Previous - 91. Rambling
Rain
Last winter was our El Niño winter, and we did have more rain than in the previous drought years, but it wasn't what I had been hoping for. Now this winter is supposed to be a La Niña winter, yet we've been having even more rain than last year. Today it rained most of the day. So nice.We had been warned about all the rain, so I had planned to stay in, which I did. There was nothing I really had to leave for, and with the steady rain I wasn't tempted to run out for anything. I even had jobs planned, most of which I did -- or at least got started on. But I'm going to be so happy to get out tomorrow to get a bunch of errands in before the rain resumes next week.
Not that I'm going to cower in my apartment all week because of rain. I really don't see how people who rarely leave their homes do it. I'm reminded that even Henry Ryecroft in his imagined Devon retirement, was constantly walking about the countryside like a good Jane Austen daughter. Maybe Gissing's real life lung problems played a part in Henry's endless walks, or maybe Gissing's boredom at being housebound (I imagine) also played a part.
Alice Herz-Sommer didn't seem to be much daunted by her lack of mobility near the end, but then she still had her music. Music gave her the ability to leave her surroundings behind both in the camp and in old age. And that was one of the lessons of the Buena Vista Social Club, how music could keep people lively in old age. Unfortunately I am like Jane Austen's Lady Catherine de Bourgh in this respect, "If you are speaking of music...it is of all subjects my delight. There are few people in England I suppose, who have more true enjoyment of music than myself, or a better natural taste. If I had ever learnt, I should have been a great proficient.... "
Musicophilia
This is a very poorly named book. Musicophilia would have been a much better title for the book about Alice Herz-Sommer. ("Chem-ophilia" would have been a better title for Uncle Tungsten.) This is largely a book about neurological dysfunction and oddities relating to music.I just read the section on musical hallucination -- which is when the music you "imagine" is so real sounding and so out of your conscious control that it usually takes time, sometimes days, for the subject to realize the music is coming from inside their head. On the one hand, it's not so surprising that the brain can generate music without the aid of the senses. As we've seen in other perceptual contexts, what we "hear" is not what our ears detect but what our brains do with that data. Musical hallucinations are just our brains replaying -- or sometimes playing with, as a sound designer might -- the music it has performed in the past.
What interests me, as in the case of dreams, is all that our brains are capable of doing on their own. Our brains, according to Sacks' multitude of anecdotal accounts, can reproduce music we heard long ago and have forgotten about and with a degree of fidelity that is often better than what those subjects can obtain from actual music -- often due to hearing loss.
And sometimes the music seems to be original and composers write it down and we have new art. (There is a footnote in the book that is so close to Adrian's story in Doctor Faustus as to make you wonder how common things like this are.)
Going further with what the brain is able to do "on its own," I come back to the always fascinating Multiple Personality Disorder. Because I also live in an open-air psych-ward, I've been thinking in recent days about the relationship between MPD and schizophrenia. The latter would seem to be a variation on the former in which the primary identity is aware of a 2nd identity but only through hearing its voice. (I mean the voice has to be coming from someplace. And is this the origin of the notion of demonic possession and exorcism? That would certainly make sense. People talking to themselves often seem like they are struggling with something trying to "possess" them, as was the case with some of the secondary personalities in the MPS examples I read.)
You could do a very interesting variation on the movie Lucy with a subject developing the ability to control some of these powers our brains seem to have. Or, to fall back on Robert Pirsig's analogy of our brain as the hardware (or OS) and our consciousness as an app running on top of that system, the underlying "intelligence" running the show could become dominant with full control of all its neurological powers.
I just did a bit of research on schizophrenia (Wiki is having a really annoying fund drive which makes their site inaccessible to me -- since I just gave them money last month), I found this interesting tidbit on another site, "It is interesting that people who are born deaf and later go on to develop schizophrenia can also experience hearing voices.11" And they report there are people with benign voices in their head, as opposed to the usual "command" and "persecutory" voices. The "persecutory" voices are the ones that reek of being MPD related, as they seem to know so much personal and embarrassing stuff about the subject. Here's a key passage, "Because they come from inside you, they have a perfect understanding of your whole psyche.2
"They understand all of your strengths and weaknesses, all of your secret fears and hates. All of the things you most love and care about, and because they know you so well they can attack you where they know that you are most sensitive and where they can do the most damage. For instance, the person may be told by the voices to harm the family members they most love. They may be told to give up their studies, sports, or the career they have worked at all their life. They may be told to harm themselves in the most painful ways.2"
An interesting question is, Are the people with schizophrenia, who at least retain control of their consciousness, better off than MPS sufferers who suddenly find themselves in surprising places? Would you rather be harangued in your head or completely lose control of your consciousness?
Getting back to musical, or auditory, hallucinations, there is often a connection with exposure to silence, either a particularly silent environment, like a boat on a still sea or someone in the middle of a desert, or the silence of hearing loss. Which reminds me of the "voice hearing" Sara Maitland and her passion for silence... while driving and flying all over the place. She never elaborated on her voices, that I can recall, so we don't know if they were something she wanted to hear or not. (Now I'm imagining myself meditating in the desert hoping to be told where I put that SciFi manuscript I can't for the life of me find, though I know I wouldn't have tossed it. Or so I can hear again that "Eclectic Mouse" LP I can not find even on YouTube. I should look again, things do turn up there... Found it! Here. I recognize the sound but not the songs. It's possible I had a later LP -- I would have guessed around 1972 instead of late '60s.)
I've read another chapter now (the one about people either having or not having a musical ability) and am wondering if there are instances where one personality does and other personalities don't.
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