Descriptions of Migraines

The Guardian published an interesting description of one person’s migraine attacks. She describes them as wrinkles in reality and after reading about them it seems clear why migraines are often linked to a kind of epileptic madness. For a fellow migraineur, a term she uses in the article, the descriptions of the episodes are fascinating, because they do make a great deal of sense of it all. The terms are hardly clinical, but it’s impossible to describe phenomena that stretch the ways reality presents itself to you with objective prose:

I’m writing now through day four of this month’s headache, one that began (as do many) with a flickering blind spot in the centre of my vision. It starts small, a spinning black penny in the middle of a page. I slump in my seat as it spreads darkly over my sight like jam, and I can’t see, or think, or entirely understand speech. It’s the film melting in my projector — it’s a bit like falling. Smells slay me. Noise, fine, but smells — Angel perfume in a lift, for instance, or that dirty spitting rain you get in cities, the kind that smells of apocalypse — will make me retch. And minutes later the headache comes.

She mentions the “Alice in Wonderland syndrome” that accompanies the attack. The body or parts of it seem oddly out of proportion. Figure-ground relations become blurred. Synaesthesia occurs. Some time before the pain sets in your surroundings are suddenly pregnant with meaning. Intense déjà vu makes the world familiar and strange at the same time. Semantic processing flickers on and off. In short, it’s like a trip on your favorite psychedelic, but with intense pain.

My own experiences are fairly similar. The headache I usually take care of with aspirin. I have tried other painkillers, but the aspirin seems to do the job. Nausea, madness and other symptoms can’t really be fixed anyway, so I simply take the edge off and spend the next few hours in a dark room. The senses remain heightened and most sounds, all distinct smells and bright light are unmanageable. The same goes for what I’ve come to call semantic garbage, unorganized loud sensations of any kind. These have in the past even triggered migraine attacks.

It sounds odd — as if madness should make sense — but I once found that listening to John Coltrane actually eased the pain merely because his playing floated somewhere beyond the rigid structures of musical harmony and rhythm. During another episode, the Spanish language was soothing. Both of these experiences, which I confess might have been given greater significance than they actually deserve due to the trippyness of it all, involved not just the perception of raw sounds, volume and timbre, but the way the information was structured. For some reason, it was this abstract beauty that gave me pleasure and relief. Perhaps it’s finally a matter of aesthetics — choppy information is as ugly as unorganized noise and both hurt the senses.

As the Guardian migraineur points out, the fact is that there is some pleasure to be had from migraine attacks if they are manageable. I know at least one person whose headaches are so bad that she would never agree to this, but I’m fairly sure those who can cope with theirs would. The way the brain goes nuts, for one thing, is a great thrill. The first migraine the Guardian writer describes made her forget how to read. That, however disconcerting, is a very strange experience that punctures a hole in your mundane existence and I would think any person who experiences something like that lives in a much more interesting world than those who don’t. There is also the pleasure that follows the attack, which for me is a pleasant fuzzy hangover. Having said all that, I don’t look forward to the next time.

Life in Europe Without a Future

While avoiding work yesterday, I wandered to El Pais’s website and found a link to a live feed of the 15-M anniversary demonstrations. Tens of thousands of people were in attendance singing and banging drums. The broadcast included a few inserts and in one of these a reporter asked a young man how he saw the future of the movement. He smiled and answered the silly question: “We don’t have a future.” I’ve been corresponding with a Greek friend of mine and although we have somehow assumed a fairly clinical tone in our discussions about politics, it’s pretty obvious he’s not very hopeful either. He has some plans for the future, but he also sees his country has been ravaged by austerity measures and that they will run out of money soon.

The thought of living without a future sounds melodramatic at first, but melodrama does not motivate tens of thousands of people to take to the streets, move billions of euros within the eurozone, or help elect neonazi’s into the Greek parliament. Most of us have some idea of what it is like to live with uncertainty, but it’s difficult to see what happens when there really is no future. For my parents the plan was to get married, make babies, work and buy a house. I can’t see myself doing any of these things. But there is something even more profound going on in the current crisis. Not many people believe that Europe’s problems can be solved with traditional politics. And the problems are many: the financial crisis, massive unemployment, growing unrest, you name it. We have grown used to the hopelessness brought on by the crisis and we are finding ways of living with it instead.

