Poe's Girls

I discovered this poem as it was read by one of my favorite music artists, Jeff Buckley. I was surprised by all of the ways to relate this poem to the class. and thought it worth posting. What sort of influence did Poe have on Pullman, and Carrol?

Ulalume: by Edgar Allen Poe

The skies they were ashen and sober;
The leaves they were crisped and sere - 
The leaves they were withering and sere;
It was night in the lonesome October
Of my most immemorial year:
It was hard by the dim lake of Auber,
In the misty mid region of Weir - 
It was down by the dank tarn of Auber,
In the ghoul-haunted woodland of Weir.

Here once, through and alley Titanic,
Of cypress, I roamed with my Soul - 
Of cypress, with Psyche, my Soul.
These were days when my heart was volcanic
As the scoriac rivers that roll - 
As the lavas that restlessly roll
Their sulphurous currents down Yaanek
In the ultimate climes of the pole - 
That groan as they roll down Mount Yaanek
In the realms of the boreal pole.

Our talk had been serious and sober,
But our thoughts they were palsied and sere - 
Our memories were treacherous and sere, - 
For we knew not the month was October,
And we marked not the night of the year
(Ah, night of all nights in the year!) - 
We noted not the dim lake of Auber
(Though once we had journeyed down here) - 
Remembered not the dank tarn of Auber,
Nor the ghoul-haunted woodland of Weir.

And now, as the night was senescent
And star-dials pointed to morn - 
As the star-dials hinted of morn - 
At the end of our path a liquescent
And nebulous lustre was born,
Out of which a miraculous crescent
Arose with a duplicate horn - 
Astarte's bediamonded crescent
Distinct with its duplicate horn.

And I said: "She is warmer than Dian;
She rolls through an ether of sighs - 
She revels in a region of sighs:
She has seen that the tears are not dry on
These cheeks, where the worm never dies,
And has come past the stars of the Lion
To point us the path to the skies - 
To the Lethean peace of the skies - 
Come up, in despite of the Lion,
To shine on us with her bright eyes - 
Come up through the lair of the Lion,
With love in her luminous eyes."

But Psyche, uplifting her finger,
Said: "Sadly this star I mistrust - 
Her pallor I strangely mistrust:
Ah, hasten! -ah, let us not linger!
Ah, fly! -let us fly! -for we must."
In terror she spoke, letting sink her
Wings until they trailed in the dust - 
In agony sobbed, letting sink her
Plumes till they trailed in the dust - 
Till they sorrowfully trailed in the dust.

I replied: "This is nothing but dreaming:
Let us on by this tremulous light!
Let us bathe in this crystalline light!
Its Sybilic splendour is beaming
With Hope and in Beauty tonight! - 
See! -it flickers up the sky through the night!
Ah, we safely may trust to its gleaming,
And be sure it will lead us aright - 
We safely may trust to a gleaming,
That cannot but guide us aright,
Since it flickers up to Heaven through the night."

Thus I pacified Psyche and kissed her,
And tempted her out of her gloom - 
And conquered her scruples and gloom;
And we passed to the end of the vista,
But were stopped by the door of a tomb - 
By the door of a legended tomb;
And I said: "What is written, sweet sister,
On the door of this legended tomb?"
She replied: "Ulalume -Ulalume - 
'Tis the vault of thy lost Ulalume!"

Then my heart it grew ashen and sober
As the leaves that were crisped and sere -                                                                                                                                           As the leaves that were withering and sere;
And I cried: "It was surely OctoberOn this very night of last year
That I journeyed -I journeyed down here! - 
That I brought a dread burden down here - 
On this night of all nights in the year,
Ah, what demon hath tempted me here?
Well I know, now, this dim lake of Auber - 
This misty mid region of Weir - Well I know, now, this dank tarn of Auber,
This ghoul-haunted woodland of Weir."

