My epilepsy continues to evolve — into what remains unclear.

This week both ears went wonky, with daily episodes of muffled yet distorted hearing, reminiscent of badly-recorded audio that, no matter how much you tweak it in post-production, still sounds like shit.  I don’t know if the new meds will help, as I haven’t yet climbed up to a “therapeutic dose.”  The warning label cheerily informs me that “the reason why this medication controls seizure is unknown.”

I’ve read that the Ancient Greeks treated epilepsy with lichen of horses, genitals and rennet of seals, testicles of hippopotami, blood of tortoises, hair of camel, blood of human gladiators drunk straight from the wound, menstrual blood, feces of crocodiles, and amulets of peonies.  Medieval doctors thought seizures arose through a vapor or “breeze” from the womb, leaving the reader to speculate how this works in men.  Theories of demonic possession, or prophetic powers, have persisted over centuries, leading to therapies of exorcism and immolation.

All this seems comically horrific (OK, in some aspects maybe just horrific), and modern methods appear so much more advanced.  At the very least, I don’t think any the meds next to my sink are extracted from blood sport or endangered species.  Yet I see a plausible argument underlying the old collection of “superstitious” remedies.  Seeking cures in gonads and uteri, devils and predators, gladiators and prophets, the ancients tried to combat illness with the force of vitality, death with the organs of birth, unconsciousness with the power of spirit.  Modern writers dismiss their work as “chiefly products of the imagination.”  But I wonder if the ancients understood imagination itself to be a curative agent.

When I was in high school, I “experimented” (to use my generation’s favored euphemism when confessing to our children or to the press) with various mind-altering substances.   Most of it was goofy escapism and clumsy self-soothing.  But certain hallucinatory experiences have stuck with me.  Under their influence, I first heard the clear sound of nature — a vibratory, voiceless, omnipresent song.   I have heard it ever since.  It is neither a god, nor any embodied being, nor self, nor other.  It is beyond birth and death.  It may be what rang in Coleridge’s head when he wrote The Aeolian Harp:

O! The one Life within us and abroad,
That meets all motion and becomes its soul,
A light in sound, a sound-like power in light,
Rhythm in all thought, and joyance every where —
Methinks, it should have been impossible
Not to love all things in a world so fill’d,
Where the breeze warbles, and the mute still air
Is music slumbering on her instrument.

My new auditory symptoms have me worried, I’ll confess.  But I’m not concerned about losing the deeper song.