It might be a philosophical question, but I don’t know what kind of philosopher would philosophize when he can’t see beyond the present. Living fully in the present goes against human nature as well. Dr Johnson famously said that he who makes a beast of himself gets rid of the pain of being a man. Easier said than done. The beautiful Spaniards shown in the broadcast talked of revolution with very human and infectious smiles on their faces. Humorists might make light of the fact that futures were the thing that got us into this mess to begin with, but it’s grotesque to laugh where a smile will suffice. Besides, my Greek friend isn’t amused and I would hate to joke at his expense. Neither of us can afford it.

Assuming either an optimistic or a pessimistic attitude to living without a future is impossible, because there is nothing toward which one should assume the attitude. The answers are not forthcoming and it’s understandable, because the problem is that the answers have disappeared from the horizon. The stalemate has begun to grow into the new norm. Perhaps fairly soon we can feel genuine nostalgia for days gone by, when everything actually was better. That is, if we can forget the mess that became of that better life. Getting used to the crisis is different from accepting it as the norm and this should be pointed out from time to time. The Spaniards have reminded us all how important it sometimes is to raise your voice in protest just for the sake of protesting. Let’s hope they have the courage to continue today.

Explaining Modern Love To Grandma

You knew the dream, you knew the waking light,
Shapeless nights and the rhythms of the day.
There was Beatrice, there was raw nature still.
There was a life above which one could soar,
Grandpa back from the wars, silent lest his
Horrors flood the tranquility of family.

Now it’s all the same gray shit
And we just sort of stare at it
With burnt out eyes, not quite
Believing it’s all gone.

Language Learning: It’s Good For You

My German studies have been advancing at a steady pace and recently I’ve noticed improvements in my reading. It’s actually been exhilarating to read stuff and watch films now that the language is starting to make more sense. I had a small revelation when I watched a German documentary I had had on my hard drive for ages, something like what Moses McCormick speaks about in one of his videos. I’m not doing composition yet and other work-related stuff does not really allow that right now, but I’ll begin soon enough.

To distract myself from work even further, I picked up the Innovative Language Learning Japanese set. (This is partly the fault of Mr. McCormick whose “Level Up” videos make Asian languages look like great fun.) In it, the authors list reasons for learning Japanese and the top reason they cite is that learning a second language is good for your brain. This is good news, because I have no serious reason to learn Japanese. In short, they say that it protects you from Alzheimer’s and makes you smarter. The memory gets a workout and your attention span grows. They go on to say that it also aids critical thinking and creativity.

As luck would have it, an article giving these claims scientific backing appeared recently. The BBC picked it up today and I dug up the original as well. It has the fetching title “Subcortical encoding of sound is enhanced in bilinguals and relates to executive function advantages.” It has to do with how the brain deals with complex visual motion and sound. I won’t pretend to be a brain expert, so let me quote the article:

We found that adolescent bilinguals, listening to the speech syllable [da], encoded the stimulus more robustly than age-matched monolinguals. Specifically, bilinguals showed enhanced encoding of the fundamental frequency, a feature known to underlie pitch perception and grouping of auditory objects. This enhancement was associated with executive function advantages. Thus, through experience-related tuning of attention, the bilingual auditory system becomes highly efficient in automatically processing sound. This study provides biological evidence for system-wide neural plasticity in auditory experts that facilitates a tight coupling of sensory and cognitive functions.

The scientists relate this to musicians and note that something similar goes on in their auditory processing. The executive function advantages, to put this into language I can understand, seem to be related to the way in which bilinguals and musicians are able to put some of the processes used to discern relevant information from the bombardment of noise on autopilot, having conditioned themselves to do so, and thus they have a greater facility for focusing their attention on, for want of a better word, thinking. Or perhaps one could say that they have refined their sensory filters — a term I just made up — to the point where they can concentrate on the relevant information more efficiently. In short, they are smarter information processors. I wonder if reversing the process and creating speech synthesizers adapted to language learning would be possible?

