A theme that has surfaced in our readings and discussions has been, in some cases, the concept of a mental illness becoming an all-consuming, self changing part of the affected human being. It has the potential to become an actual part of the person rather than something outside of them. It can make a person who they are. There is no longer a differentiation between the self and the disease. In Mark Salzman’s Lying Awake, Sister John lived years with migraine-like headaches that gave her “a wonderful experience, but it’s spiritual, not physical” (47).
I found that the decision to place this story in a cloister with a nun who is affected by epilepsy is a very deliberate decision. Epilepsy is a disorder which can make the patient feel that they are “becoming so drawn into the altered world created by the disorder that one loses interest in everything else” (68). The days spent in the cloister are used for the purpose of becoming closer to God. The goals are to be as selfless as possible and to put oneself “in [God’s] hands completely” (125). In the cloister, the nuns are meant to lose themselves in religion. There no longer is a material world. Epilepsy, just like religion, is impalpable. Sister John experiences her epilepsy so that her spiritual world and physical world become undifferentiated. According to Sister John, Epilepsy is a disease of the will of God. She gives God full power over this illness and loses her will to cure her epilepsy. She questions her surgery because surgery used to cure epilepsy would mean questioning God. The narrator states that for Sister John, “leaving the enclosure made her feel uneasy, like being caught in an open field with a storm approaching” (38). The cloister and her place in it has been what defines Sister John. Everything that she experiences within the cloister whether it be physical or emotional becomes entangled within her identity as a whole.
Something that was quite striking in Lying Awake, was Sister John’s reaction to her diagnosis. It seems as though she was very much aware of her life, pre-epilepsy. She knew there was difference between her pre and post epileptic life and must have believed that it was due to some sort of religious awakening rather than a physical cause. The epilepsy actually improved Sister John’s emotional life. She states that “if the surgery were to take my dream away, everything I’ve gone through up to now would seem meaningless. I wouldn’t even be able to draw inspiration from the memory of it…” (138). In this moment sister John begins to separate her illness from her religious life, admitting that the epilepsy has made her religious self, a more meaningful self. She comes to the conclusion that the medical world and the religious world might be separated and that her doctor may not understand her “take” on her condition.
To Sister John, epilepsy is something that was given to her by God, a condition that was designed for her. To the medical world, her way of life seems like “hyperreligiousity” and “the choice to live as a celibate: hyposexuality. Control of the will through control of the body, achieved through regular fasting: anorexia. Keeping a detailed spiritual journal: hypergraphia” (153). Many of the mental illness that we have studied in class so far have seemed like an exaggeration of a neurotypical mind. In this case,however, Sister John contradicts the idea that what she experiences is “hypertypical”. She sees her epilepsy and her way of life as being normal and different from the material world, but not an extension of the “norm”. To Sister John, epilepsy is who she is, her conception of “neurotypical”.
I found an interesting parallel between your statement that the cloister is what defines Sister John and the way that in the Carroll article, he is defined by most people by his supposed pedophilia. One of the notes I made while reading that article was, "do we only define people/latch onto the most 'shocking' difference they have"? In which case, when reflecting on Carroll's life, the most shocking difference he had while alive was this (perhaps misguided) notion that he liked little girls--since TLE was not really understood at the time. In Sister John's case, to the outside world the life of a contemplative nun is a more shocking difference than TLE, though both are incomprehensible (and maybe frightening/threatening?) to the average person.
ReplyDeleteIn both cases, TLE offers another "answer" to the person's life. Why would a mathematics don write these flights of fancy, or why would a woman having a crisis of faith remain in the cloister? A diagnosis of epilepsy seems to help bind together the disparate elements of both characters.
The idea of this "cloister" further interests me due to the fact that, ultimately, epilepsy seems to produce dual competing sensations of freedom and restriction. The epileptic persona-type is largely shown to be introverted- hyposexual and shy. Emphasis on the external world is weaned away due to an increasing sense of that larger, wilder, metaphysical world beyong immediate reach.
ReplyDelete(in a mildly different direction: I think there’s something interesting concerning whether/how neurology and spirituality can coexist with one another. Because one can track one’s perceptions to a tumor in the brain does not immediately invalidate a sense of spirituality. It seems to me that, as we’ve grown to understand more and more about the world, we’re ever forced to expand our conceptions of both our brain (sense of self) and spirituality, God, metaphysiology, whatever you want to call it. Does the molding of the two together not simply force a new contextualizing?)
Anyway. The restriction of the material world is made up for by a freedom of internal self-perception. In some ways, I wish I could gather a better sense of the visions and sensations experienced by the epileptics. Obviously there’s a great deal of discrepancy, but still. The conception of time and space operating differently certainly gives a sensation of transcending beyond the typical physical restraints of the world. Epilepsy forces oneself to have such a different conception of one’s self, of what one has access to, and as such, what the world is made up of. So what if God’s just a tumor hiking up your brain?
Also: the discussion going on below concerning neuro-ethics, and the relationship between the self and the brain, certainly needs discussion.