Poetry Reminds Me of the Holes in My Memory

Caesura by Victoria Kornick

One of the most common symptoms of an oncoming grand mal seizure is the sense that it has happened before. Déjà vu, like an epileptic seizure, begins as a disturbance running through the temporal lobe of the brain. The sensation of déjà vu, in itself, can be a small seizure. It is possible to have seizures like this—absence seizures, very small seizures, seizures when sleeping—for years without realizing they took place.

The criteria for diagnosing epilepsy is simple: The patient has had two or more seizures, and these seizures have no other known cause. “Have you ever been unable to remember what you were thinking? Have you spaced out, or had a blank period of memory? Did this happen in your childhood? When? How often?” a neurologist might ask.

It is like being called upon as a witness to an event that occurred years earlier, one you can’t remember happening, and about which no one will tell you the date or any particulars. You must swear both to how you felt and how you looked from the outside, on some long-ago, unremarkable night, when you may have left your body.

The year I started writing poetry was also the year I had the worst migraines of my life. I was nineteen, in my second year of college, and enrolled in a workshop for the first time. The genre seemed true to my experience of being alive: images flashing over broken lines, rhythm and meter giving the illusion of familiarity, of a connection or meaning just outside of sense.

It was dark by the time I got back to my dorm after my last class each week. A migraine would begin throbbing on my walk home. By the time I reached my room, I had trouble seeing. I collapsed on the cold concrete floor of the suite’s bathroom and vomited on and off all night. Most of this I can’t remember well, but I had always thought that was simply the nature of the mind: to block out memories of pain so we can keep living.

I thought of these periods as a caesura—the break within a line, a pause between ideas, a moment of breath that gives meaning to what falls around it. Caesura comes from the Latin to cut, though parenthetically, the Oxford English Dictionary notes that “(Some writers appear to have erroneously associated it with cease).” Cease, seize. Seizure, caesura. These are words I want to use, when trying to describe the blank spaces within a line, a night, a life.

The triggers for an epileptic episode, like those for migraine, include loud noises, bright lights, hormonal changes, periods of intense stress. One can be mistaken for the other. A migraine can move so variously, through the brain, the inner ear, the sinuses, the spine, the stomach, the gut. It can be dull or sharp, sudden or take days. It can begin with a spasm firing in the neck, a partial or complete loss of vision, a pulsing ache of blood and nerves in one eye.

“But was there ever a blank space within the sensation of pain?” The doctor looks at you, like you might know the answer. “Did you move your limbs without knowledge or effort? Would you describe your actions during any of these periods as involuntary?”

The primary definition of seizure is in the sense of possession: a sudden and forcible taking hold. Its etymology runs back through the romance languages to Frankish Latin. At the end of the entry, the Oxford English Dictionary hypothesizes its ultimate origin is the Germanic satjan (to place), the root of the verb set.

To set is related to, but more complex than, to sit. It isn’t simply a matter of having an object, like lay is to lie. Set can be transitive or intransitive, reflexive or figurative. Set can refer exclusively to a rabbit in one sense, to a hen in another, or, most often, to the sun. You can be set upon by plagues, set in motion, set a table, set up a scene, set down a law. Setting is definite, though not permanent. What sets can also rise.

It is like seizure in that way—what is seized can be released or reclaimed. Though not necessarily permanent, each can repeat infinitely. The sun sets and sets and sets. The body seizes and seizes and is seized.

On Friday nights in college, after my migraines, I went to parties. Everything then was some degree of a rave, all the house parties, the fraternities, the bars. The terrible pounding of dubstep making it all feel like one long version of the same song. A strobe light flashed somewhere, always, and some guy grabbed you from behind.

Once, a tall, sweaty brick of a frat brother took my glasses off my face, and I had to leap at him, in the strobe light, clawing to locate where he held them in the air, then stretched the temples to fit over his huge, laughing face.

Wouldn’t it have happened then? A seizure I mean. It seems, looking back, so perfectly primed: the flashing lights, the strong emotion, the fatigue. Was it happening, that year, on the nights I had migraines? How can I know what went on in my body in the moments I can’t remember?

When it did happen, the seizure felt incredibly familiar. I was sitting at the dining room table of my childhood home, eating dinner with my parents, my husband next to me.

I lurched forward and thought I would be sick. My parents’ dog started barking, and I felt like I was remembering something, as if I were midway through a book I had just picked up again, or a dream I was trying to reenter. I could almost place it. Then I lost consciousness.

