it sounds like not having had access to words made you prize them when they came back. i wonder if that's because you were young when it happened.
i had a concussion when i was 27 that took away my ability to read for an hour or two and for somebody that had built his whole life on research and was about to start a doctorate that was pretty terrifying, to realise it could all be taken away in a moment
im pretty sure thats why i stopped trusting words and now prefer images. its interesting how that works out differently for different folks
that being said, i do think making images of things and developing symbols into things that can be understood is an essentially left brained thing to do. iconography anticipates the alphabet after all.
ironically, i took the hit on the right side of my head. i don't remember exactly where but i'm pretty sure it was the prefrontal cortex. maybe we have more in common than it seems from the ways we respectively responded to our brains going wrong.
my whole life was built around my head and how smart i thought i was. i think it was ultimately a positive thing for me though, it showed me i was pushing martial arts training too hard and burning my candle at too many ends.
This is so fascinating to read as a person who also have had conscious seizures. The 'scrambling' you write of, or the simple *being* is exactly how I felt! Being conscious during a seizure feels like an embodied oxymoron. It bothered me for a while, and it seems like it bothered you too. Maybe that's why we write after all. Thank you for this read, I will continue to follow your work closely!
I remember watching Jill Bolte Taylor's video in college. Honestly, it had a major impact on my intellectual formation at the time.
RE: Singing the Iliad, you should check out the work of Eric Havelock (and orality-literacy studies, generally speaking). Preface to Plato is perhaps his most well known text.
Walter Ong's Presence of the Word, if you haven't read it yet, will also blow your mind.
This is only tangentially related to one of the things you said here, about needing to understand things before participating in them - but that made me come up with words for what my life has been like as an overthinker (or "smart" person, as my mother would say).
If I had to describe being a "smart" person in one sentence, it would be this: I compulsively need to understand something before I participate in it - and if I don't understand it, I judge it as silly; which means that my life has been spent looking down upon every base human behavior, intellectualizing it, discovering on my own that it was in fact a good and useful behavior all along, and finally submitting to it; in other words, being "smart" is taking the long way round to participating in human life.
Anyway, fascinating article that I'll be thinking about for a while.
I wanted to ask, at what point were you able to connect the dots and begin to frame this as a kind of origin story for yourself as a writer? You mentioned the Zoom call with a friend. Was it like a slow realization, or was there a pivotal figure (like McGilchrist or the "Stroke of Insight")?
That call was not the first time I framed it that way, but it was the most solidly formed and it fully occurred to me a bit all at once in that moment. It has just been getting more detailed since then, reading Walker Percy, McGilchrist, etc.
I understand that writing is a compensation: when I was a child I stuttered. Unfortunately, I didn’t have patient parents, so I had to overcompensate the lack of speech with writing.
I need to read Lost in the Cosmos again
Wild! Loved reading this
Woo! Thanks, Grace.
🙏🏽🙏🏽
Bless
it sounds like not having had access to words made you prize them when they came back. i wonder if that's because you were young when it happened.
i had a concussion when i was 27 that took away my ability to read for an hour or two and for somebody that had built his whole life on research and was about to start a doctorate that was pretty terrifying, to realise it could all be taken away in a moment
im pretty sure thats why i stopped trusting words and now prefer images. its interesting how that works out differently for different folks
that being said, i do think making images of things and developing symbols into things that can be understood is an essentially left brained thing to do. iconography anticipates the alphabet after all.
ironically, i took the hit on the right side of my head. i don't remember exactly where but i'm pretty sure it was the prefrontal cortex. maybe we have more in common than it seems from the ways we respectively responded to our brains going wrong.
That's very interesting that it was your right frontal. No surprise it took away your ability to read (we use both). I wonder what that was like.
pretty ego shattering ill tell you that much
my whole life was built around my head and how smart i thought i was. i think it was ultimately a positive thing for me though, it showed me i was pushing martial arts training too hard and burning my candle at too many ends.
This is so fascinating to read as a person who also have had conscious seizures. The 'scrambling' you write of, or the simple *being* is exactly how I felt! Being conscious during a seizure feels like an embodied oxymoron. It bothered me for a while, and it seems like it bothered you too. Maybe that's why we write after all. Thank you for this read, I will continue to follow your work closely!
I remember watching Jill Bolte Taylor's video in college. Honestly, it had a major impact on my intellectual formation at the time.
RE: Singing the Iliad, you should check out the work of Eric Havelock (and orality-literacy studies, generally speaking). Preface to Plato is perhaps his most well known text.
Walter Ong's Presence of the Word, if you haven't read it yet, will also blow your mind.
This is only tangentially related to one of the things you said here, about needing to understand things before participating in them - but that made me come up with words for what my life has been like as an overthinker (or "smart" person, as my mother would say).
If I had to describe being a "smart" person in one sentence, it would be this: I compulsively need to understand something before I participate in it - and if I don't understand it, I judge it as silly; which means that my life has been spent looking down upon every base human behavior, intellectualizing it, discovering on my own that it was in fact a good and useful behavior all along, and finally submitting to it; in other words, being "smart" is taking the long way round to participating in human life.
Anyway, fascinating article that I'll be thinking about for a while.
So well described. I'll be mulling over this.
I wanted to ask, at what point were you able to connect the dots and begin to frame this as a kind of origin story for yourself as a writer? You mentioned the Zoom call with a friend. Was it like a slow realization, or was there a pivotal figure (like McGilchrist or the "Stroke of Insight")?
That call was not the first time I framed it that way, but it was the most solidly formed and it fully occurred to me a bit all at once in that moment. It has just been getting more detailed since then, reading Walker Percy, McGilchrist, etc.
Stunning memoir!
I understand that writing is a compensation: when I was a child I stuttered. Unfortunately, I didn’t have patient parents, so I had to overcompensate the lack of speech with writing.
My wife and I use "dyslexic lawyer" as a shorthand to mean "someone who has become great at something because he is naturally bad at it."
As I was reading, I found myself saying out loud, “Adam in the garden, Adam in the garden…” and then you mentioned him.
I say all that, because I was going to write “Adam in the garden” but then you beat me to it.
It’s interesting though, that God reveals His name as “I Am” The being that Adam can’t name for naming implies dominion.
The naming of a thing draws it from the mist as you say. And so, God is He who cannot be drawn out of the mist.
A fascinating read. Thank you. I shall be thinking about this for a while.