The view from the car wash

Something special about being in the car wash. I love watching the big brushes and all that water and soap: so close but yet so far. I agree with my hubby: this car wash is the best ever.

Hallucinations by Oliver Sacks

In 2012, as Dr. Oliver Sacks neared the age of eighty, he published this book, which includes memoir, patient reporting, and current scientific data about the brain.

Hallucinations, says this remarkable physician, are common phenomena that arise in healthy individuals as well as in patients with a variety of conditions. But people rarely report such experiences, lest they be thought crazy.

Treated with L-dopa, Parkinson's patients may have multi-sensory hallucinations. The bereaved see dead spouses. Many people feel companions beside them, sensed rather than visible, and one pet lover was frequently "visited" by his deceased cat. Some see print transformed to musical notation. For some, pictures come alive with movement. One woman "sewed" with hallucinatory thread.

People with Alzheimer's and other dementias may experience delusions of misidentification or duplication. Some patients think their partners are "duplicates" that have replaced the originals, or believe their residences have been replaced by identical fakes.

Hallucinogenic drugs, including mescaline, LSD and cannabis, have certain typical effects. Colours are enhanced, and people may notice "striking alterations of apparent size." Other "enhancements or distortions of the senses," include "temporary synesthesia," in which one experiences, for example, the smell of a sound, or the sound of a colour.

While Oliver Sacks was a resident doctor following his calling to neurology, he passed through a stage of self-experimentation with various hallucination-producing drugs. Experiencing bizarre hallucinations, he coped by writing about them "in clear, almost clinical detail," in order to become "an observer, even an explorer," rather than "a helpless victim of the craziness inside." Indeed, he was inspired to become an expert and begin a book on migraine while in an amphetamine haze.

A lifelong migraine sufferer, he studied his own headaches and those of his patients, noting that migraines generate particular hallucinations, typically olfactory warnings and geometric visual patterns. Similar patterns, Sacks points out, are present in "Islamic art, in classical and medieval motifs, in Zapotec architecture, in the bark paintings of Aboriginal artists in Australia...in virtually every culture, going back tens of thousands of years."

Epilepsy brings different hallucinations. Those who suffer from the so-called sacred disease may hallucinate warnings at the onset of a seizure: perhaps a blue star approaching the left eye, or a whirling object that closes in until the patient loses consciousness. Novelists Amy Tan and Fyodor Dostoevsky both experienced epileptic hallucinations. Some epileptics have memorable "ecstatic seizures" that can "shake the foundations" of their belief.

Following a certain type of brain surgery, patients can experience complex hallucinations "of deformed and dismembered faces...with exaggerated, monstrous eyes or teeth" that are "typical of abnormal activity in an area of the temporal lobes." Psychotics experience similar hallucinations, but in post-surgical patients, Sacks emphasizes, these are "neurological faces, not psychotic ones."

It is common for patients who are blind due to cortical damage to deny this reality. Blind people with Anton's syndrome hallucinate a world they insist they can see, and "walk boldly in unfamiliar places." Asked to describe a room, they do so with fluency and confidence, even though their claims are "entirely incorrect."

Hallucinations also visit during high fevers. This is especially common in children, and can involve "distortions in proprioception" that may, for instance, cause a prone patient to feel she is standing tall. Fever-produced hallucinations can also "provide, or seem to provide, moments of rich emotional truth...revelations, or breakthroughs of deep intellectual truth." Scientists, artists and writers have all reported such experiences. Delirium of fever can produce tactile or musical hallucinations as well.

Toxic psychosis appears during withdrawal from drugs or alcohol, a situation well-described in Evelyn Waugh's novel The Ordeal of Gilbert Penfold. While writing it, Waugh continued his drinking habit, and took heavy doses of sleeping drugs as well. Penfold "is not 'allowed' to see the speaker" of his auditory hallucinations, lest the delusion be shattered. Guy de Maupassant, who suffered from syphilis, began to see a double of himself; he wrote about this in "Le Horla."