When I came to, I heard a loud, mechanical noise, like a revving engine. I wasn’t aware that any time had passed. I couldn’t see, though I sensed that my eyes were open. I felt hot waves of fury, like I was fighting with someone, though I couldn’t remember whom, or about what.

I saw my mother’s face, then my husband’s face, then my father’s. They were all standing over me. I was still in my chair, though I’d slid down, my head tipped over the backrest, face lifted to the ceiling.

Someone should turn off that machine, I thought, as the sound kept pounding in my ears. I tried to lift myself up, but my hands were too weak to grasp the edge of the seat. There were small points of blood on my palms, where my nails had pierced the skin.

In the emergency room, my husband described what had happened, since I couldn’t. It was strange to hear about myself like this, like a person who wasn’t there.

“She jerked backwards all of a sudden. She got so stiff, and the chair almost fell over. Her head tilted back all the way on her neck, and her hands clenched into fists, shaking really hard at her sides. It was maybe a minute, maybe longer, until she started coming to.”

I learned from the ER doctor that the anger I felt as I regained consciousness was a common neurological symptom. Patients often report strong, random surges of emotion—panic, laughter, tears, ecstasy—as part, sometimes the only part, of a seizure. The machine I heard was an auditory feature, a sound only the person having the seizure can hear.

“Did you convulse in your sleep as a baby? Did you have learning disabilities? Did you seem absent as a child?” A neurologist, a month later, interrogated me as if I had been an observer, and not the child in question.

He asked about the déjà vu I’d described to the emergency room doctor. “What image did you see?”

I said it hadn’t been an image, but a feeling, as if I were about to understand a connection or remember a dream.

“That’s not déjà vu,” he said. “My patients with déjà vu, it’s like they look at the television and think of a glass of water. Like, aha!” He snapped. “A totally random association. And then they have a seizure.”

The neurologist’s disbelief made me hopeful. “Does this mean there’s a chance I didn’t actually have one?”

“Oh no,” he said, looking back at his notes. “You almost certainly have epilepsy. You’re just not very accurate in describing things.”  

Poetry accounts for pauses in a way that prose refuses to. This was one of the reasons I loved it: how I could mark the breath of a caesura on the page, how I could scan syllables for emphasis and note line breaks with slash marks, stanza breaks with double slashes.

When I teach poetry now, I show my students a line and cover the one below it. What would it mean if you only had access to the first? For example, if I began:

         I had a seizure, though perhaps not

It would cast doubt on the fact of the seizure, pausing your reading before you reach the rest of the sentence. Each line is, for a moment, true, even if the next complicates or negates it.

         I had a seizure, though perhaps not

         my first.

The line break allows for a brief deception, an omission, a doubling in meaning. Enjambment is, in some ways, a trick. But it is also powerful to hold two truths together at once—each line on its own, and what they become together.

Sometimes, prose writers in my class will ask how to use this idea in their work. I want to say that every lesson is applicable, that learning about poetry makes you a better writer of any genre. But caesura and enjambment simply don’t transfer. Maybe, I said once, you could imagine enjambment on a larger scale. Tell a story in parts, perhaps out of order. Let each piece you add change and complicate what came before it.

About a month before my seizure, my husband and I had been in Europe. We each had archives to visit for our dissertation research, but we also went sightseeing, walked for hours, ate late into the evenings, had drinks on patios, befriended strangers.

On a sweltering afternoon in Rome, I started feeling a little strange. I stared down at my pasta, unable to eat. The feeling didn’t abate that night, or the following day, when we travelled to the south of England. The temperature turned cool and crisp. The owner of our bed and breakfast was delightfully eccentric, walking barefoot with us to the grocery store and singing opera in the yard. My husband and I traipsed through gardens, and I spent hours in library special collections. Every afternoon, I was so exhausted, I slept until dinner. I drank cup after cup of tea, and my stomach lurched unsteadily.

We dropped our rental car at Gatwick Airport, before spending a final few days in London. While my husband sat with our luggage at the ground transit Costa Coffee, I restocked a few toiletries at Boots. I considered, as I picked up a box of tampons, whether my period might be late. I saw, at the very bottom of the display, a pregnancy test for only £3.99 and decided it couldn’t hurt to take it.

