Monday 8 April 2024
My wife would say I’m delirious from maddening pain now when I am describing migraines using the word “gift” in this blog’s title. In most cases, when migraines torture me, they’re not blessings or endowments; they’re crushing and overpowering agonies. My migraine diary is too erratic to pinpoint a direct cause and effect relation with certain triggers known to instigate a migraine. I haven’t discovered a food or environmental stimulus that then later initiates a migraine. At this point, I think most of my migraines erupt during my intellectual diver-like bends. When I say “bends,” I mean my way of describing my analytical, reflective modes of thinking, teaching, and writing in which those acts are so involved and deep that mental and intellectual pressures manifest themselves as physical or somatic pressures. Intellectual dilemmas taunt me. Can I answer or explain them? If I can’t, why not? And, in that pursuit, I dive too deeply, too quickly, not preparing myself to counter the metaphysical lightheadedness or heaviness I experience, which thus becomes a migraine.
Migraines aren’t just bad headaches; they’re worse. The best way I can characterize a migraine is: imagine the worst alcoholic hangover headache but intensified to a hellish degree. A migraine can last for days. I feel as though I am underwater. Other times, I feel like I’ve been in a smoky room. My jaws and teeth hurt. My eyes feel ready to burst. Even my hair hurts. Sometimes, I feel overheated, and my forehead burns, despite having no alleviated body temperature. Other times, I feel a chill. Nausea chokes me. Sometimes vertigo topples me. Experiencing so-called aura pre-events warns me a migraine soon will bombard me; however, this warning isn’t consistent or dependable.
Years ago, my migraines stumped my physicians: were the migraines causing my high blood pressure, or the high blood pressure causing my migraines? Treated with blood pressure medication, I eventually discovered that the two conditions weren’t related. Even with daily migraine preventative pills, I couldn’t rid myself of them. The past year, I have stopped taking both medications, and, inexplicably, I have had fewer debilitating episodes, but the migraine’s specter always is there. Because I have lived with migraines since adolescence, I resentfully accept my condition.
I’ve taught classes through migraines. During certain lessons from my War Class, I’ve given myself migraines; the intensity of both the course content and my teaching style has triggered migraines. For this reason of migraines, I now try to avoid certain literary texts to avert them. Although I didn’t directly say that migraines were a reason for me not teaching certain war literature texts, I addressed this issue indirectly in my “Professor, Why Aren’t We Reading ‘___’?” blog. I usually don’t tell my students when I get them; however, these episodes when migraines hold me captive in the classroom certainly could have been a blog topic for the series of classroom experiences that I had planned to write but didn’t carry out.
In surrendering to migraines, I flatter myself, saying: “Dostoevsky suffered epileptic seizures. Migraines happen to me.” Why is it? Why should I associate a migraine as some kind of badge of honor or some kind of mark of distinction? Moreover, Simone Weil, the sublime, mystical, and truly distinctive French philosopher and political activist, whose writings I depended upon for my Herman Melville dissertation—God! her dazzling, transcendental, and unequaled insights taught me so much—suffered from migraines.
No way do I compare myself to either Dostoevsky or Weil; nonetheless, recognizing fellow deep divers like Dostoevsky and Weil—two mighty and personal influences who truly have plunged into intellectual deep waters—I justify my own intellectual deep dives by appreciating their intellectual diving sessions. By finding motivation from their experiences in the deep, I tolerate my own “underwater” pressures. Stoicism and fortitude, I cling to these buoys while treading my own intellectual waters during a migraine. Are they my occupational hazards… my migraines… the manifestations or revelations of my scholarly, existential, Sisyphean fate?
Long since becoming an intellectual-scholar, I begrudgingly receive migraines as signs, oracle-like warnings, or prophetic confirmations. Yes, I do have a spiritual/metaphysical nature. When drafting the blog which later became the rough draft of Afterword for the Katyn manuscript (I wrote about this episode in the 01 April 2024 blog, “A Blog Draft Becomes a Book Chapter Draft Instead”), I felt a migraine erupting. It wasn’t a draining, enervating migraine; instead, this migraine produced a giddy, dizzying, rapturous excitement. My head felt like I was in a smoky room with a smoldering, incense-filled urn. I received this migraine like a seer accepting a vision from the gods. The cynical professor blog draft becoming the new Katyn manuscript chapter was that gift from the Muses; those sources of inspiration were speaking to me. As they were dictating their creative directions to revise a blog draft into a book chapter draft, I listened. And the token I must pay to the Muses is the migraine. Something for something.
Although I didn’t mention it, that migraine was a manifestation of my “Holy Shit” revelation I wrote about in last week’s blog. I don’t like to admit it, but if I get a migraine, I see it as an indication that I’m on the right path, creatively and intellectually. The act of writing isn’t easy, and it doesn’t become easier the more you write. Each writing session is a travail. And for me, migraines are the reminders of that struggle.