According to Wikipedia: The identity of Ulalume is questionable. Poetically, the name Ulalume emphasizes the letter L, a frequent device in Poe's female characters such as "Annabel Lee", "Eulalie", and "Lenore".^[7] If it really is a dead lover, Poe's choice to refer to Ulalume as "the thing" and "the secret" do not seem like endearing terms.^[8] Ulalume may really be representative of death itself.^[8]

In the Chapter titled Through the Looking Glass Insects, Alice can't remember her name. "And how, who am I? I will remember, if I can! I'm determined to do it!' But being determined didn't help much, and all she could say, after a great deal of puzzling, was,`L, I know it begins with L!'

Favorite Chapter of Alice's Adventures

Through the looking Glass Insects

You may recall this is the chapter about Which involves Bread and Butter flys and pollinating elephants as well as a passenger train which Alice has no ticket for. Well, I have always had a thing with trains: When I was about eight years old, living in the south suburbs of Cook county, I remember crossing the street through about a city block of dense forest, past Coy's Auto Repair Shop heading to the "tracks". It seemed that there were always these train cars sitting there. Well, under the thirteenth car was a load of iron oar, the perfect size for me to shoot with my "wrist rocket". I had many of these slingshots over the years and can even remember making one from the trees in said forest and a solid rubber band. I remember being afraid to climb under the train cars even though there was nothing to be afraid of, as these cars seemed to be forgotten. I remember climbing on them with the older boys in the neighbor hood and feeling like a rebel and I liked that. I used to shoot these perfectly round man-made iron spheres at the trains when they would go by and remember all the graffiti above my reach. 

Being about 30 miles from Chicago, the train was one of the best ways to get to the city. As a kid I traveled by the Metra train to and from Chicago White Sox Games and as I got older to and from Venetian Night and the 4th of July and the debauchery which followed. In high school I remember my buddy's face on the evening news. Someone had videotaped a fight he was involved in which caused a number of people to be kicked off the train at really shitty spot for a white kid to be dropped off. 

 I moved to Colorado when I was 19. I was seeking adventure and the Mountains and the Western attitude. I used the Amtrak to travel to and from home and once to California on Christmas day. I made friends in the smoking car and brought my whiskey to share (which made me nervous as I was underage). I remember going down there, it's always on the track level, and not even smoking(cigarettes anyway). Everyone was on an adventure! Stories were told and crushes developed. I remember always wanting to "hook-up" on the Amtrak like the way one may fantasize about the "mile high club" on an airplane. Still yet to happen, although once I was traveling by Greyhound, and as this possibility began to develop, chick was pulled off the bus by a police officer because she was a run-away. 

I have since graduated from passenger train travel, and prefer to pay a few more bucks to fly. But, I have not gotten over my joy of travel by freight train or Tren De Cargo as they say in Mexico... At 20, I dropped out of school at Boulder and jumped in a fellow raft guides VW bus (how cliche right?) and headed for a place called Terlingua, Texas. This was a place which I had heard much about that previous summer as I trained on the river with a couple of natives from the area. I guided rivers as the youngest employee and was surrounded by well traveled explorers of rivers, mountains, jungles, and deserts. One guy named Phil, had done some travel which none of the other raft guides had experience with, of course it was via freight train. The conversation probably started around a fire or on the Rio Grande as we had much time to Bull shit during working hours on the river. The customers would go two to a canoe and the guides would grab a bunch of weight, usually water for the group, and cruise either ahead or behind the custies. He told me of a book (I can't find it on the internet) he owned which gave the ins and outs of getting away with this wild idea I had never really imagined doing. I read the book in a day and was "catching out" by that weekend. 

Phil came along he was 34 years old, I was just a kid. I remember reading about the fine if you were caught and neglecting to bring the cash but Phil being prepared. I didn't give a shit, I was a college drop-out with a passion for adventure and nothing to lose. We drove to Alpine, Texas, where we could hop on because there was a shift change there. A shift change location is simply a predetermined spot where the Engineers start or finish a shift. These are known locations all across the country with the closest one being in Hamilton, Montana. As the train slowed we waited in the bushes, about five minutes later the train sounds the horn and begins to roll slowly. This is when we run out of the bush and climb the ladder into a space behind a double stacked cargo box (as seen in any major port like Seattle or Portland), Hobos call them Piggy Back Cars, they are the best to ride on because of the comfort of being hidden and the high priority of the train itself. These are the expensive goods, which need travel from A to B as fast as possible and not stopping for other lower priority train cars like the ones I used to collect iron ore from under. 

