Something fantastical and magical about Phillip Pullman’s Book of Dust.
Its the way he introduces the phenomenon of the visual impact of a migraine into the life of the lead character, Malcolm.
No-one, I think, mentions the word migraine in the book.
He opened his atlas on the page showing the English Channel and tried to measure it with his dividers and the miniature scale at the foot of the page, but it was all too small to read properly. But no: it wasn’t too small. There was something in the way. Something very small flickering and swimming exactly on the spot he was looking at, so that he couldn’t see it clearly, though everything around it seemed clear, at least until he moved his gaze and looked at something else, when the flickery thing moved too. It was always in the way, and he could see nothing behind it. He brushed the page, but there was nothing there. He rubbed his eyes, but it still didn’t go away. In fact, it was even more curious, because he could still see it when his eyes were closed. And it was very slowly getting bigger. I wasn’t a spot any more, it was a line: a curved line, like a loosely scribbled letter C, and it was sparkling and flickering in a zig-zag pattern of blacks and whites and silvers.
Asta said, ‘What is it?’
In The Book of Dust Malcolm’s visual effects are never accompanied by the crippling pain of a migraine. Therey are simply just magical weird experience somehow linked to all the other magical things that happen in Phillip Pullman’s parallel universe. Somehow linked to the Northern Lights, the alethiometer and other stuff…
But still, there’s something in Malcolm’s initial exploration of the experience, which rings an absolute bell. Malcolm is curious, but for many migrane sufferers, the first experience is out of this world, and a strange of combination of calm and terror. Calm because this is definitely happening and so just chill and see where it goes – but terror because something seems to be happening to me that is out of this world and not good – and could lead to my demise. When I started getting a migraine for the first time – I remember the moment so well – I remember the day so well – everything in and around this terror – is anchored and stapled down in my memory – I remember looking in the mirror and not being able to see my own face. I was alone – and I thought – without feeling physically threatened – I am going to die. Something seriously wrong is happening to me. All the flicking lights, the way they grow out of a blind spot – which gets bigger and bigger – until they are pulsating around and around in an arc. And there’s something strange about the flickering lights. They aren’t random. They are somehow packaged into a serious of lines, which are all lined up next to each other, sometimes in parallel, sometimes cutting across each other in packs, but ultimately all, whether pointing at one angle or another, packaged into this arc like shape, that grows out slowly, like a snake.
Can you see it?
I can feel something. What can you see?
What’s it doing now?
Just getting bigger. I can see past it now. It’s getting closer and I can see the words on the page and everything through the middle of it. It’s making me feel dizzy, a bit. If I try and look at it directly it slides away…. Its just getting closer and bigger, but sort of sliding out of the way too, out towards the edge… As if it’s just going to float past and behind my head…
…And then it goes. But it doesn’t leave things the way they were when it arrived. It is like a forest fire ravaging your brain and eyeballs and body. Pullman describes Malcolm having a sense of calm when he has this experience. Certainly I have found, after years and years of getting migraines, that I can have these days or periods of time, where I wake up feeling anxious, stressed, on edge, nervous as hell – and it is this state that seems to trigger the migraine – perhaps I am already having a migraine when I’m in this state – its just I don’t recognise it – its quite subtle. But once the migraine has come and gone – that stress is turned off – disappeared – as if somehow the migraine is the body’s way of switching off the stress – of saying I can’t cope with that level of anxiety – lets burn it – lets destroy it – lets switch it off.
There are two movement, the growth of the snake, which is slow and sly and sneaky – but then the pullsating flickering of the straight line lights, which have the movement and energy of those pullsating electric jellyfish colours.
Its something that people who suffer migranes make reference to when they share their experience – but its not something that I’ve ever seen represented in art or on a TV screen. Makes me wonder if anyone has every accurately depicted it.
This is a simplistic version of – not a bad entry point – that I found on the internet – but I think its like this – but not quite like this.
Christ. Now I’ve found this. From 1870!
Hubert Airy’s 1870 visualization of the scintillating scotoma of his migraine, reproduced in P. W. Latham’s On Nervous or Sick-Headache (1873). (see here).
This is good, too, in terms of a depiction of what you can and cannot see.
Whenever I think about or talk about migraine experiences, i can feel something happen deep down in the machinery of my brain, mind and body, as if just imagining and recalling the experience, creates a sort of light nausea thorughout my body – and a clenching of my eyeballs and innards. I’ve just shivvered big time – I often shivver when I realise the visual phenomena are appearing – I’m telling you – there is something weird about what happens when you describe or spend time meditating on the experience of having a migraine – you can get very close to inducing some of the real life symptoms of the migraine – just by reflecting and thinking about it – now that freaks me out. I feel that nausea now as I’m writing.
What Malcolm never experiences in the book is the crippling pain and nausea and vomiting that people who get migraines tend to get after the visual phenomena peter out. Lucky Malcolm. Strangely, curiously, as I’ve got older the intense pain that I use to suffer in my early 20s has stopped – there is an impact – a dull pain – nausea more than anything – and it does something weird to my emotional energy – it completely sucks it out of my being – or stops it – or something – so that I become completely unconcerned about what people might be feeling – I simply don’t care – don’t have the energy or time for any of that stuff – I can intellectually consider that people have emotions and I might be able to recognise them – but I remain unaffected – that feels powerful, liberating, inhuman and scary all at the same time.