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

[txanne.livejournal.com]

Was it strictly physical objects, or did it also happen with music, food, scents, textures...?

[elisem.livejournal.com]

I experienced it most strongly when I looked at things -- or at least it was most readily apparent visually.

I do perceive scents more strongly, though, or more emphatically. This has occasionally been a problem; there are things that bug me now that I probably tuned out before.

Sounds, hm. Not sure. Might be not sure because sounds are tricky for me anyhow, as I get less of the total bandwidth there.

Texture . . . again, not sure.

Visual, though? Very sure. Very big. Very very.

[txanne.livejournal.com]

Hm. Were you mostly a visual person pre-stroke?

[elisem.livejournal.com]

It's hard to answer that, because I have synaesthesia, but yeah, probably that's the easiest way to categorize it. (However, visual stuff provokes kinesthetic response, for me. So does auditory stuff, to a somewhat lesser degree -- but I also get taste with auditory, and I rarely get taste with visual.)

[txanne.livejournal.com]

How awesome! I didn't know that about you. Have the combinations changed, post-stroke?

[elisem.livejournal.com]

I think there's been some shifting around, yes. I need to listen to more new music, though, in order to check that.

I used to describe my kinesthetic sense as "temperature, density, and pressure" -- catch me in person for a description with handwaving which sometimes seems to make sense to folks -- but I think there might actually be a motion component to it now. Or maybe it's just "reference to a local vertical" or some gravity deal. Hmm. Will have to watch and see.

Good question!

[cavyherd.livejournal.com]

Vestibular? (There was a discussion in NLP circles some while back that the vestibular system could be classed as a separate sensory modality.)

[elisem.livejournal.com]

I don't know if it would be, because I'm not clear enough on what exactly that system feels like when in use.


The handwaving explanation I mentioned before is ... hm. I don't know if I can even approximate it in print. But it's sort of like this: I see something, and I feel a whole-body response, but the response is sort of mirroring the thing, except it's not about looking like the thing. It usually involves shifting my position slightly (either in reality, or in my imagination, which feels like 'argh, i really want to move!' and is kind of uncomfortable in some cases) and feeling tension in whatever the right places are for the thing I'm ... eh. Here's where I'm stuck. What am I doing to the thing? Looking at it? Responding to it? When I was little, I just thought of it as "matching that thing." I noticed that I could do it when playing a game called Scan, where a pattern is revealed and then players scan an array of large cards randomly scattered on the floor until they find the matching pattern. First one to point it out wins. I could look at the revealed pattern and instantly "feel it" in me, and then I just swept my gaze over the scattered cards until something down there made me feel the same way when I looked at it. It took about as long as describing the game has taken me. After a while, nobody would play Scan with me any more because nobody could beat me more than once in a very great while.

[tournevis.livejournal.com]

I do get kinestetic stuff from sound and the reverse, which makes getting a massage really interesting. Let's talk about that, and sensory mediation next time we meet.

[elisem.livejournal.com]

Yes, let us. Remind me of it, though, when we meet?