Prior to the Enlightenment, headaches were seen variably as a scourge of Guilt laid upon, literally, the head of the Sinner; as the entrance of a temporary demon into the soul of an impure heart; as retribution for some sort of indiscretion committed; as a momentary possession by the divine; and so forth. Variable mythologies of otherwise non-European origin held that headaches, alongside momentary reductions in sight or hearing or other sensation mutations, were cyclical, associated with punishment for having seen or witnessed, heard, or experienced, some sort of delicate to egregious wrong, but not necessarily having committed it. There is the occasional mythology which places a headache in the realm of the shamanistic, a primitive (if not bizarrely and uniquely postmodern) form of detournement that allowed the seer to understand by not being able to fully understand, to gain clarity through inability to focus on anything other than pain. Across cultures until the Enlightenment and the advent of modern medicine, migraines and intense visions - and migraine auras, neuropathies, and the like - were equated to, if not the Wicked entering the domain of the corpus, the entrance of the Divine into the body. Ecstatic visions through wild, illusory colors, migraine-induced synaesthesia, auditory hallucinations: these were the stuff of prophets and mystics (provided one was born into a class where this was the case, and not accused of witchery).
I suffer from routine headaches. I have for years. I could blame any number of things, psychic, psychosomatic, or somatic. I could rationalize this by my binge-coffee-drinking: caffeine, like all vasoconstrictors, wildly regulates blood flow, and therefore oxygen flow, to the brain: too much, and a headache ensues; too little or none at all, and the brain responds and reacts with a headache. I could rationalize this by my relatively poor and apparently fluctuating eyesight: muscle strain puts excess load on the optic nerves, which alters blood flow to one portion of the brain at the expense of others. I could rationalize this through a decade-old diagnosis of chronic peripheral neuropathy, where, again, because of intermittent failures or overworkings of portions of my nervous system, blood flow is altered and chemicals are stimulated in various parts of the brain to respond to tingling and loss of sensation, generating transient pains in the head. In one example, I was flying back from Detroit, and the span of time between meals was a little over fourteen hours; I was standing against the wall in the Charlotte airport, somewhat slumped over in a suit, my face and cranium burning with pain, all brought on, no doubt, by a sharp decrease in nutrition coupled with a subtly stressful experience; my blood had no new carbohydrates or proteins to carry around, so it was struggling for work. After a failed relationship a little over a year and a half ago, I had constant headaches brought about by not eating properly, self-medicating on melatonin and beer, and working about 60 hours per week in a loud, busy environment.
The commonality seems to be blood, through all of this. The mythologies around blood are vast: life-giving liquid, life-saving liquid; the poison of the evil man (viz. Bad Blood) or of the bitter, impudent individual; the overall regulator of our being in the physical. Among other earlier civilizations, the Nasca people held that blood was holy rain that the gods imbued humans with, and at times it was necessary to spill the blood of the strong in order to reciprocate the relationship with the divine and plead for climatic mercy in the way of dependable rainfall. We have the idiomatic phrases “to make one’s blood boil” and to “angry up the blood.” We have “blood-curdling.” We have “rush of blood to the head.” “To make/have one’s blood run cold.” The patterning of the blood-fetish is scattered throughout our language, holding on to the mythologies of Good and Evil, centered yet still on a complex fluid that at its root simply takes good things to places in our body and takes away bad things so we can get rid of them. Blood remains mercurial, and just as dangerous, and just as inculcated with symbolic worship. And, on the simplest front, blood regulates our pain, our inflammation, our suffering. The pathways and transmission of this Holy Water still controls our mind.
We have a great many instruments and vials of snake oil to cure the headache. Aspirin thins the blood. Ibuprofen muddies the blood. Naproxen Sodium compounds interfere with materials the blood carries. Codeine and Vicodin slow the speed of the blood, precipitously, dangerously, and the blood often craves it more at the behest of the limbic system. Herbal supplements and oils to control pain in the forehead act upon the blood in similar ways. Iron supplements, calcium supplements, fish oil supplements, in their blessed containers, for their intended uses, enrich or detract from blood, all in the mean of soothing discomfort. We can go for hours and hours, days and days, without acknowledging the pain, without acknowledging the radicalization of pain. We can be full, active, productive members of society, writ large, through our employment and interactions, through our creations of meaning. Manifestations of physical pain cannot be seen or tasted or touched and must be evaded every 4 to 8 hours or as recommended by a physician. Proper diet, enough sleep, exercise, a lower heart-rate: these appear on the checklist a few items below “medicate” and “erasure of pain.” We have altars, sacred covenant shrines, in our bathrooms, with remedies aplenty, redundancies abounding, to keep pain from happening, to act on the blood. We have a democracy of disavowal at our disposal: Advil? Alleve? Food-Lion-brand aspirin? Motrin? Tylenol? Yes. Yes. A thousand milligrams yes.
Bodies do not lie as they express to us when something is amiss, but of course this can be induced initially by non-corporeal factors. We have pills to treat stress, pills to ease the psychic discomfort of loss, jealousy, sadness; bottles and potions to counteract being lovelorn, or too excited, or even just being normal. We preemptively strike against the regulation the body provides us with; we bomb the fields of misery with panaceas of all sorts before we know there’s even a war afoot. We miss the aspect of self-care: these headaches, these improper motions and speeds of blood, exist to remind us to reconsider how we treat ourselves, exist to remind us how not to treat ourselves. They are punishments for not living well enough at that moment; they are punishments, as in the case of hangovers or caffeine overdosing, for living a little too well in one moment without regard to the next. While not essentially a mechanism to suffuse our lives with a mind-body (literally) Pavlovian response to self-inflicted mistreatment, and while no longer simply a vehicle through which to have holy visions, there is a kernel of truth to being punished, to being reprimanded.
There may still be some value to the mythology of cerebral discomfort. We cannot have our society without painkillers, and I cannot focus through a headache, and on my dresser stands the Golden Chalice of NSAID. I have been nursing a low-level migraine for three days, after having had a severe, but not migraine, headache about two weeks ago. I can point to the psychic reasons clearly, but so far, I have not acted upon them, and, as a matter of course, I am unable to act on them, for they are outside of my control. These headaches are entering into me, a spirit forcing me to turn inward, forcing me to think forward, a spirit that can only be exorcised with proper care as I invoke the words “Child-proof seal. Push down and turn.”
No comments:
Post a Comment