by Laurie Sheck
The Minister of War has declared I can’t live in Petersburg or Moscow so I am free but not free xxx But now I am in Petersburg after all I can’t explain how this happened xxx Today the doctor confirmed my illness is epilepsy and that I will never get well xxx Some speak of being purified by suffering but I don’t believe this xx bursts of synchronous brain waves Insidious destruction xx my falling a brutal mockery of all the beauties and conclusions of reason xxx Walking back in the late afternoon I saw over the Neva new buildings rising out of the old but it was only the smoke from the chimneys xxx it still amazes me to walk without fetters
xxx But why do we assume a mind is just one single mind xxx All these words I send to you xxx unsigned xx disordered xx and all the flowers of the steppes disordered xx and what if the universe is just a jumble heap of moments and all existence dependent on the existence of coincidences x xx And as it is the doctors can’t keep my brain from catching fire x or help protect the scattered words inside me xx Dear Mikhail Dear Apollon Dear Sonechka I don’t want to fall but I will fall x
All of Petersburg is up in flames even the Apraksin Market and the Schukin Markets Men hurry through the streets destroying the wooden fences they designed and built with their own hands xxx they need to stop the fire from spreading further xx There are leaflets everywhere even on the Nevsky Prospect They are demanding justice for the peasantry and the overthrowing of the Tsar “The day will come when we will unfurl the red banner of the future We will move against the Winter Palace we will wipe out all who serve it We are prepared to hunt them in broad daylight through all the avenues and streets of the capital We will find them we will track them down…” But I can barely see the twelve trees anymore xx xx x And the flames are so close I don’t think I’ve ever stood so close xxx Have you fallen do you need me xxx interictal abnormal electrical activity How can I cross the courtyard to you when this fire is so close and spreads so quickly xxx
I can feel the aura starting, the fire in my arm increasing. And now Myshkin’s brain is catching fire…the flames seeping from his head and spreading…the whole book we read from is burning…there is no way to protect the pages he is embedded within them…How will I tell her there is no way we can continue reading we’ll never reach the next chapter…and Myshkin’s hands are shaking badly now…he has lost his whole world…his whole body is trembling…
This morning as I prepared one of the last remaining folders to be sent to Dr. Galzinga and his research team, I wondered if, like me, something in her would cringe and think of Myshkin.
•••
FOLDER A3. Dr. Henri Gastaut’s working notes for his 1977 conference paper “Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Involuntary Contribution to the Symptomatology and Prognosis of Epilepsy” delivered at the Annual San Servolo Epilepsy Seminar and subsequently published in Epilepsia Vol 19, 1978.
—
I will now illustrate my previous point with two quotes from Dostoevsky:
“My sickness is getting worse rather than better. Last month I had four fits, a thing that has never happened before, and I could hardly do any work. The fits are followed by a state of gloom and melancholy and I feel a completely broken man.”
—1858
“O my friend Stepan Smitrievich, this epilepsy will end up carrying me off! My star is fading—I sense that. My memory has grown completely dim (completely!). I don’t recognize people any more; I forget what I read the day before. I’m afraid I’m going mad or falling into idiocy. My imagination is overflowing, working in a disorderly way; at night I have nightmares.”
—1867
Years before, when I first started working as a scanner, I glimpsed this passage: “Though by and large we think of the sun as silent, in truth its core is raucous, cacophonous, conflicting. The source of our planet’s warmth derives not from silence or consistency, but from upheaval, volatility, disturbance.”