Sacks describes such elaborate deliria and psychoses as "volcano-like eruptions from the 'lower' levels of the brain." Yet, he points out, they are also "shaped by the intellectual, emotional and imaginative powers of the individual" as well as "the culture in which he is embedded."

Normal people commonly experience hypnagogic hallucinations, either just before falling asleep or immediately on waking. However, these are seen with the mind's eye, rather than being projected into external space. Other hallucinations may accompany narcoleptic syndrome, a sleep disorder. One patient, diagnosed with this condition only in middle age, became convinced that her earlier apparent experiences of paranormal phenomena had actually been caused by the narcolepsy. Sacks suggests that "the folklore of every culture includes supernatural figures that behave in similar ways," adding that "such myths and beliefs are...narratives for a nocturnal experience which is common, real, and physiologically based."

Flashbacks are "profound and sometimes delusional states that can go with post-traumatic hallucinations." For example, a war veteran may suddenly "be convinced that people in a supermarket are enemy soldiers" and "open fire on them." It is fortunate that though potentially deadly, this "extreme state of consciousness is rare." It is interesting to note that "PTSD seems to have an even higher prevalence and greater severity following violence or disaster that is man-made," while "natural disasters...seem somehow easier to accept." It is also noteworthy that the people who suffer from PTSD and hallucinations are those who have locked away their horrible memories, rather than attempting to consciously remember, accept and integrate them.

Sometimes, groups of people experience mass hallucinations. This may explain events like the Salem witch trials and the witchcraft stories of the Middle Ages. Sacks feels that these kinds of events could possibly be explained by ergot poisoning, which may have induced the hallucinations suffered by an entire population.

A century ago, William James lectured on exceptional mental states. Discussing trances where mediums channeled voices of dead people, he discussed the mental states that produced them. An observer at many seances, he felt mediums were not charlatans, but people who entered altered states of consciousness that generated hallucinations. As Sacks says, "meditative or contemplative techniques...have been used in many religious traditions to induce hallucinatory visions."

In early developmental stages, many children hallucinate imaginary playmates and interact with them. This is both normal and common.

Electrical stimulation in the cortex, as well as severe blood loss, can induce out-of-body experiences. When he suffered a brief cardiac arrest after being struck by lightning, New York surgeon Tony Cicoria clearly remembers experiencing a departure from his body and his subsequent return.

Swedish botanist Carl Linnaeus experienced the doppelganger phenomenon, an autoscopic hallucination that made him feel his other self was strolling beside him in the garden, mimicking his movements. In an "even stranger and more complex form of hallucinating oneself," a person can interact with his double and even become confused about which is the original. The strength of this impression is illustrated by the following anecdotes. One patient, though at a logical level he knew the double was a hallucination, felt compelled to pull up a chair for him. Another enjoyed watching his double mow the lawn, reminding him of the duty he himself was avoiding.

The Other is also a literary archetype that taps into a certain vein of horror, as in the case of Edgar Allen Poe's "William Wilson," R.L.Stevenson's "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde," and Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Grey."

A phantom limb is a hallucination "more like a memory than an invention." Phantom limb pain can be experienced even by people born with missing limbs. This fact is well-illustrated by a child who learned to count on phantom fingers she'd never had. Phantom limbs can seem to "enter" a prosthesis, or become grotesquely foreshortened, like a hand springing from the shoulder.

Until neuroscientist V.S. Ramachandran found a way to treat it, phantom limb pain was an intractable condition. Ramachandran tricks the brain with a simple box that uses the mirror image of the normal limb to make the missing limb seem visible. His remarkable experiments have helped patients use mirror boxes to influence phantom limbs. It is now evident that "the brain's representation of the body can be fooled simply by scrambling the inputs from different senses."

Common hallucinations that most people experience follow dental anesthesia. While the facial nerves remain frozen, we sense grotesque swelling, deformity or displacement of the cheek or tongue. While freezing lasts, this sensation persists, even as we see in the mirror that it isn't so.

Quadriplegics may have a particular challenge: a phantom body that is "unstable and prone to distortions and deformations." One patient reported her technique for reversing these by taking "visual sips" of her body's appearance while passing a mirror in her wheelchair.