We arrived in Tucson, Arizona (shift change) some 16 hours later, only to get back on a train going the other direction. We were then thrown off 5 hours later by the US border patrol as they, in spanish, screamed for us to... one could only guess as my spanish was of little understanding at the time. Nothing happened, the Border Patrol handed us over to the local sheriff and he dropped us off at the next county. We hitched back. 

With a little practice, I was ready for the rumored rails and tunnels of the Copper Canyon in Chihuahua, Mexico. Copper Canyon is a gorge 4 times the size of the Grand Canyon, just not quite as deep. At the end of the commercial season on the Rio Grande in April I was dropped off at the border and made my way to the rumored catch spot.  I rode from San Rafel to Sufragio or vise versa can't recall. The trip was a success. Sixty Four tunnels and some of the most spectacularly clear nights I have ever seen. I rode only one way as I was too afraid to do hop on the way to the canyon. I rode in an open container car this time and had panoramic views from the last car of the train. I was told by a group of Mexican tramps which hop the trains into the states to pick fruit that I was the only American they had ever seen on the line. I felt like some kind of hero. Who needs a ticket anyway?

Research Paper

Ryan Early

December 1, 2008

Eng 304

Civilization vs. Nature in His Dark Materials

 

Phillip Pullman’s His Dark Materials contains commentaries and critiques regarding many important issues of the world. His writings provoke questions related to religion, destiny, love, literature, children, the theme of civilization vs. nature/savagery and many others. Man’s effect on Nature has been a controversial topic throughout literature for centuries. As scientific evidence continues to build for environmental degradation and species extinction, the literary world continues to imaginatively portray these results. Pullman demonstrates the sad realization of man’s effect on nature with subtle and obvious environmental critiques through his characters: the mulefa and Mary Malone, the Authority and Father Gomez, Will and the subtle knife, and Iorek the armored bears.

In Pullman’s trilogy, everything on earth was fine until 300 years ago when humans took advantage of nature and threw off the balance, causing each universe problems of it’s own, whether with a subtle knife or pollution. The Dust is leaving the worlds, specters are taking some over, and there are fissures between the parallel universes. Regardless of which world one is in, nature is threatened by civilization. The mulefa’s seedpod trees are dying, animals are being killed and used for humans’ advantages, and the polar bears’ ice caps are melting.

The mulefa have the seemingly good relationship with nature, as they have established a mutually conducive relationship; each organism benefits from the other, and thus each organism’s survival depends on the other. The trees give the mulefa their wheels (seedpods), and the mulefa, by riding the seed pods around, cause a very hard seedpod to crack open, which is very difficult for it to do by itself. When the seedpod cracks open, the mulefa stop using it as a means of transportation, and plant it in the ground. "Without the mulefa's attention, the trees would all die. Each species depended on the other, and furthermore, it was the oil that made it possible" (643). They are in a give and take relationship with the trees, a mutual symbiosis. However, due to the efforts of “civilized” man, “despite every effort and all the love and attention the mulefa could give them, the wheel-pod trees were dying” (646). 

Mary establishes a mutually conducive relationship with the mulefa. She tries to fix the Dust problem for them with the amber spyglass, which ultimately affects every organism in the worlds survival. Also, she fixes their fishing nets, collects shellfish that they cannot get to themselves, and keeps a watch for the tualapi. In return, they help feed, clothe, shelter, and be-friend her. Mary's survival depends on the mulefa while she is in their world, and the mulefa's survival depends on Mary, through the resolution of the Dust problem. This is balanced accord between civilization and nature.

