lobe epilepsy".

Other epileptics develop their self-destructive side, as was the case with van Gogh. He described his convulsions as "the storm within". In Saint-Rémy, where he was a patient, one of the nurses saw him having a convulsive seizure. At least he managed in his paintings to transform his self-destruction into a reconstruction of the world.

Some people suspect that Lewis Carroll wrote Alice in Wonderland in order to describe his own experiences of epilepsy. The story at the beginning of the book, when Alice falls down a black hole , is an experience familiar to most epileptics. During her journey to Wonderland, alice often sees things flying and she herself feels very light - another very precise description of the effects of an epileptic attack.

Dostoevsky had his first attack when he was nine years old, and said that it brought him moments when he felt utterly at peace with the world as well as moments of terrible depression.

Famous People with Epilepsy

De Nacht van de Wansmaak ¶ 4:06 PM