The one I’d chosen was so basic, its instructions so vague, that as I stood in the airport bathroom stall watching my phone timer, I was holding up the wrong side of the plastic test strip for results. Puzzled, after three minutes, that not even a control line had appeared, I turned the test in my hand. On the other side, I found two bold, fully formed blue stripes. I stared at them, then at the instructions. I stared at the dark, floor-length door of the stall, unable to believe I could be—I was—pregnant. I rushed back to Boots to buy a nicer, name-brand test.

The same teenage cashier rang me up both times. “I hope it’s the result you wanted?” she asked shyly, handing me another pregnancy test. I told her, laughing, that I thought it was.

I reached out to my gynecologist, who suggested taking an antihistamine for the nausea, which I later realized was mostly for sedative purposes. I learned, after the seizure, that antihistamines can be a trigger for epilepsy patients; the second neurologist I saw believed this was certainly to blame. But what, I wondered, of the countless times I’d taken allergy medications in the past? My GP speculated that pregnancy alone may have caused enough stress to lower my seizure threshold.

I kept asking what the seizure meant for our baby, but no one was sure. This was not the doctors’ primary concern. I needed to get more tests. I was only seven weeks pregnant, and an obstetrician hadn’t even confirmed viability.

My crisis in poetry came in graduate school, as my poems grew longer and longer. I didn’t want to omit anything. Still, I felt that what I was writing was poetry—poetry had been the shape my life had taken. My stories so seldom came to a climax.

The difference between poetry and prose can be, at times, difficult to define. One professor told me a poem is circular, the final line recalling each of the preceding lines and changing them. A simple test, he said, was when you finish reading a poem, you want to go back to the beginning and read it again. Prose, by contrast, takes you somewhere new and leaves you there.

I loved this idea, though I found it difficult to apply. After finishing a novel, for instance, I often reopened it and read again from the first page. I realized, eventually, that I wanted poetry and prose to do different things for me. I wrote poetry to replicate the way my life felt. I needed prose to help me understand it.

Seizure and caesura have no common etymology, nor do seize and cease. The constellation of words I wanted to use to describe what happened were related only by sound, that ghost of one thing in another that creates meaning in poetry, but elsewhere, creates no viable connection, much less a conclusion. 

As an EEG technician glued electrodes to my head, he told me about how, when his wife was first pregnant, they’d balanced a spoon on her belly to see whether it was a boy or girl. He said this casually, as if this were a test I’d be familiar with. I acted like it was, though later I wished I’d asked more questions.

He finished putting on the last of the electrodes and turned off the lights. When the spoon fell—how it fell was what mattered, though I couldn’t tell from his description why—he felt the urge to weep, an urge he said never left him. “I knew we were having a baby girl, and it changed something in me,” he said, and I could hear from his voice that he was crying again, as he stood at a monitor behind me in the dark room, recording the electrical activity of my brain.

“You should relax,” he added. “Your High-Betas look like the waves of a very anxious person. But I’m not seeing seizures so far.” He asked me what had happened, that I was having this test now. He asked what the seizure had felt like, and if I was in pain.

“It felt like nothing,” I told him, “with terrible pain on either side.”

He said that sounded right. He told me about his wife’s pregnancy, which had also been very difficult, medically. He talked about his infant daughter. I thought about caesuras, and seizing, and ceasing, and cutting. Cut scene, the seizure has ended. Caesura, we’ve reached the other side of the line. Cease, start again. I thought about electricity, and a spoon falling slowly, and I felt like I was about to understand something important.  

I didn’t know I’d fallen asleep until the lights came back on. I felt panic rising at the sensation that I’d lost some amount of time during the scan. “Don’t worry,” he said. “You were just asleep. Your waves were like—” he moved his hand through the air, as if tracing a gently sloping line I could not see.

A woman who has her first seizure at thirty may not have a second. Each six-month period without one is a milestone, the passage of which lowers the probability of another happening. Nineteen months, a neurologist predicted, was when my next seizure would take place. But this was only a statistical likelihood, and it would change if I’d had seizures in the past, which I couldn’t confirm. I needed to pay attention, the doctors said, to the onset of any symptoms, particularly déjà vu.

Two nights after the first seizure, my husband and I stood in my parents’ street at dusk. We were going to start the drive back to Los Angeles in the morning. My husband said something, but I didn’t quite hear him. I was looking at the hellebores in my childhood garden, shining softly through the dark. I had the sense I recognized them, like the faces of people I’d known years before. I swayed and my husband caught my arm. It was only a slight pause in my steps, a momentary cessation of thought, a familiar longing. I couldn’t have said whether anything had happened in that small, almost unnoticeable gap between looking at the flowers, and looking at the flowers again.