This also relates to something I’ve often thought about while studying languages. When one is engaged in study, it often seems like one is not studying in any strict sense of the word, but rather trying to get used to the language. “Conditioning” might be close to the term I’m looking for, but the English word escapes me. The Finnish word that comes to mind is “totuttautua.” There is a slight nuance in the Finnish which tells me that the very process of getting used to something involves not being completely in control of the process or perhaps being in control of the situation only vicariously. In terms of language learning, it might be viewed as a kind of cognitive behavioral therapy, systematic desensitization or graduated exposure therapy. And once we go there and begin to look at what the article calls “sensory enrichment” involving languages or music, we are back in that ancient medical paradigm that saw music and poetry as forms of medical intervention.

As I said, I’m not a brain scientist or qualified to draw conclusions from such speculations. That unfortunate fact aside, it’s nevertheless nice to hear the good news. I’ve put my brain through a lot, but based on these findings I’ve apparently also been taking care of it. This also means that there is now no reason not to study languages and if anyone ever tells you otherwise you can point to this article. It’s science.

Son of the Morning

Arriving at an impasse once again,
Always a new one but always the same,
“Non serviam!” echoes in empty halls.
It’s gained a veneer of ironic pomp.
It builds and builds until it shakes the guts.
“Sound’s a variation of air pressure
To which the tympanum is sensitive,”
Reasons aloud the thinking prisoner.
Rising vibrations gather under wing:
The labyrinth will empty by morning.

On Fairy Stories

Because I study literature and languages, people often ask me for recommendations as to what they should read. Usually, I don’t give a straight answer, because different people look for different things in literature and my own interests are professional and hence a bit strange compared to most tastes. But something can be said about the reasons why one should read literature in general. And by literature I mean mostly fiction, although strictly speaking one should not exclude things like Ruskin’s criticism or Newton’s Principia, for example, from the category of great literature.

One of my childhood favorites, the horror writer H. P. Lovecraft once reportedly said: “I’ve always had [the] subconscious feeling that everything since the 18th century is unreal and illusory.” This is something I’ve come to believe as well, not because of any subconscious feeling but thanks to study. When one studies literary history, especially that of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century England, what one finds is something akin to rhetorical bootstrapping of literary registers. This has to do with the political theater of the court and many other things too complicated to go into here, but something like the final destruction of the link between res and verba seems to have occurred. That is, in some sense polite culture did become unreal and illusory.

Things like this happen in literary history once in a while. Something like it happened with Dante and with Shakespeare. The title of Harold Bloom’s Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human gives a hint of what happened with the latter. In the eighteenth century, however, this phenomenon — whatever we want to call it — happened on an industrial scale. With the Restoration, the English found themselves emerging from an Hobbesian world where the interpretation of the actions and words of men became more than an art. Rhetoric was no more mere ornament, it was a battlefield that required skills of skeptical reading and careful interpretation.

Dwelling on the subject for a few years will heighten one’s awareness of the doubleness of people and their words. It’s something close to paranoia if one does not keep it in check. Puritan critics of the Elizabethan period were still able to call for transparency in language and romances were one of their main targets. Moral improvement was for them the primary function of literature and what silly fairy stories did to readers was dangerous. And, in some sense, they had a point in their Platonic objections to poetry of this kind. It does make readers immoral in the sense that it will familiarize the reader with a different register that may overtake the plain speech the Puritans preferred. The unreal and illusory infect the register of plain speech and one has to deal with a new type of register that is morally dubious.

On the other hand, studying literature may also familiarize one with fiction in a way that enables one to recognize bullshit when one sees it. Romantic literature, for one, is notorious even in our time for installing silly ideas of romance into the heads of people who will look for transcendent love as if they were the heroes or heroines of cheesy novels or, more likely nowadays, soap operas. The Victorian novelist Anthony Trollope was once asked what the point of his novels was, to which he replied that they helped young ladies decide on marriage. He was a great admirer of Jane Austen and she of course is widely recognized as the greatest writer of his genre. Every man contemplating marriage, I would say, should read Austen just to see how carefully the young ladies in her books weigh their options and pay special attention to the role money plays in their decisions. Austen, despite her reputation as romantic fluff, is fantastically brutal in the way she destroys whatever fairy stories one may have heard of marriage. She is one of the most unromantic writers I’ve come across and well worth reading, but I’ve never been able to bring myself to recommend her to anyone. Perhaps next time someone asks I will, because she teaches skills in ruthless judgment that might save lives.

