madhuleema chaliha
Sat, 28 Jun 2003 03:41:42 -0700
The beauty of having a migraine
The bad part of a migraine is, without any doubt, the migraine itself. The good, and the most beautiful, part of it, however, is what happens to me after it has passed away. Unlike a medicine that leaves a bad taste in the mouth, a migraine almost always goes away leaving a strange feeling of wholeness inside my mind. It is the most destructive poison that I know of that contains within itself the seeds of regeneration.
As far as I can count, a migraine progresses through ten stages :
(1) I feel a tingling sensation “somewhere” inside my mind. And yet how can it be “somewhere” : does the mind have “parts”? It is quite unlocatable : to be sure, one can pint-point the exact zone of the brain where it has started, but in another sense it is everywhere, all at once all over the mind. At this stage, it is just like a pin pricking me from the within; and in a way it is quite enjoyable.
(2) In the next stage, the pricking becomes more incessant and intense. A thousand pins pricking that would have made even Gulliver feel the pain of the Lilliputian arrows. Now I begin to feel that I have been detached from “reality”. I knock the table in front of me with my knuckles, and the noise echoes and re-echoes with a loud bang through the corridors of my mind. I look out through my window at the green leaves on the trees and it seems to me that someone has painted them green just a minute ago : so bright and colourful do they appear. And the sky; I feel as if someone has just painted blue on a white screen. Every part of the sky is brimming over with the most brilliant blue. The whole world is rejoicing in a cosmic dance of joy; a riotous orgy of colour. Meanwhile the pricking goes on.
(3) I look at the wall in front of me and it seems that it is one thousand miles away from me. I stretch out my hand to touch it and my hand seems to be suspended in the air, miles away from the wall. I put on some music and it is as if someone is singing to me from the next house. I also begin to see a strange light in front of my eyes. It is one-half of every possible tone that I can recognise : half-green, half-red, half-yellow …
(4) I am surprised to realise that this conglomeration of colours is somehow ‘inside’ me. It is not my eyes that are seeing : it is someone else who is seeing through my eyes. I am losing my-self to myself. Some strange unknown inhabitant is taking over the controls and telling me what to do. Who is this person who is hearing through my ears, smelling through my nose and thinking through my mind? I hear a strange voice filling up the caverns of my mind; and when I go inwards into it, I realise what great unplumbed depths lie sleeping within it.
(5) I try to remember who I was/had been before the migraine started. It is as if I have jumped over a bridge to a different kind of a world that I do not know; a world where I can bend backwards to myself; where all words turn back to myself; where I try to grasp a thing outside me and realise that I have been grasping myself all the while; where I feel that I have become like a drop of water in the ocean which in searching for another drop loses itself into the heart of the unknown depths.
(6) Now a great darkness slowly spreads itself over my eyes. A great exhaustion sinks into my bones; the tiredness with which the dawn spreads her wings yet again over the heartless night. I lift up my hand and feel that I am trying to lift a thousand stones at once. It slowly moves down into my body and I feel that a thousand burning arrows have been shot through my heart. I grasp my pillow with a tightened grip and feel that it is my ever-fleeting mind itself that I am trying to catch.
(7) Slowly a strange music fills the air all around me. I feel like a man who at the end of a life’s journey comes to the realisation that the treasure that he had been searching for had always remained hidden partly inside him, partly outside him; like a man who is filled with the terror that he might be so close to the mystery he thinks has always eluded him. Time has now stopped. Nobody can see me; for everybody and everything is now somehow inside me; and it is this other unknown person inside me who can see the all through me; feel the all through me; and destroy the all through my own destruction. I see a great waterfall rushing headlong into a bottomless pit and just at the place where it crashes into the rocks, a great whirlpool where the world itself is being sucked into.
(8) Now there is nobody either here or there; for ‘here’ and ‘there’ have become the same. It is the night of the final dissolution; a gentle peace has descended over the black waters. A thousand sparks fly into the crisp air every now and then lighting up the horizon; and then it becomes quiet once again. I want to sleep now. Sleep until the beginning of eternity. Sleep until the end of time. Sleep the longest sleep possible for any human being.
(9) I wake up the next morning. I feel that I have been re-born. Re-born into the most beautiful world that anyone could have created or even imagined. The trees are bursting forth with a new life; the birds are singing the most delightful of songs and the river is flowing with a fresh stream of joy. When I walk, I feel as if there are three inches of empty air between my feet and the ground that I seem to be walking on. For a long moment, there is no pain and its very sting has been taken away; death itself has been transcended; there are no tears, no worries and no anxieties. In one night’s pain, the world has been perfected. Would I want to have another migraine? can only answer : Yes, yes! To be brought again and again to the very brink of the abyss, and to return from it again and again : how shall I explain what strange joy lies in the utter misery of this coming and going?
(10) So the migraine goes away; and I return to the world, but it is not quite the same world that had existed yesterday evening. It is now a world where round the edges of a piece of spotlessly white cloth I can see a gentle shade of black silently merging into the whiteness: a blackness that makes the white shine out even more beautifully. It is a world to which we die only to be born again; and what lies beyond this world can only lie within it and through it.
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