Though your window has been dark for a long time I still want to ask you How does the brain know what tenderness is In what ways does it register its presence Are there chemicals assigned to it x Codings x Neural pathways xx Do you still come to me I can’t remember if you come xxxxxx Gray blur of sun gray-yellow nights xxx I haven’t told you that last month a girl knocked on my door Her face dirty xx long black hair in messy curls xx She said her grandfather had died and she was looking for his dog Azorska xx That no one was left to take care of her so how could she take care of the lost dog xx I took her in and watch over her and feed her but for weeks she wouldn’t even say her name xxx Something brutalized in her face Suspicion and mistrust in her black eyes xxx Today she finally said, “I am Yelena. I begged on the Meshchanskaya Street xx My mother told me before she died it isn’t wrong to beg but it’s wrong to suffer and stay hungry ‘Stay poor, and after I am dead don’t go to anyone for anything, there’s nothing wrong with being poor, but it is wrong to be rich and hurt others.’” xxxx Are you hurt now are you sleeping have you fallen xxx “Everything human suddenly disappears” Myshkin says of his seizing xxx xx All of Petersburg is burning xx What has happened to the dog Azorska—
I meant to bring you Myshkin’s joy xx not this garret or Yelena’s begging xx xxx There are things one chooses not to say it is better not to say them I won’t tell you what happened to Yelena xx xx The Neva is very beautiful in sunlight and all of Petersburg intricate with hundreds of canals and bridges xxx This other Venice of the mind I walk through xxx Nothing is stranger than the real
Titian’s voice was soft, his tone sober, “I often think of the many beggars in Venice though I chose not to paint them. By the 1520’s the whole city was sick with gaunt faces—so many had fled the provinces desperate for work. One night I walked among the swirling masks of carnival only to stumble upon three starved corpses sprawled beneath the portals of the Ducal Palace. There were no poor laws then, no edicts to support the needy. In his Libri della famaglia Leonardo Alberti put forth his cruel suggestion—all beggars should be expelled from the city if they remained without work for more than three days as a man would be better off dead than to live in misery and need. Within just a matter of weeks the price of wheat rose from 4 lire per bushel to 15.5—so how could the poor afford even a small loaf of bread? When the Senate finally ratified a law, it drew a distinction between the ‘deserving’ and ‘undeserving’ poor and proposed all foreign beggars be incarcerated or shipped from the city. ‘All beggars who have arrived within the last year must depart the city in three days.’ Sometimes I wonder what it did to my eyes to see their sunken eyes and bony hands, the emptiness they carried. I tossed my few coins and walked on.”
Dear Chairman of the Society for Aid to Needy Writers and Scholars:
In preparing to go abroad again for three months for the treatment of my health and consultations with specialists in Paris and Berlin about my falling sickness, I am resorting to the help of the Society and request a loan until February 1, 1864, of 1500 silver rubles, without which, because of my circumstances, I would be unable to make my trip xxx But this Dark Energy Dark Matter xxx I give my word of honor to return this money with interest by February; I am firmly convinced that by then, having restored my health, I will have managed to finish and publish the work with which I am now occupied xxx And when I think of you and when I try to reach you xxxx In the event of my death, or if for any reason I have not repaid my debt, I offer to the Society as security the permanent right to possession and publication of all my works, I cede all my rights completely xx Sleep spindles xx Prions xxx This transfer of rights will be accomplished, as required by law, in a broker’s office.
Fyodor Dostoevsky
23 July 1863
Wiesbaden Paris Baden-Baden Hamburg Turin Genoa Livorno The roulette wheel’s blank eye spinning and spinning When I lose I am flooded with shame Each time the wheel spins my mind asks Does hope exist Is the universe kind or is it made of the most brutal power xxx Why do I still feel these shackles on my legs the prison cloth rough against my chest Today I lost 600 francs Yesterday 300 Not
hing is calm or settled on this earth—
This morning before I woke I felt her standing at my door, upset that Azorska was still missing. Somehow I knew it was her, though she looked like Yelena. “I never told you that Azorska performed for many years in the circus. He carried a monkey on his back. This took enormous concentration and he did it with great dignity, but the audience only laughed and mocked him.”
“When he grew too old to perform the circus-owner dropped him on a street corner and drove off. After that he sat with me every day on Meshchanskaya Street. But how can I share my scraps with him now that I can’t find him?”