Perhaps the most bizarre hallucination is the conviction that one's limb is not one's own. A man with a damaged right parietal lobe became so deeply estranged from his own leg that he refused to believe it belonged to him, and pushed it out of bed. Naturally, he fell out along with it. Yet in spite of the evidence, astonishingly, he continued to insist that the leg was not his own.

Humans, says Dr. Oliver Sacks, need to "transcend, transport, escape...meaning, understanding, and explanation."  Whether or not it is literally true, some people have direct experiences of the presence of God or an overwhelming force for good. Their religious feelings, rather than being mere intellectual concepts, are realities that are apprehended directly, as William James has also said. Sacks adds that the the animal sense of "'the other,' which may have evolved for the detection of threat, does not have to be negative. On the contrary, it "can take on a lofty, even transcendent function, as a biological basis for religious passion and conviction."

The Swedish fountain in Van Dusen

The iron sculptures that used to decorate the Swedish fountain now surround a large tree. The men labouring with axes, shovels, and farm animals evoke a rural and forested past.

Filling up on electricity

It was interesting to observe. Except for the missing person holding the pump, it looks just like a car filling up on gas.

This station is located in the parking lot of Surrey City Centre Parking lot.

Glad I finally witnessed what it looks like when a car fills up on electricity.

A flying visit by a blue jay

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I left the front door open to the summer air and went back to the kitchen. Hearing a thump, I returned to the hall. All seemed quiet. As I retreated again, another noise made me look over my shoulder, just in time to see a Steller's jay fly out the front door and into the large cedar on the lawn.

I'm honoured that he came by for a flying visit, and grateful he left the house on his own.

Hummingbird visits croscosmia by the front door

Three times in as many days, hummingbirds have visited the crocosmia in front of the door. I feel grateful and privileged. This amazing little bird is wonderful to watch, and I was able to observe it for a couple of minutes each time.

Hummingbirds symbolize lightness, joy and healing.

Image from flickr

Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell

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Dystopic future books I usually avoid, and until I picked up this audio book from the library, I didn't know it was one. When David Mitchell spoke in Vancouver a couple of years ago, his comments on writing intrigued me, so I persevered with this novel, enjoying the dramatic cast of actors presenting the story.

I couldn't begin to comment on the immensely complex structure of these six interwoven tales. Instead, I offer some lines that struck me. In view of current news stories, a few are chillingly apropos.

"Missionaries are malleable if you pretend you're a potential convert," "The sacred is a fine hiding place for the profane," and the brilliant observation, "Where there's bluster there's duplicity."

Mitchell speaks of "the enemy required by any hierarchical state for social cohesion," and how "In a cycle as old as tribalism, fear of the other engenders hatred. Hatred engenders violence, and violence engenders more violence, until the only rights belong to the most powerful."

"An abbey had stood there for centuries until corpocracy dissolved the pre-consumer religions" and "non-consumer religions were criminalized." This, of course, is because "if consumers found satisfaction at any meaningful level, corpocracy would be finished."

Thought the novel has a certain gravity, it is not without humour. These comments made by Tim, the aging editor, are among the ones that made me smile. "The woman was sincere; bigots mostly are," and (in speaking to himself), "Oh imp of the perverse, why do I let you speak for me?" The excitable composer Robert Frobisher can also be funny, as when, after getting involved in a brawl, he bemoans having to watch "all those cannibals feasting on my dignity."

"He who pays the historian calls the tune" recalls Churchill's lighthearted prediction that history would be kind to him, "for I intend to write it."

Mitchell makes shrewd observations about our skewed vision of the past, illustrating with the idea of the Titanic. Once all those who remember the real event have gone, later generations begin to remember the movie as if it were the real story.

He also waxes philosophical with this astute comment: "Funny how power, gravity, love...the forces that really kick ass are all invisible."

The last quotations offer glimmers of hope: "No crisis is insuperable if people cooperate." And as a survivor of attempted murder muses, if our individual choices to do good are but drops in the ocean, they still count. "After all, what is an ocean but a multitude of drops?"

Cloud Atlas has also been made into a movie.