However, where to begin one’s reading if one is interested in something else besides reining in one’s hormones? The one answer that I’ve given a couple of times and been happy with is that one should start with the ancient dramatists Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides. In this at least, my education in literature didn’t really differ that much from eighteenth-century schoolboys — although I didn’t learn Greek as a boy in order to read them. They show the lengths to which human beings are able to go and what they are willing to do in order to survive, to love, to exact revenge or to defend what is theirs. They also show that since the ancients people have struggled with problems related to distinguishing illusion from reality. They taught me that if you are willing to assume that everything you know is wrong, you are on your way to finding answers. It will probably not be a pleasant experience, but at least it gets you a little closer to something like the truth.

Soap Bubbles

The hand that feeds tells you you’re hungry,
The eye that sees you must be seen.
They grant you rest from pains they cause
As if that’s how it’s always been.

And we’re supposed to live through this,
To quell the flames of sinful needs
Whene’er the slightest itch provokes,
Desire craves heroic deeds.

This morning, as soap bubbles pooled
Into brilliant mandala flowers,
It stopped. Remember, Faustian dreams
Are of that silence, this power.

Language Learning: More Vocabulary

Since my last post about vocabulary, I’ve been focusing mainly on German and trying to keep up the habit of reading some every day and looking up words in the dictionary. I use two: dict.cc and Wordreference. It’s incredibly easy compared to messing around with books and printed dictionaries. It’s a mystery how anyone got anything done before the Internet.

I’ve also done some German translations. It’s a nice way of getting one’s hands dirty and to get a feel for the language. Until now, I really haven’t thought of translation as a way of learning the language, but perhaps it’s time to give it a go. In Between the Ancients and the Moderns, historian Joseph Levine describes the methods of seventeenth-century pedagogy as written down by schoolmaster Richard Hoole:

A favorite device, for example, was “double translation,” which Hoole borrowed directly from Ascham and Brinsley. The student was asked to translate some of Cicero’s epistles into English and then back again into Latin, “to render many of them into good English, and after a while to turn the same again into Latine, and to try how near they can come to the Authour in the right choice, and orderly placing of words in every distinct Period.” . . . Evelyn was astonished when he visited Westminster School in 1661 to find the boys there capable of writing themes and verses with such “readinesse and witt” in the two classical languages.

One should also note that in Richard Busby’s Westminster only Latin should be spoken and boys who failed to do so were whipped and even expelled. Whipping aside, it’s an ancient technique for learning a language and it works.

One of the modern proponents of the method is the Italian polyglot Luca and, if I’ve understood him correctly, he does translations in more or less the same way — the proof is in the pudding. His latest post tackles vocabulary and gives great advice on study techniques for vocabulary acquisition. He suggests (in English, French and Italian) that we all put our genius for forgetting to good use, forget actively and revise accordingly.

What I’ve found studying languages is that once you get into it, at some point you will begin to recognize words whose meaning escapes you. Tons of them. This used to be incredibly frustrating — I looked up the word before and thus it feels silly to look it up again for the fifteenth time. Some time has passed and now it just seems like a natural thing to do. Besides, using electronic dictionaries means the whole operation takes literally two seconds. Why not up the volume? The human brain is not a data storage unit that can upload information and retain it immediately and indefinitely. It’s too squishy for that and needs repetition. We might as well deal with it.

