Oliver Sacks who has lived in and written about Oaxaca recently wrote an article appearing in the NY Times entitled "Patterns." He writes:"I have had migraines for most of my life; the first attack I remember occurred when I was 3 or 4 years old. I was playing in the garden when a brilliant, shimmering light appeared to my left — dazzlingly bright, almost as bright as the sun. It expanded, becoming an enormous shimmering semicircle stretching from the ground to the sky, with sharp zigzagging borders and brilliant blue and orange colors. Then, behind the brightness, came a blindness, an emptiness in my field of vision, and soon I could see almost nothing on my left side. I was terrified — what was happening? My sight returned to normal in a few minutes, but these were the longest minutes I had ever experienced.
I told my mother what had happened, and she explained to me that what I had had was a migraine — she was a doctor, and she, too, was a migraineur. It was a “visual migraine,” she said, or a migraine “aura.” The zigzag shape, she would later tell me, resembled that of medieval forts, and was sometimes called a “fortification pattern.”
This was a truly beautiful and insightful description of a phenomenon I have experienced for as long as I can remember. I have lived in Oaxaca, Mexico now for over five years, drawn here by some attractive force and random coincidence. Since being here this attraction has become more localized to a particular piece of ground beneath a tree overlooking the pyramids of Monte Alban. I feel as though I lived here at some time. At least something is intimately familiar. Today I recognize that the pattern I see when I experience my aural migraines is a jagged shape similar to the style of patterns found throughout Zapotec culture.
Sacks makes this co
nnection too:"Migraine-like patterns, so to speak, are seen not only in Islamic art, but in classical and medieval motifs, in Zapotec architecture, in the bark paintings of Aboriginal artists in Australia, in Acoma pottery, in Swazi basketry — in virtually every culture. There seems to have been, throughout human history, a need to externalize, to make art from, these internal experiences, from the decorative motifs of prehistoric cave paintings to the psychedelic art of the 1960s."
He also references hallucinations produced by mezcal, an agave based liquor produced here:
Many years later, as a young doctor, I read a little book (really two little books) by the great neurologist Heinrich Klüver, “Mescal” and “Mechanisms of Hallucination.” Klüver not only culled many accounts from the literature, but experimented with mescal himself, and described geometric visual hallucinations typical of the early stages of the mescal experience: “Transparent oriental rugs, but infinitely small … plastic filigreed spherical objets d’art [like] radiolaria … wallpaper designs … cobweb-like figures or concentric circles and squares … architectural forms, buttresses, rosettes, leafwork, fretwork.”
On my 44th birthday, July 10, 2002, five months before I discovered Oaxaca, I wrote this poem:
44
Thinkin of mom
Waitin for the bomb
Thoughts of fleetin
Things heatin
Scratchin
Crawlin
Reachin
Breathin
Where will I be
Whom will I see
Lay me by a tree
Let me see thee
Before during after now
Don’t know how
But makin a vow
Before during after now
Keep listenin
Keep breathin
Open wide
Slide inside
Move from here
Live without fear
Open your eyes
Strengthen your ties.
I have spent long hours beneath the tree at Monte Alban and at times, when opening my eyes it seems, I have Zapotec-like visions. I wonder what self-organizing activity in the vast populations of my own visual neurons led me to this place and why? I know my attraction has to do with the light here but perhaps there is more to discover through the ancient patterns that decorate the culture here.
Dr. Sacks has given me a lot to think about in this regard:
"What we can say, in general terms, is that these hallucinations reflect the minute anatomical organization, the cytoarchitecture, of the primary visual cortex, including its columnar structure — and the ways in which the activity of millions of nerve cells organizes itself to produce complex and ever-changing patterns. We can actually see, through such hallucinations, something of the dynamics of a large population of living nerve cells and, in particular, the role of what mathematicians term deterministic chaos in allowing complex patterns of activity to emerge throughout the visual cortex. This activity operates at a basic cellular level, far beneath the level of personal experience. They are archetypes, in a way, universals of human experience."
|||b