Additionally, civilization has a rare opportunity to feel nature’s pain when the Dust starts flowing much too quickly out of the worlds, and Mary's tree falls over and dies. "Every fiber in the trunk, the bark, the roots seemed to cry out separately against this murder. But it fell and fell, all the great length of it smashed its way out of the grove and seemed to lean toward Mary before crashing into the ground like a wave against a breakwater; and the colossal trunk rebounded up a little way, and settled down finally, with a groaning of torn wood" (878). This is ultimately the fate that awaits every tree and every animal and every part of nature when civilization continually fights to establish and maintain authority over nature and savagery.

When the character, Father Gomez, is introduced, he is a civilized intruder from society. When the large bird attacks him, he shoots it with his man-made rifle that he brought. "[The bird] was hissing with malice, stabbing its head forward.... [Its] head exploded in a mist of red and white" (818). Father Gomez triumphs over nature, and then attempts to control it. He thinks, "once they had truly learned to fear him, they would do exactly as he said" (819). This is an explicit example of civilization dominating nature. After Father Gomez is killed, while trying to kill Balthamos, he ends up being consumed by nature in the end. "The lizards were scavengers...mild and harmless creatures, and...[the lizards] were entitled to take any creature left dead after dark. The lizard dragged the priest's body back to her nest, and her children feasted very well. As for the rifle, it lay in the grass where Father Gomez had laid it down, quietly turning into rust" (901). The priest gets his retribution in the end, and nature ultimately triumphs over him, a representative of civilization, and his gun, a tool of civilization.

            Again nature is endangered by civilization by Will’s use of the subtle knife. By his cutting holes in the fabric of the universe he causes the formation of the specters. The specters then go around draining the souls/daemons out of adults, so civilization hurts nature which then hurts civilization; so in this particular case civilization gets its retribution.

 

Iorek remark to Will when asked to repair the knife, “With it you can do strange things. What you don’t know is what the knife does on its own. Your intentions may be good. The knife has intentions, too….Sometimes in doing what you intend, you also do what the knife intends” (681). Iorek was right to question the reparation of the knife because it did do things that Will was not aware of. Every time a cut was made with the knife, a specter was created. The specters start killing all the adults in a couple of worlds. Additionally, the windows that were created by the knife allow the Dust to leak out of them, which harms all of nature in every world. So Will unknowingly brings bad into the world, and good out of the world, and civilization hurts nature in this case as well.

Finally, there is the quandary of the armored bears. As in the Arctic of 2008, the polar ice caps are melting, and the armored (polar) bears’ environment is deteriorating. “Since the catastrophe that had burst the worlds open, all the Arctic ice had begun to melt…. Since the bears depended on ice and on the creatures who lived in the cold sea, they could see that they would soon starve if they stayed where they were; and being rational they decided how they should respond” (630). As Iorek remarks, due to environmental degradation, food and shelter are scarce. Because civilization caused nature’s bears to have to struggle too much for survival, Iorek leads them south, to live in the mountains that he had heard about from Lee Scoresby. “Since the vast disturbances in the Arctic, the ice had begun to disappear, and Iorek knew that he had to find an icebound fastness for his kin, or they would perish” (577-78). Once Iorek has sailed his fellow bears south to the tall, snowy mountains, however, it turns out that it was a false hope. He discovers that it is not easier to hunt there, and there is not that much snow; so he begins the trek back to the North, not knowing if his species is going to survive much longer. Of course, had he been in Mary and Will’s world, he could have petitioned to be on the endangered species list. At least after killing off nature until there are only ten specimens left alive of a species, they can then be on the endangered species list before they become extinct.            

Through the mulefa, wheel-pod trees, Mary, Father Gomez, Dust, Iorek and the armored bears, Pullman critiques civilization’s conquering of nature. He shows that the ultimate scenario for both sides is death, since Dust is affected and nature dies, which in turn causes mulefa and even humans to die. Pullman asserts that the ideal relationship between nature and civilization is not a constant battle, but a mutual symbiosis, perhaps. After all, each side of the dichotomy has elements of the other. This is what Will and the angels closing the portals, and feeling optimistic achieve at the end of the book. For once, civilization helps nature, rather than trying to conquer it, and the result is the salvation of nature and, ultimately, of the earth as we know it.

