A Plea for Eros

frightened me enough to swallow the picture whole and leave in its place an absence filled only by my mother’s words
epileptic seizure.
    Like many children, I was prone to inward reveries—long dreaming sessions in which I would lose myself and look out at the world. How strange it is, I would think, that we see and smell and speak and eat and feel, that there are trees and cars and houses, barbed wire, cornfields, and cows. These thoughts were accompanied by a lifting within me that I experienced vaguely as closeness to God and nature (the two mingled in my mind) and as a form of private magic, a secret belief in my own power that set me apart from other people and would take me very far in the world. I have often wondered where this inner conviction came from. I was in no way a prodigious child. My early memories of school are mostly sad ones. I learned to read easily but suffered terribly over numbers. Even now, I cringe when I remember the long rows of intractable digits that never came out right. The complex relations among children—the ins and outs of friendships and alliances, the hierarchies of dominance and weakness on the school ground—puzzled and often hurt me. I wasn’t athletic either, a serious deficit in most places but probably even more so in the Midwest, where physical prowess could catapult both boys and girls into a heroic position among their peers.
    And yet, despite evidence to the contrary, I held fiercely to the lonely idea of my own great destiny, and I suspect that I clung to this irrational position for a single reason: my parents loved me very well. It was plain that my mother and my father thought I was wonderful. They made me feel that nothing was beyond me, and their belief in me and in my three younger sisters was unshakeable, a fortress into which we could retreat whenever we needed it. Years would pass before I understood that I came from a family that was remarkable in this respect, not ordinary. We are, all of us, made from our parents, physically and emotionally, and the quality we call “character” partakes of both genetic givens and the mysterious meanderings of a particular psychic history.
    Some people are more prone than others to numinous experience—those moments or minutes of transcendence, disassociation, or euphoria. It seems clear to me now that I had a neurological as well as an emotional predisposition to these curious transports of the spirit. As a child I suffered from headaches, and at eight I remember my shock when a friend told me she had never had one. All my life, I have shivered at the mere sight of an ice cube, even on a sweltering day. Little more than a passing thought about ice produces a genuine shudder of cold in me. I once asked a neurologist about this, but he seemed not to know what I was talking about. Around the age of eleven, I suffered from commanding inner voices and rhythms that terrified me with their insistence. They always came when I was alone, and they seemed to want to impose their will on me, to press my body into their marching orders. The danger of madness seemed very real to me then, and I’m lucky they vanished. When I was twenty, I was struck with my first migraine, which lasted for eight months and then lifted. In the years that followed, it became obvious that my nervous system was unstable. I lived with auras that ranged from the very mild—a few black spots and brilliant white lights—to the more dramatic, such as a sudden seizure in my arm that hurled me against a wall. Once, I was subject to the very curious phenomenon known as “Lilliputian hallucinations,” during which I saw a small pink man and his little pink ox on the floor of my bedroom and believed they were actually there. I have also had several euphoric episodes before getting sick, and despite the inevitable aftermath, I recall these moments with pleasure: My vision takes on a sudden heightened clarity that makes me imagine I am seeing what I normally can’t, and then, just as I remark to myself on the fantastic quality of my eyesight, I feel an overwhelming joy.
    Common wisdom designates this kind of happiness as aberrant, false, a mere trick of the brain that heralds an oncoming migraine or seizure, and there is some truth in this, but the experience is as real as any other, and it may be that trying to disentangle any emotion from the nervous system is futile. It is the interpretation that matters. However morbid my sensitivities may be, they