Bastard Tongues by Derek Bickerton

Linguist Derek Bickerton focused much research on the origin of Creoles, especially in Hawaii. Bastard Tongues is a rollicking read, as the reader joins the quest of a colourful academic iconoclast on the trail of linguistic origins.

The anecdotal storytelling and lighthearted tone suggest the pleasing illusion of being seated beside the author in an open-air bar in the tropics, listening to him elicit Creole sentences from native speaker informants.

A self-described "lifelong autodidact," Bickerton has filled his book with grim historical details about slavery. Indeed, "the infernal machine" of slave-based sugar production gave rise to Creoles. Initially, English and Dutch brought indentured laborers to work the Caribbean islands. But the Portuguese were first to develop the plantation society."

I doubt it's common knowledge that "in 1493 the pope divvied up the non-Christian world between Spain and Portugal...the boundary line being down the middle of the Atlantic." One result was that "if Spain wanted African slaves, she had to buy them from Portugal." For the formation of Creole languages, "the shift over time in the balance of whites and non-whites" was "a crucially important factor in the formation of Creoles."

Bickerton began his linguistic research in Guyana, a place with a shockingly violent history. Later, Hawaii later revealed itself as the crucible of the Creole tongue. From this book, I learned the islands had been unoccupied until Polynesians settled there 1200 years ago. When the Americans took over, Hawaii was home to sizable immigrant groups from Japan, Korea, China and Portugal. Before the hegemony of English, Hawaiian newspapers were published in five languages.

After his Hawaiian investigations, Bickerton found that the Creoles of Seychelles and Mauritius supported his language bioprogram hypothesis. What else could explain how children in Hawaii "ignore all the English they were exposed to...and acquire a Creole construction that they could never possibly have heard?" In effect, children built the grammar, and taught the new language to their elders. He posits his inborn grammar theory as the only explanation for why Creole grammar "was the same in Hawaii as...in Suriname, despite the thousands of miles that separated them."

But how do creoles, pidgins, and dialects differ from languages? A pidgin is a short-lived and limited attempt by two linguistically different groups to understand each other on first contact. Highlighting the socio-linguistic hierarchy of tongues, Bickerton quotes fellow-linguist Uriel Weinreich: "A language is a dialect with an army and a navy." Unlike pidgins, Creoles are complete and complex tongues. Although they use vocabulary "borrowed" from French, English, Dutch and Portuguese, their grammar can express a full range of meanings and intimations.

Far from lamenting language loss around the world, Bickerton calls languages "tough beasts" that "die hard," and feels we should "treat reports of language death with some skepticism." Meanwhile, "like magma seeking a volcanic rift, the language in all of us will find some way by which it can break out into the world."

Flightpaths by Heidi Greco

Heidi Greco's well-researched book of poetry alludes to primary sources, of which there are many, to evoke the legendary pilot as a whole woman of complex aspect. Around her disappearance, all is uncertainty. However, a recent Washington Post news story raises one more theory about the fate of the disappearing flyer.

In this picture from britannica, Amelia Earhart stands beside her plane after her first solo crossing of the Atlantic. Perhaps the shadowy figure in the background is Fred, her navigator, limned but faintly, just as he is in Greco's well-crafted collection about the storied aviator.

The poems also evoke Amelia as a child, a sister, a friend, a dreamer, and a dog owner, and readers glimpse her ambiguous marriage and her daughter.

Oscar of Between, a Memoir of Identity and Ideas by Betsy Warland

This genre-bending work moves from vulnerable personal reflections to thoughts on the state of the world. In 2007, a camouflage exhibit at London's Imperial War Museum inspired Oscar. In 2015, the New York Times reported, "'young black men are shot dead by police at 21 times the rate of young white men.'" Meanwhile, Warland wonders wearily at the "endless categories in which one individual or group must unfailingly be subservient to another."

Lightening dark moments with linguistic luminescence, the author wonders poignantly "if there is any greater violence than story-cide." She evokes "the unexpected ecstasy" of air rushing between cars of a moving train. And, in Oscar's sudden memory of riding her wounded Spitfire as it "gyres to the sea," she reveals trans-generational hauntings and the sense of WWII in our DNA.

