Western logic
Floating, spinning, surging, internal breakers crashing, foaming. I don't know what way is up but I can act anyway.
Act 2. Scene 2 of the rascal, the mongrel and the mutant.^ Western logic
His rollrock highroad roaring down,
In coop and in comb the fleece of his foam
Flutes and low to the lake falls home.A windpuff-bonnet of fáawn-fróth
Turns and twindles over the broth
Of a pool so pitchblack, féll-frówning,
It rounds and rounds Despair to drowning.From Inversnaid by Gerard Manley Hopkins
Head and heart
I am on my way to the city for an MRI and I am feeling like fáawn-fróth1. My trip starts with a 90 minutes taxi ride from to the main town on this island (they’ve told me I cannot drive) followed by the little plane. It is like my body is lost behind me. I’m in a centrifugal rollercoaster being pulled back, my inside blood cells moving with gravity and that left-behind body magnetism, cellular-surging-in-front feeling. Except reverse, go sideways and shake up, down and cartwheel too. I never liked the big-dipper… Having these sensations all the time has fully taken over my life.
Yet, I’m laughing at the ridiculousness of it all too. In the city hotel, after an hour’s ride on the little plane, it is like a post-apocalypse zombie movie. Empty. Nothing. Everything shut up. Thank goodness I’d thought ahead and grabbed a gin and tonic can, there was no food, at the gas station on the way to the airport. The alcohol dulls the rush feeling and means I can walk out to the convenience store for lunch. Well that is pre-made sandwiches at 9 pm 🙂 … covid times!
Head
In the city hotel, as the bed spins around me, the raging strength has me searching. It is super hard to read so I’ve been reluctant to do much research but I push myself in desperation. The closest I find for a diagnosis that fits my symptoms—70% of them—is “feeling as if floating or spinning”. There’s another bit of that too, Olfactory Hallucinations without Clinical Motor Activity.2
I am not up to trying to make sense of it but this minimal research suggests I could have seizures. Could that be a reason why I’m so short of breath, even with super mild exercise, sometimes? I can’t go any further with the research—reading is wildly harder than it used to be—I can only be momentarily present with what is on the page before I am flipped off:
the feather spun upward
Upward and upward
Spinning all the weather vanes
And you’re sitting at the kitchen table
Listening to the radioNick Cave The Spinning Song
The bed bucks some more and I try and orient by being spread-eagled across it, enough to think. I am aware the symptom fit I’ve found is only because it is where I’ve been looking.
Nevertheless, this partial symptom match does give me a ‘no lose’ strategy. Keto diets can manage seizures in some people. I discover this goes all the way back to the ancient Greeks and Hippocrates and so I start one. On the bed! Straight away.
So much energy for an individual
The interventions investigating my condition are serious despite all the covid shutdowns. Yet, I am perplexed on how easy it is to intervene on me as an individual and how difficult it is for us all to intervene on our whole planet.
This MRI seeks to find actionable points for pills, surgery, therapy etc.
Scale it up to our planet and there are many discrete difficulties we could intervene on. Inequality as a root cause of biodiversity destruction. Biodiversity destruction which is enhancing the likelihood of further covid-like pandemics.3 Project Drawdown’s medicine of 100 actions to reverse climate change (many of which address biodiversity).4 There are plenty of similar examples.
The contrast between the fast efforts on me as an individual and our gulf of urgency with our global crisis is stark.
Hara and Keto
For myself I am super motivated. Keto means next to no carbohydrates. Goodbye croissant—verboten. It does not matter that the research on this is encouraging but not conclusive.5 It’s more than enough for me to try the diet. As my friend David says:
When is it time to reef a sail at sea?
When you first think about it!
‘Reefing the sail’ is not really a thought. Time to pause, time to reef a sail imperatives, come straight from intuition. The impulse for action is from our hara—I feel what I need and want.
Fast forward to some personal results and already I feel I will be overtaken a lot less, less often I will be taken away somewhere else, unable to do much while spinning and floating.
Head
A week after the MRI the mercifully short report arrives. Once decoded—ischaemic foci, infracts and gyri anyone?—it indicates I may have had a thrombosis.
It’s quite a thing to read something that says a part of my brain has died. I quickly run from that however to our planet, confounded as I was earlier by the way we will work so fast on individuals in crisis but not our collective crisis.
The thing is it’s never been just about evidence and logic.
A personal example: Going through my report with my doctor, a diagnosis is: Two weeks after the vax, when things were getting very wild, I had a blood clot, a CVST. Due to low blood supply a small parts of my brain died. That ‘stroke’ triggered or caused seizures. The dissociative sort are present as well.
I put this analysis as somewhere between speculation and informed guessing.
Scans lie. Scan 100 healthy people and you’ll find abnormalities like mine in 5 to 10 people. Regardless, there are a lot of things that correlate—the dead bits of my brain are associated with reading and balance, both of which I’m struggling to re-learn—plus there is the support in the limited amount of literature I can read. The doctors will recommend action but it is certainly not ‘proof beyond a reasonable doubt’.6
Rational humans?
But then they sent me away to teach me how to be sensible
Logical, oh, responsible, practical
And then they showed me a world where I could be so dependable
Oh, clinical, oh, intellectual, cynicalLogical Supertramp
I am still held by western logic so I have to do the numbers:
CVST is the super rare brain thrombosis following the covid vax I had. About 1 in 100,000.
Dissociative seizures. Between 2 and 33 in 100,000.
Active epilepsy. A bit more than 1 in a hundred.
The math? Split the differences and combined odds:
1 in 50 billion!
Surely it is time to buy a gambling ticket?
While grateful for all the help I am receiving, I can’t get past how much effort our systems will go to find a clinical diagnosis and course of action for me, an individual. Yet, on our collective patient, the planet and all the living systems we are part of, things that are low risk and restorative seem inordinately hard to start.
^ I am deeply indebted to my dear, dear friend Teresa Zimmermann including inspiration for this series title, to write Act 3, to integrate the songs … and so much more.
Picture: Festina Lentívaldi, (be) Benevolution. Reuse: Creative Commons BY-NC 3.0 US.
This is a three act story and there are four parts of Act 1:
Act 1, Scene 1 is The-rascals-immunity
Act 1, Scene 2 is Rascal visions
Act 1, Scene 3 is Rascal’s descent
Act 1, Scene 4 is Boom, crash, bounce?
There are currently three parts of Act 2
Act 2, Scene 1 is The Rascal and the Mongrel
Act 2, Scene 2 is Western logic, this article!
Act 2, Scene 3 is Unfolding realities
For more on these personal interventions see Act 2, Scene 3. Coming soon.