Alice in Wonderland Syndrome

 

 

Migraine and epilepsy (Wiki Carro)

In his diary for the year 1880 Dodgson recorded experiencing his first episode of migraine with aura, describing very accurately the process of 'moving fortifications' that are a manifestation of the aura stage of the syndrome[29]. Several people have suggested the odd experiences Alice undergoes in the stories may have been inspired by migraine-like symptoms.[citation needed] Indeed a condition, Alice in Wonderland Syndrome, has been named after it. Also known as micropsia and macropsia, it is a brain condition affecting the way objects are perceived by the mind. For example, an afflicted person may look at a larger object, like a basketball, and perceive it as if it were the size of a mouse.

Dodgson also suffered two attacks in which he lost consciousness. He was diagnosed by three different doctors; a Dr. Morshead, Dr. Brooks, and Dr. Stedman, believed the attack and a consequent attack to be an "epileptiform" seizure (initially thought to be fainting, but Brooks changed his mind). Some have concluded from this he was a lifetime sufferer from this condition, but there is no evidence of this in his diaries beyond the diagnosis of the two attacks already mentioned. [30]. Some authors, in particular Sadi Ranson, have suggested Carroll may have suffered from temporal lobe epilepsy in which consciousness is not always completely lost, but altered, and in which the symptoms mimic many of the same experiences as Alice in Wonderland. Note that Carroll had at least one incidence in which he suffered full loss of consciousness and awoke with a bloody nose, which he recorded in his diary and noted that the episode left him not feeling himself for "quite sometime afterward". This attack was diagnosed as possibly "epileptiform" and Carroll himself later wrote of his "seizures" in the same diary. It's worth noting that epilepsy runs in families, and Carroll had at least one other family member with epilepsy (also recorded in his diaries), and that speech hesitations, facial asymmetry, as well as some deafness are not uncommon in certain epilepsies. It is also recorded that several of Dodgson's siblings suffered from a speech hesitation, suggesting again that any existing neurological condition was within the family as reported in Interviews & Recollections, editor Morton N. Cohen.

0.^ "The Diaries of Lewis Carroll", vol 9 p. 52

 

 

Going Underground/ What about lewis carroll

Sadi Ranson-Pollizotti

Who else but Carroll could carry on a successful mathematics career, penning many books under his Christian name (Dodgson), serve as a tutor at Oxford, be the author of the Alice books, and one of the most important photographers of both his and our time, with photographs that are still widely exhibited and highly valued (not to mention controversial) to this day. When writing about Carroll, even though we are writing about one man, he is a man who lived many lives, all of them at the same time. Some biographers have labeled him ‘schizophrenic’, others ‘multiple personality disorder,’ and many more diagnoses, yet none seem to fit and none, for the record, were ever diagnosed during his day. It seems many biographers have had a difficult time reconciling the many parts of Dodgson’s personality, and, unable to reconcile them, they simple create a split and hence, the misdiagnoses (mis-diagnonsense?). It may sound good; it may explain how he could be so different as Carroll the writer and

Dodgson the Deacon, but this doesn’t make it the truth.

The answer to Dodgson’s personality quirks is likely to be found in the one condition he was very clearly diagnosed with during his lifetime; temporal lobe epilepsy, an interesting fact for myriad reasons, but especially for the fact that epilepsy has a proven link to creativity and artistic expression as well as religious fervor and hypergraphia. One wonders why biographers have given it such little ink when it could be the very key to understanding not only Wonderland, but also Dodgson’s personality; he fits the epileptic personality – a very particular group of personality traits known as Geschwind’s syndrome-all of which would encompass his moral and religious beliefs, love of organization, love of music boxes and clocks, and his hypergraphia. That Dodgson also had a fascination with epilepsy should tell biographers something; that much of his written work is focused on ‘fits’, altered states of consciousness, and other such ‘eerie states’ or what he coined, ‘the waking dream’, are all clues to his inner-mechanism. To say he was simply epileptic would be too reductionist; but to not factor it into the equation at all (and it does not get its due in really any biography to date), is clearly a huge oversight. 