In Montreal, she carves out writing space by occupying the apartment of a fellow writer who has temporarily exchanged his space for hers in Vancouver. Seeing a neighbour's drying brassieres pinned on "a frigid line" evokes memories of childhood, the realization of "how transparent rural life was." Oscar hangs out her other clothing, but still cannot bring herself to dry her underwear out of doors. Nor, she notices, does the guy who lives downstairs. Camouflage again.

Reading Oscar, I suddenly recalled a line from Carolyn Heilbrun about the social pressure to follow the established "paths laid down for the young." How to survive if you are one who cannot or chooses not to follow these social strictures? Oscar of Between reveals some answers to this conundrum.

Before reading this remarkable book, I had given little thought to the practical decisions and challenges faced on a daily basis by those who occupy the space between sexes. Astonishingly, one of the hierarchies in which Betsy Warland's work is lowered is the world of feminist poetry. There, she is quietly, heartbreakingly dropped, both from readings and from opportunities to be anthologized.

For me, this book was an emotional roller coaster, showing me flashes of how another writer of my generation reacted to life events within and without. The astonishing possibility of "Military manoeuvres" on Hornby Island. How "within a few months Netflix wipes out...video stores on the Drive," where "Oscar talked film with the staff," ending these conversations.

On the macro level, Warland reveals camouflage as "the foundation for runaway credit" and feels that "US citizens abandoned their right to be told the truth decades ago, settled for what only sounds believable." She admires writer friends from different backgrounds who tell their stories, "knowing what's at stake and not backing away from it."

The childhood gun vignette struck notes of both familiarity and surprise. The .22 her father gives her for Christmas, despite her mother's fears about what the neighbours will think. The smile exchanged by father and daughter, her relieved conclusion that he had seen her "as she was." When I was about the same age, Dad gave my brother a .22 and took him for target practice. Dave and I were inseparable playmates, but I was already resigned to the fact that as a girl, I couldn't expect to be invited along. I didn't want a gun of my own, yet at that moment, I knew my real self was invisible to my father, had already doomed myself to the acceptance that he was incapable of seeing me "as I was."

Humans are social and tribal animals. Yet in the end, the hard social and tribal categories go nowhere. Our commonalities are so much greater than our differences. If our race is to survive and thrive, we humans must face that reality, rather than turning from it in fear.

Uncompromised and uncamouflaged, Betsy Warland belongs unequivocally to the tribe of writers. I highly recommend Breathing the Page, an illuminating series of essays on the writing process, published while she was still head of The Writer's Studio she envisioned and established at SFU. These days, she teaches and does manuscript consults for other writers.

Canada is 150 years old and I've witnessed a lot of its history

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I've been here for 44% of the nation's history, though my birth province was not among the original four of Confederation. When I was born, WWII was only 4 years over, and Newfoundland had just joined Canada. Our Prime Minister was Louis St. Laurent. George VI was king, Clement Attlee's Labour Party governed Britain, and Josef Stalin headed the USSR. The US President was Harry Truman, Jawaharlal Nehru presided over India, and Chairman Mao Zedong led China.

When I was born, neither Quebec women nor aboriginals off reservation were allowed to vote. Runner Tom Longboat, a veteran of WWI, died the same year, and though Rocket Richard was playing for the Montreal Canadiens, the Leafs won the Stanley Cup. Canadian surgeon and communist hero Norman Bethune was working in China, where he is still perhaps more famous than he is in Canada, at least outside Montreal.

The first passenger jet, the de Havilland Comet, took its test flight, and Hugh Maclennan had won two of his three Governor General's Literary Awards, including one for Two Solitudes. He would later be dubbed the Father of Canadian Literature. Arguably Canlit's mother, Margaret Laurence, was then living in Somaliland (later Ghana), and still five years away from her first publication.

Today, I feel like a relic of history. Yet I'm pleased that as a country, we've improved a great deal since then. We're far from perfect, but ever so much better than we used to be. Happy Canada Day, everyone. Nations are iffy institutions, but I'm sure glad this one is our home.