Complex Partial
First, you have to understand that there are not things in the world like cars and beds and dressers and you and me. There are not colors too, which are also things because a thing is a thing that is separate and also that separates a thing from another thing like color or shape. You know what I mean when I saw the word red.
Because one day when you are getting dressed in your bedroom and you sit down on the bed in front of the dresser to put on your shoes, suddenly the things around you aren’t things anymore and neither are you. When this (doesn’t, couldn’t) happen, it feels like something or someone has reached down from the sky or outer space or a wormhole above you and pulled the air from your lungs, the lungs from your chest, and you are your lungs or you are whatever was pulled from your body and you are not a thing made of thing in a world of things anymore or ever have been will be. But you are still in the universe because where else would you be?
When this is all over (it is never over), when you are coming back to yourself, solidifying, re-materializing into this world we think we live in all the time, you will think that you can’t ever think the same way as that because it/you was/were not thinking. Thoughts are things. You will try to think of how to translate what just happened, is still slightly happening, is fading as you fade into being again, thinking. You will think even then that it is not possible, but you will try because you want to remember, you want a way to think about it, to hold it the way you hold everything you ever were in things we call thoughts, which are also stories. So this is the story you come up with:
Gray. Not black or white like empty space or light. No distance because you are already at the end of the universe past galactic clusters, but there are no galaxies or clusters or space or distance. You are already there no matter where.
When you think about how to think about things in that world that isn’t the world, you think about white dotted lines in and around and through that gray. Dotted lines that look like the outlined thing that things are supposed to be. Like there is the white dotted lines of your dresser (that is talking/singing to you while you sit in front of it light years away — I know. Not really. Don’t worry. It’s not real.) next to, in front of, inside the galaxy that’s already dotted lines anyway (stars, vectors). But really what the universe is telling you is that you and the dresser and the galaxy and the universe are just stories the universe is telling itself. That’s what things are. (You are drawing the dotted lines around things, you are making things by thinking). Sometimes the universe is telling itself it’s a dresser thing. Sometimes the universe is telling itself it is you and you and you. Sometimes it is telling itself it is me. Sometimes the universe is telling itself it is a dog or a lake or the water in the lake and all the things on the lake ever at the same time. And sometimes it is telling itself it is you, listening to/thinking a story that the universe is telling itself is me. And the universe, the huge everything all of it, is no bigger than you.
And you will think all of these things and also think that that’s not what happened, but also nothing and everything happened all the time and that there’s no way to think or talk about it without being there again and you can’t do that.
So no, you can’t know what it’s like, but I am trying to tell you. I am the universe trying to tell you about itself when I am not myself or too much myself. But it’s okay because I’m, we’re, you’re already the universe anyway. Are you here yet?
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I thought afterward that I had been gone for hours, but my partner was still talking and getting ready and hadn’t even noticed that I’d been gone. Like visiting Narnia, what felt like hours or years in the seizure world was only seconds or minutes in this one.
That was probably a simple partial seizure, an ecstatic ‘aura’ that is supposed to be very rare although Oliver Sacks in Hallucinations pointed out that more and more people are reporting them, that people have probably been having them all along but no one recognized them as seizures. If I were more inclined to religiosity, I probably would have interpreted the entire event as visions about angels or Jesus or the Virgin Mary, or maybe Buddha or Shiva or Muhammed, but I’m not. I read Lacan and Foucault and books on quantum mechanics, so my translation of ‘events’ is much more in line with those conceptions of the universe and consciousness. And that’s only one seizure and every seizure is different. My seizures are usually a couple of seizures together. The other seizures I’ve had were preceded by something called a ‘derealization’ aura (another kind of simple partial seizure) which for me takes the form of jamais vu, the opposite of deja vu, in which everything is deeply profoundly unfamiliar and unreal even though I know all the facts that usually make things familiar about all the things and people and cats around me that are so unfamiliar. Sometimes this lasts for a moment of strangeness, sometimes for odd dilated minutes. After the jamais vu, what follows has just been lost time (complex partial seizure, a.k.a. absence seizure). They can last from a few seconds up to twenty minutes. (It’s hard to tell. It’s lost. Absent.) But maybe that means I was in that (non)place and I, my mind, couldn’t fade out and back in, but switched on and off. That place where memories and time should be is just black, not gray. I couldn’t make it into a thing or a story or even a thought. No information is returning from that black hole. I am forever stuck on the event horizon.
I haven’t had many complex partial seizures, but I have had them during my office hours, at home, and once in the dentist’s office (which was the most embarrassing and potentially dangerous because, after, I was so disoriented that I just got up and walked out without paying (I couldn’t speak) and drove home). After a seizure I am disoriented and exhausted. The longest one I had left me partially paralyzed on my right side for hours and so disoriented I couldn’t zip my jacket or figure out how to get out of my office, much less the building. The elevators were impossible.
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So how do you know you’ve had a seizure and not just, like, some random flashback or hallucination? They take you to the basement of the hospital and rub spots raw on you head. They attach electrodes to those spots with modeling glue. They lead you, high on glue fumes and trailing a thick tail of wires from a shower cap, into a room with what looked like a dentist’s chair from the seventies. Maybe they offer you a Tylenol for the pain. You can’t remember everything. They connect those wires to a computer that reads the electromagnetic activity in your brain as you sit in the ugly chair and the tech talks to you and asks standardized questions to make sure you are conscious. They compare those waves to normal brains and the waves they make. Your brain makes strange waves that aren’t always waves but sometimes spikes that are recorded by the electrodes glued to your scalp over the temporal lobes, and the computer to which these electrodes are hooked up. But you didn’t look any different or do anything strange according to the tech even though those spikes are evidence of seizure activity in your temporal lobes.
After twenty minutes they take the shower cap off and nail polish remover the electrodes off your scalp and tell you to go home. You’ll remember the elevators and the basement of the hospital and worrying that you might have a seizure and forget where you are and wander around down there forever. Then you’ll remember the sunlight through the stack of windows in the lobby when the elevator opens and you are so happy you can go home even though your hair is sticking out, full of acetone and pieces of glue, and your brain is making spikes instead of waves. Your partner’s texts will finally come through in a tsunami of worry-filled blue bubbles because there was no reception in the basement. Sometimes the universe is telling itself it is you getting a text from your partner who is also the universe telling itself it’s her.
You’ll text her that you’re okay and go home.