Dodgson doesn’t tell us how to interpret his work, his life – he just leaves it there for us, nicely organized like the library he oversaw at Oxford (he was sub-librarian at Christ Church for many years, the windows of which overlooked the Deanery garden, from where he likely caught his first glimpse of the Liddell sisters and young Alice). It is all there for us to peruse at our leisure. The work he has left behind, his famous nonsense, the Alice books, The Hunting of the Snark, remain the post popular, despite the fact that Dodgson was a mathematician by trade and penned many books under his own name, it is the nonsense of his life that interests us most, a curious fact.

 

 

Neurophilosophy

Diagnosing Dostoyevsky’s Epilepsy

http://neurophilosophy.wordpress.com/2007/04/16/diagnosing-dostoyevskys-epilepsy/

 

An early attempt at diagnosing Dostoyevsky’s condition was made by Sigmund Freud, who trained as a neurologist, and described epilepsy as “an organic brain disease independent of the psychic constitution”. Freud believed that the condition was incompatible with great intellect, because it was “associated with deterioration and retrogression of the mental performance”; “What is generally believed to be epilepsy in men of genius,” Freud wrote, “are always straight cases of hysteria”. And this is exactly how the psychoanalyst interpreted Dostoyevsky’s epilepsy. In an essay entitled Dostoyevsky and Parricide, which was first published in 1928, Freud suggested that the onset of the Dostoyevsky’s epilepsy is intimately connected to the death of his father:

Dostoyevsky called himself an epileptic…it is highly probable that this so-called epilepsy was only a symptom of his neurosis and must accordingly be classified as hystero-epilepsy - that is, as severe hysteria. The most probable assumption is that the attacks went back far into his childhood, that their place was taken to begin with by milder symptoms and that they did not assume an epileptic form until after the shattering experience of his eighteenth year - the murder of his father.

 

In the following passage, Strakhov relates Dostoevsky’s own description of the aura:

Fyodor Mikhailovich often told me that before the onset of an attack there were minutes in which he was in rapture. “For several moments,” he said, “I would experience such joy as would be inconceivable in ordinary life - such joy that no one else could have any notion of. I would feel the most complete harmony in myself and in the whole world and this feeling was so strong and sweet that for a few seconds of such bliss I would give ten or more years of my life, even my whole life perhaps.”

 

 

 

In this passage, Dostoyevsky gives a vivid account of the ecstatic aura preceding one of Myshkin’s seizures:

 

He was thinking, incidentally, that there was a moment or two in his epileptic condition almost before the fit itself (if it occurred in waking hours) when suddenly amid the sadness, spiritual darkness and depression, his brain seemed to catch fire at brief moments…His sensation of being alive and his awareness increased tenfold at those moments which flashed by like lightning. His mind and heart were flooded by a dazzling light. All his agitation, doubts and worries, seemed composed in a twinkling, culminating in a great calm, full of understanding…but these moments, these glimmerings were still but a premonition of that final second (never more than a second) with which the seizure itself began. That second was, of course, unbearable.

This very famous account of an ecstatic aura has helped neurologists to localise the origins of Myshkin’s, and hence Dostoyevsky’s, epileptic seizures. The emotional content of the aura suggests that this type of seizure was caused by abnormal electrical activity in parts of the temporal lobe; the emotions are associated with activity in structures of the limbic system - specifically, the hippocampus, amygdala and neocortex of the temporal lobe. The Idiot was written in 1867-68, when Dostoyevsky was having emotional and financial difficulties. With his wife, he set off for Europe, travelling from one city to the next, to avoid his creditors and to seek treatment for his epilepsy. This was a period during which Dostoyevsky experienced a number of severe seizures, perhaps as a result of the psychological burden of his circumstances.