Stephen Toulmin’s Rules

Sometimes one comes across a book that seems to reveal rules that previously seemed indiscoverable. Stephen Toulmin’s The Uses of Argument (1958, 2003) was one of those books for me. I had previously read a (sadly) lesser-known Cambridge philosopher called John Wisdom and grown very fond of his Paradox and Discovery (1965) and Proof and Explanation (1991), and upon reading that Toulmin was a former student of his it was clear that his book, a legend in its own right, should be on my reading list. Even before going through it, however, I came across the famous Toulmin-model of argument. The simplicity and flexibility of the model was quite simply astonishing. It really is a thing of beauty, never mind the fact that the book is not strictly about this single model. Here it is:

It looks way too simple to be a powerful tool of analysis, but there is no denying that it goes a long way in any argumentative affair. (D) stands for data or datum; the horizontal line, the inference, leads us to (C), a claim that is put forth by using the argument; (Q) stands for qualifier, it might be a word like “probably” or “presumably”, but it can also be something more elaborate; (R) means rebuttal and it is characterized by the word “unless”, ie. it explains why the contingency expressed in the qualifier might come in handy; the warrant (W) supports the inference and it explains why it is possible, or warranted, to make the inference. Warrants, in turn, can be backed up (B for backing) with further arguments when, for instance, someone challenges the acceptability of a given warrant. That, in turn, can develop into a whole new discussion that needs new arguments. The model can therefore branch out in multiples and be used again to describe what goes on under (B). It’s scalable in this sense.

The model is so simple that one can gain a lot just by learning its vocabulary. These are pretty much everyday words: warrant, claim, data, qualifier, etc. Therefore, there is little need to screw around with fancy terminology on this level. Just picking up stuff in the papers or daily conversations and naming the constituent parts of argument one finds in them can help one to make a habit of picking apart simple, everyday argumentation. Most arguments come to us unlabelled, and thankfully so, and most are not constructed carefully enough to have backings for their warrants or qualifiers or much else, but in order to be argumentative they have to have at least a claim.

One can speak of argumentative rigor only after a claim has been made. After that, one can ask for instance: “What do you have to go on and what warrants your inference?” Assuming you are on friendly terms with your interlocutor and don’t get punched in the face for asking that, this questioning will lead you to think the matter through with more precision and, who knows, even construct a more solid argument to support the claim through constructive criticism. In any case, the model is one of those things that will have a lasting effect on your thinking when you get it.

Mick Goodrick’s Rules

Studying music has many, many benefits and can enrich your life in all sorts of absolutely amazing ways. One thing it does not do, however, is help you feel good about yourself in any simple sense of the word. Whatever you do, there’s always something you haven’t mastered and, as a result, you feel inadequate. Stuff you’ve learned before by taking great pains, perhaps even intricate virtuoso shit, feels lightweight and too easy. So easy, in fact, that if you were your own audience it would be an insult to your intelligence and talent to play that drivel.

This felt inadequacy can be used for good, as a motivating force, but its dark side can at times become too much, a source of stress and anxiety. Times like these require a good teacher. If there’s none of those around, you need a good book. The workbook I use for my own amateurish efforts is Mick Goodrick’s The Advancing Guitarist (1987). When I first started reading it, I noticed it had clever little jokes that at times seemed a bit off-putting, but it was easy to get used to the humor when it was submerged in so much theoretical information and, for want of a better word, wisdom. Check out this passage from a section titled “On Being Self-Critical”:

Students tend to think that eventually, after they learn whatever it is that they think they need to know (or they can do whatever it is they think they need to be able to do), they won’t feel insecure anymore. This thinking amounts to wishing that you didn’t dislike your playing so much. It’s fantasizing that things will gradually change for the better.

Well, as good as it sounds on paper, it seldom (if ever) happens. In fact, it tends to get worse. If you start off being critical, you tend to remain that way, and more likely, along with everything else, your criticalness will improve. If you try to deny your criticalness, that messes you up, because it amounts to lying. If you become critical of your criticalness, it’s the same thing removed one step. . . . Being self-critical actually has a lot to be said for it. People who are self-critical tend to improve in music because they always seem to see so many things to work on. They tend not to get involved in overly developed egos. They tend to be much less critical of everyone else. Often, they are compassionate. (98)

At first glance, this has very little to do with music. It’s just saying that your criticalness will improve as your playing progresses. But the book is not for brief glances. It’s for practice in the sense of rehearsing and active meditation. There’s very little “just” in it, except for the odd joke or two. Its advice is based on a pluralism that always has music in mind. There are many approaches to any given aural device, of which Goodrick gives a few, but it always comes down to the same two questions: What does it sound like and why does it sound like that?