For a moment she looked away, as if seeing Azorska on the street-corner in the days before she’d lost him.
I waited for her to say more, but she turned her back and stared into the empty courtyard.
Dear Nikolay Nikolaevich Already it is March I am in Paris the so-called beautiful-far-away xxxx The Europeans speak of brotherhood but I sense in them a troubling isolation xxx I am alone most of the time then go to the roulette tables and lose all my money When the tables spin I feel a freedom like no other or like the shadow of the moment before I fall when there is no such thing as time and harm is more fragile than air xxx a pale invention of the human mind—
Last night, I read from the 9th section of Part 4 where the narrator says (but it’s unclear who the narrator even is) “It is extremely difficult to continue our story…how can we describe that of which we have no idea or personal opinion….”
At those words, I felt my skin turn cold again. I saw Myshkin standing in a world that couldn’t know him or even sense his existence. Then that world became the future, and intracerebral electrodes were being surgically implanted in his brain to track the epileptogenic zone’s electrical activity—
A gray, automatic door slid open to admit him, then closed.
He lay face up on a gray table. Ten incisions were cut into his scalp, the electrodes secured at varied intervals to best register the angles of the zone’s neuronal network. Brain-mapping had identified the key sites of high frequency oscillations. He was told to open his eyes, to keep them open no matter what. Bright white lights flashed in rapid succession, inducing the seizure.
Neon-green brainwaves lurched across the screen. Five horizontal lines of similar waves appeared, and on each line the waves started crowding together, quivering, still lurching, tightening into clumps of almost-solid green. Small, trapped specimens of roiling ocean beneath a sky wholly placid, stormless, unmoving. The waves were slowing, curving downward into mild undulations, as if they could almost undo themselves, would, wanted to, could reach into themselves and find some other nature.
All the while, a computer registered and interpreted the data.
Myshkin’s eyes had closed. His hands were gray fists, his knuckles almost yellow. Soon another door slid open. An attendant wheeled him through.
The print-out lay on a metal shelf, tagged with his number and the date. The report was open, and I read it: “Aim of Testing: Our goal is to provide a robust approach allowing easy access to patients’ brains in time and space. Our program involves the effective normalization of brains to a common anatomic atlas.”
I thought of Spratling’s “destroys,” his prisons. I didn’t want to look anymore. But like the time she asked for page 221 and I turned to it and saw what it was and didn’t want to read it but did, I read more:
SEIZURE ONSET ZONE: amyg. ant/post Hc pHcG. T4
FIGURE 1: Summary of the procedure to obtain a map of epileptogenicity index at peri-onset time D and in a frequency band f, from stereo EEG signals and electrode positions.
ANALYSIS OF THE ONSET SEIZURE ZONE: Two seizures were recorded. Using a fixed-effect analysis, epileptogenicity maps clearly confirmed the bilateral involvement of opercular regions and of right precentral regions, (see Fig. 5). The seizure propagation map contained only zeroes indicating very fast onset in all implanted regions.
RECOMMENDATION: Surgical removal of the epileptogenic zone.
I felt even colder. I heard his waterfall, the train hurtling toward Petersburg at full speed, its windows white with fog. He tried to see out but couldn’t. The stranger across from him was about to ask his question, but in my mind I wouldn’t let him. Maybe Myshkin hadn’t gotten on the train. Maybe none of it had ever happened.
But where was he now?
Outside there were only nameless streets. The sky silver-yellow. It didn’t look like Petersburg, I was sure it wasn’t. I watched for a long time but saw no one. After an hour, maybe two, I saw him with an overnight bag strapped over one shoulder, walking down the long central street, still empty. His back grew smaller and smaller. If he walked long enough would he come to anyone he knew? Anyone who would recognize him and speak to him and listen as he spoke? Would he even want to?
Pilate sat in his stone chair in the moonlight. The migraine wandered in his brain, its red thorns strong as trees. Red petals calcified behind his right eye, pressing and crushing. Everything else was drained of color—the granite cliffs in the distance, the cracked soil. His chair was gray, and the robe with its silk lining.
