Art After the Stroke, Part One: Seeing Every Thing

[elisem]

I've promised to write this up for a while now, so here's an actual start on it. This is part one, about the change in perception I noticed after my stroke, which happened in the wee hours of January 5, 2011.

After the stroke, once my recovery seemed to be going very well and I had been out of the hospital for a number of days, the excellent neurologist who treated me had a few things to say in case they came in handy. Those things were about some changes in perception and related matters that apparently some people experience who have strokes in the area they figure I had mine. Dr. Azhar was both clear and kind, giving me some information that I bet has been useful in reassuring a number of people, because the effects he was mentioning can be pretty disconcerting.

(Please note: anything I say here is a paraphrase of what Dr. Azhar said, and whatever he actually said was put much better.)

He mentioned, among other things, that some of my perceptions might be more unmediated than I was used to before. When he got to the part about how some people in some places meditated a lot or did other things to achieve such a state of mind, Juan started to make small amused noises, and I was grinning by the time he looked back at me and said, "You may have some experience with this sort of thing already." I allowed as how I could work with that, and thanked him for telling me.

He was right to tell me, and it was indeed happening to me. I've described it to other people since using these words: "I can look at something, and I see it, and I know the name of it. I know the word for it and I can find that word any time I want -- but the word is not between me and it."

It's hard to convey how precisely I mean those words. (Feel free to ask questions.) I'm not being metaphorical in ways people think I am; I'm saying that my perception of something is no longer primarily filtered through the name-and-identification-and-long-history I have with things-that-also-wear-that-word. I'm seeing the thing, not the word. And it was that way with every thing. I saw every thing. None of it was filtered out. And pretty much all of it was interesting.

If any of you know a Liavek story about an art critic who runs afoul of . . . well, circumstances too complicated to explain, really, and he winds up seeing beauty in absolutely every piece of art, then you might understand why I found this whole thing just a bit disconcerting. Well, I would have said worrisome, but at that point, my worrier was still turned off, which is another happy side effect of my stroke, at least for a while. Still, seeing every thing is pretty amazing. There are reasons why people do all that meditation and other stuff to get there.

The difficult part came when I sat down to sort beads. And I'll write more about that soon. For now, if you have questions, please do ask; answering them might help me make more sense of this in words that can be shared.

Art After the Stroke, Part One: Seeing Every Thing
Art After the Stroke, Part Two: Counting Flax Seeds
Art After the Stroke, Part Three: Frozen in the Fields of Plenty
Art After the Stroke, Part Four: And By My Eyes Be I Open
... and more to come.

Comments

[sashajwolf.livejournal.com]

I will be interested to hear any further thoughts you have, if you care to share them.

The emotions thing was very broken, albeit better than some of the other coping mechanisms I used. That's a big part of why I was so struck to see that most of your commenters seem to consider that kind of processing "normal" in other contexts - because the only internal reference I have for that kind of processing is in a context where it was clearly the result of some kind of damage. I guess it's one of those things that works in its "intended" context, but isn't so good elsewhere.

[elisem.livejournal.com]

I've been trying to find a description of what "seeing" was like, before, and the closest I can come is:

I saw what I thought I knew about things,
rather than just seeing things.

That's not entirely accurate, and it's not entirely fair, but it's heading in the direction of being able to describe it.

[sashajwolf.livejournal.com]

Something like that does sometimes happen to me - I see something, identify it as X, then realise I was wrong and it is in fact Y, and the visual image noticeably shifts to match. I think for me, that mostly happens at the level of sensory pattern-matching rather than words, though. It does become more verbal as the patterns get more complex, because my inner monologue starts prompting me for what features to look out for. If I'm trying to identify a bird and the possible candidates are very similar species, for instance, I'll start getting verbal thoughts like "Are the chest markings more like blotches or more like stripes?" But the better I know the particular species, the less verbal it will be. The words nudge the process along if it seems to stall; it doesn't feel like they're fundamental to it.

[elisem.livejournal.com]

Interesting! The bit about sensory pattern-matching reminds me of a bit near the beginning of a Spider Robinson story, where a man walks into a closed bar where the lights are out, sees something very weird, and it takes him three tries to identify it. He then has a brief meditation on the hierarchy he perceives in his choices.

If anybody's got the book handy and can quote, I'd be very grateful.