 

 

 

Temporal Lobe Epilepsy

History

http://www.emedicine.com/NEURO/topic365.htm

 

Aura

Auras occur in approximately 80% of temporal lobe seizures. They are a common feature of simple partial seizures and usually precede complex partial seizures of temporal lobe origin.

Auras may be classified by symptom type; the types comprise somatosensory, special sensory, autonomic, or psychic symptoms.

Somatosensory and special sensory phenomena

Olfactory and gustatory illusions and hallucinations may occur. Acharya et al found that olfactory auras are associated more commonly with temporal lobe tumors than with other causes of TLE.

Auditory hallucinations consist of a buzzing sound, a voice or voices, or muffling of ambient sounds. This type of aura is more common with neocortical TLE than with other types of TLE.

Patients may report distortions of shape, size, and distance of objects.

These visual illusions are unlike the visual hallucinations associated with occipital lobe seizure in that no formed elementary visual image is noted, such as the visual image of a face that may be seen with seizures arising from the fusiform or the inferior temporal gyrus.

Things may appear shrunken (micropsia) or larger (macropsia) than usual.

Tilting of structures has been reported. Vertigo has been described with seizures in the posterior superior temporal gyrus.

0.Psychic phenomena

Patients may have a feeling of déjà vu or jamais vu, a sense of familiarity or unfamiliarity, respectively.

Patients may experience depersonalization (ie, feeling of detachment from oneself) or derealization (ie, surroundings appear unreal).

Fear or anxiety usually is associated with seizures arising from the amygdala. Sometimes, the fear is strong, described as an "impending sense of doom."

Patients may describe a sense of dissociation or autoscopy, in which they report seeing their own body from outside.

Autonomic phenomena are characterized by changes in heart rate, piloerection, and sweating. Patients may experience an epigastric "rising" sensation or nausea.

What is it like?

http://www.epilepsy.com/epilepsy/epilepsy_temporallobe

Here's a typical story: "I get the strangest feeling—most of it can't be put into words. The whole world suddenly seems more real at first. It's as though everything becomes crystal clear. Then I feel as if I'm here but not here, kind of like being in a dream. It's as if I've lived through this exact moment many times before. I hear what people say, but they don't make sense. I know not to talk during the episode, since I just say foolish things. Sometimes I think I'm talking but later people tell me that I didn't say anything. The whole thing lasts a minute or two."

 

Dostoyevsky, the 19th-century Russian novelist, who himself had epilepsy, gave vivid accounts of apparent temporal lobe seizures in his novel The Idiot:

He remembered that during his epileptic fits, or rather immediately preceding them, he had always experienced a moment or two when his whole heart, and mind, and body seemed to wake up with vigor and light; when he became filled with joy and hope, and all his anxieties seemed to be swept away for ever; these moments were but presentiments, as it were, of the one final second…in which the fit came upon him. That second, of course, was inexpressible.

Next moment something appeared to burst open before him: a wonderful inner light illuminated his soul. This lasted perhaps half a second, yet he distinctly remembered hearing the beginning of a wail, the strange, dreadful wail, which burst from his lips of its own accord, and which no effort of will on his part could suppress. Next moment he was absolutely unconscious; black darkness blotted out everything. He had fallen in an epileptic fit.

hree-quarters of people with TLE also have simple partial seizures, in which they remain fully conscious. Some people have only simple partial seizures and never have a change in consciousness.

Unfortunately, in about 60% of people with TLE, the seizures spread from the temporal lobe to a wider portion of the brain. This process is called secondary generalization. The result is a convulsive (grand mal) seizure.

After the complex partial seizure or secondarily generalized seizure has ended, patents are often confused for several minutes and then gradually recover.

Temporal lobe seizures usually begin in the deeper portions of the brain's temporal lobe. This area is part of the limbic system, which controls emotions and memory. Some individuals with temporal lobe epilepsy may have problems with memory, especially if seizures have occurred for more than 5 years, but these memory problems are almost never severe.