The red separateness spread like a vast sea, words shattering, dissolving. Had he ever cared for another, shown kindness or concern for another? Had he married or ever had children? The red separateness couldn’t remember.
For a second he vaguely recalled being a follower of Pyrrhon who posited that for any given proposition the opposite can be proposed with equal reason. “The man of wisdom, rather than declaring this is so, can only say, This seems so.” Then he sensed that once he’d had power over a man who, unlike him, felt certain and deeply believed, but the thorns stabbed again and there was nothing.
Thousands of years passed between one thought and another.
Procula—wasn’t that his wife’s name? Her hair wreathed with white flowers in six braids under a veil the color of flame.
The red thorns pressed in again. The crushing sea. Words shattering to useless pieces.
His hands stayed rigid on his chair as the gray land before him stretched farther than his eyes could see.
Again I was carrying the one who waited to be read to across the courtyard to the epileptic’s room.
(Or was I carrying Frieda?)
When we reached the courtyard’s border, I left her at his door, knowing he would let her in. The two of them sitting without speaking. Then he picks up the book and starts reading, and her sight isn’t blurring. She’s listening from a place in Myshkin’s eyes.
I’m in the Basel Museum looking at Holbein’s Dead Christ then I feel I’m falling but for once I keep looking and don’t fall xxx The eyes are dull half-open the face a nauseous blue-green the skin on the verge of decomposing xx the mouth rigid unclosed There’s not one hint of consolation xx Who would want to sit beside this corpse you can almost smell it rotting Nothing else on the canvas but these two horizontal forms Stone slab Brutalized hurt body xxxx xx The slab so much easier to look at than the other In what ways can compassion appear for the beautiful that is mocked and does not know its own value xxxxx And there is no such thing as empty space x the whole universe expanding xxxx every day in my notebook I ask myself this question
My dear friend Sonechka much has changed since we last saw each other xxx I am living in Geneva my brother Mikhail died suddenly last August xx It will surprise you to know that I am married xx I am at work on a new book xx I want it to be as uncompromising as Holbein’s Dead Christ xxx xx Each day I destroy most of what I write xxx I am tired of beautiful words I never liked them xxxxx I don’t know if I can do this—
xxx Dear Apollon I think it is impossible to know what goodness is until it is reduced to complete powerlessness xxx My hand fears what it must write xxx There is a Prince I need to hurt in order to reveal his goodness In order to begin to know him xxx
But where are you have you fallen xx Myshkin says that “kindness can rescue everything” but how can this possibly be true xxxxx
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nbsp; Today I felt my skin grow cold again. I saw the gray table, the electrodes, the city with its empty streets. And he was on that table again and he was cold, his hands in fists, that same yellow-gray as before. (How many times must they make him go back? Why are they still taking the data from his brain? Will they ever finally stop?) I could hear only a few words: signal analysis, temporal, microvolt, asymmetry, resective.
But then as if from somewhere inside the prone body, and in a language I’d never heard and didn’t know, someone, or something—was it him or someone else?—was speaking. And although I couldn’t understand, somehow I felt its questions that weren’t quite questions but a kind of questioning assertion—What colors come from the destruction of color, what new forms from the destruction of form, what new sounds from sound destroyed?
“The mind is a chaos of touches,” Titian said. He was standing outside the locked gate of his former garden near Calle Largo dei Botteri. “This is why I’ve preferred my late works to stay unfinished, though it took me much too long to understand this. For many years I loved only the mastery of my hand, but over time I began to wonder about the shape of a donkey’s cry, the black sound its eyes make, each impenetrable red thread before it’s woven to another, nothing that my hand could render. Think of how in your language thread means wander, meander, pull back, and even betray. Nothing is ever just one thing. But for so long I didn’t see this. Still, I will never forget the red cloth, the red pleasure it gave me.”
