“A recent study of stroke victims with damaged language abilities found that those who listened to music recovered better than those who listened only to audio books. Music plus words trumped words alone. Studio 360’s Gideon D’Arcangelo has witnessed this phenomenon first hand–with his mother Sylvia.”
by Lou Lipsitz
Three-week coma,
enfeebled left arm. He slowly came back —
physical therapy, exercise — and after a time
he was himself again,
and we figured the binges would resume.
But instead he stayed in his room
without the radio on
and let his beard grow out white.
Instead of not coming home
for a week at a time, or coming home
cursing five nights in a row,
he was silent and every evening
came out for a snack of bread, jam,
and tea before bed.
While he was taking a stroll
one day, we snuck in
and found the poems:
one about the death-fear
he'd experienced before the coma;
one about walking the streets
alone; one about a woman
he could not speak of;
one about the ocean and
how it might feel to be a blind man
walking into it; one about
how he had seen his mother's
breasts when she'd been
drunk and wild, and he'd wanted
to run into the street.
It was as if we'd come across
a tunnel under our house
that led out beyond the lake
to the valley of another language.
No one mentioned the poems, but
something changed after we found them. My anger
began to dissolve. And when we assembled
at the table for dinner,
I noticed how my grandmother,
who had not slept in the same bed
with him for thirty years,
would sometimes, while serving
the food, reach over to touch his hand.
"Neuroanatomist Jill Bolte Taylor had an opportunity few brain scientists would wish for: One morning, she realized she was having a massive stroke. As it happened -- as she felt her brain functions slip away one by one, speech, movement, understanding -- she studied and remembered every moment. This is a powerful story about how our brains define us and connect us to the world and to one another."
From TED
"Right now I can step into the consciousness of my right hemisphere where we are -- I am -- the life force power of the universe. I'm the life force power of the fifty trillion beautiful molecular geniuses that make up my form. At one with all that is. Or I can choose to step into the consciousness of my left hemisphere where I become a single individual, a solid, separate from the flow. Separate from you. I am Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor, intellectual, neuroanatomist. These are the we inside of me. Which would you choose? Which do you choose? And when? I believe that the more time we spend choosing to run the deep inner peace circuitry of our right hemispheres, the more peace we will project into the world and the more peaceful our planet will be. And I thought that was an idea worth spreading."
My Stroke of Insight: a brain scientist's personal journey
[Thanks Kit!]
"The diving bell is an image of his stroke, the prison in which he is forever trapped, what neurologists call 'locked-in syndrome.' The butterfly is his imagination and his memory, flying free."
"But no butterfly for me. My imagination nestled in his diving bell, inert. For two weeks I agonized and finally came to the conclusion that I would have to tell Kathy [Kennedy, the film's producer] she had misplaced her faith in me. No alternative but to return the money. Now, nothing concentrates a writer's mind more wonderfully than the thought of having to give back the money. I stared at the phone, gathering courage to call my agent when, like a thunderbolt, literally, an idea exploded in my head. What if the story unfolded from Jean-Do's point of view? What if the camera did the blinking? Audiences would not have to gaze endlessly on this pitiful human being but instead see everything as though they themselves were locked in. I rushed to my desk, set the scene in his hospital room, and started: 'Blackness. Silence,' and when I came to write in bold: THE CAMERA IS JEAN-DOMINIQUE BAUBY, KNOWN AS JEAN-DO, I knew the screenplay was possible."
-- Ronald Harwood, who received an Oscar nomination for his screenplay adaptation of The Diving Bell and the Butterfly writing in Script (Jan./Feb. 2008)
“After Julian sent me the script, we didn’t discuss it very much. He didn’t tell me that, in some ways, I would be playing his father. But movies are like that — I had never met Mathieu Amalric until the day of our first scene, and he had to shave me. It was rather intimate, and he did cut me. But it’s always that way: you’re supposed to be involved with someone in the film and you’ve just met them for the first time and then, 10 minutes later, you say, ‘I love you,’ and you are in bed.”
“When I was making the film, it was impossible not to think about my father. I was born in Sweden, and my father, who was a professor of Scandinavian folklore, was 50 when I was born. When I was 20, he was 70, and on the day of his 70th birthday, he had a little stroke. Small strokes followed for the next four years. That changed him. And I regret that I was not more curious about him at that time. All the questions I would like to ask today, I haven’t asked.”
-- Max Von Sydow discussing his role in The Diving Bell and the Butterfly with Lynn Hirschberg (The New York Times, 1/27/08)
“Hold fast to the human inside you, and you will survive.”
The critics aren't exaggerating. It's brilliant. It's the kind of movie that as you're watching, you are immediately aware it will be impossible to forget.
Looking Closely, Seeing Through
A stroke left magazine editor Jean-Dominique “Jean-Do” Bauby locked inside his paralyzed body, forcing him to live primarily in his mind. His only means of communicating was to blink his left eye in response to the alphabet being recited. The details of his story offer a glimpse into some key aspects of mindfulness.
Mindfulness is the ability to keep track of the components of sensory experiences as they arise in various combinations, moment-by-moment. The basic building blocks of sensory experience include physical-type sensations in the body, emotional-type sensations in the body, external visual stimuli, mental images, external sounds, and internal sounds and conversations.
The tagline for The Diving Bell and The Butterfly says, “Let your imagination set you free.” The word imagination comes from the Latin imāginārī meaning to form a mental picture to oneself. With his body having become a closed door, Jean-Do’s only escape is through the window of his left eye and his mind. The movie screen becomes the viewer's window into seeing the world from his perspective.
It is through the visual component of the thinking process that we experience memories, plans, and fantasies. In Julian Schnabel’s film, as in the practice of mindfulness, Jean-Do experiences a blurring and merging of his internal (subjective) experience and the external (objective) world.
As Jean-Do reluctantly accepts his physical paralysis with greater and greater degrees of equanimity, his prison gradually becomes a home. Through concentration, clarity, and acceptance, Jean-Do was able to see the world more clearly and, fortunately for us, to patiently communicate his story one letter at a time.
Daron Larson
Freelance Contemplative
